Scott Alexander has an article titled “TEN THINGS I WANT TO STOP SEEING ON THE INTERNET IN 2014.” Spoiler: he did not stop seeing those on the internet in 2014 :(. He gives the example of the word butthurt, noting, ““Butthurt” is one of those magic words that completely suspends human decency.” He furthers
For example, suppose a headline reads: “Jewish community saddened over swastika graffiti on synagogue”. You might make the mistake of feeling sympathetic to these Jews, or believing they’re human beings whose feelings matter.
So we change the headline to “Jewish community butthurt over swastika graffiti on synagogue.” Haha! Stupid Jewish community! Always getting butthurt over stuff!
(Even better: “Torah fanboys butthurt over swastika graffiti on synagogue.”)
(Fanboy was another word he gave as an example of a word that suspends human decency).
So, there are some words that have very negative connotations, that pollute the otherwise innocuous and reasonable meaning of the sentence that they show up in. Elsewhere, I’ve argued that eugenics is one of those words.
I think that the word entitled is one of the clearest cases of this.
Entitled basically means deserved, but it is exclusively used to describe either assholes or social security and Medicare. Somehow, when discussing entitlements—social security and medicare—it’s managed to (mostly) avoid its otherwise horrible reputation. But when using the word entitled, in basically every single other context, it just involves calling someone a jerk.
If you call someone entitled, that involves insulting them. So why in the world do we use a word that is an insult on its own to have meaningful discussions about what people deserve—or what they should be given? Suppose we say any of the following sentences
You’re not entitled to have anyone love you.
You’re not entitled to take other people’s money to pay for your healthcare.
You’re not entitled to an abortion.
You’re not entitled to having an AR-15.
All of these sentences sound true. No one is entitled to any of this. But this is just because of the toxic influence of the word entitled. Entitled means something similar to deserve—if I say you’re entitled to healthcare, that means something like ‘you deserve healthcare.’ But if we replace entitled with deserve in these sentences, we get horrible sounding result.
You don’t deserve to have anyone love you.
You don’t deserve to take other people’s money to pay for your healthcare.
You don’t deserve to have an abortion.
You don’t deserve to have an AR-15.
All of these sentences make the speaker sound monstrous. And they make it very clear that the speaker is calling the other person out. And yet the word entitled makes sentences, functionally identical, sound horrific and vitriolic.
Now, a natural objection arises at this point—doesn’t deserve have a different meaning? After all, even people opposed to abortion probably wouldn’t endorse the sentence ‘you don’t deserve to have an abortion.’ But I don’t know if this is a very big difference in substance beyond a mere difference in connotation. Both seem to highlight that it’s a fact about the person that makes it impermissible for them to to get the thing that they might be entitled to or deserve.
They’re not helpful about thinking about the problem because they don’t focus on whether the thing is worthwhile. The sentence “you’re not entitled to abortion” sound (maybe?!) correct, but the sentence “you’re not entitled to be a lawyer,” also sounds right. Any sentence that starts with “you’re not entitled to X important thing” will sound bad—for example, you’re not entitled to have me help you open the pickle jar.
But when thinking about whether to give people things, rather than asking whether they’re “entitled” to them, it makes sense to ask whether it’s actually good to give people things. The reason to ban abortion, if there is one, is based on abortion being wrong, not anything to do with entitlement. If you don’t help people, the reason not to do that—assuming its justified—is that it wouldn’t be a good thing to do, perhaps it would harm someone. It would have nothing to do with whose entitled to what!!
For this reason, I’ve always been a bit uncomfortable with the idea of justice. Don’t let the heavens fall, though it may be unjust. A standard definition of justice is giving people what they deserve. But I don’t really think desert really exists—see here for more if you’re interested. Even if you think desert exists, it seems like lots of things that are good don’t involve rewarding people for desert. Animal happiness is good, but are they really getting what they deserve? They’re not virtuous—they don’t even have moral concepts!
This is why I prefer something more like the Rawlsian idea of justice. Justice just involves treating people fairly. I think if we were perfectly fair, we’d reward people—even those who aren’t very virtuous.
Scott Alexander, in his article radicalizing the romanceless, has talked about ways that the word entitled is unhelpful. He notes that lots of people merely being sad about their absence of romantic relationships are mobbed and accused of feeling entitled to be in a relationship. But this is absurd; saying “I’m sad I don’t have X,” doesn’t mean “I feel entitled to X.” If I say “I’m sad I’m not still friends with George—we were such good friends in childhood,” this doesn’t mean “I’m entitled towards forcing George to be friends with me right now.”
If feeling entitled towards something just means wanting it, then people feel entitled to remain married, entitled to get a sandwich, and entitled to do everything else that they want to do at some point. The phrase “being entitled to do X” has come to be a blend of wanting X and feeling entitled—as in, feeling stuck up and like those who don’t give you X are jerks who are denying you what you deserve in some deep sense.
But these are terrible words to mix together. It would be like if the word cancer became a toxic mix of the word representing those who have a particular astrology sign and rapidly splitting cells that kills millions of people a year. Then, when a person talks about being born in June or July, people treat them as toxic monsters who kill lots of people and rapidly divide.
Oftentimes, people will try to argue for positions while not having substantive arguments for them. As a result of this, they’ll often try to make the points sound correct by phrasing them in ways that make their sentences sound reasonable based on the connotations of the words. If a person is arguing against moral realism, they’ll often phrase it as “I don’t think there’s some deep cosmic sense in which things are wrong.” This is just a way that’s maybe not technically wrong, but it’s still not the right way to phrase moral realism. I don’t know what it means for something to be wrong in a deep cosmic sense.
When people are trying to defend bullying people who are not in relationships, they will use the word incel, because we as a society have let incel mean roughly “person who is involuntarily celibate, and is also satan incarnate.” If a person makes fun of those who are not in relationships, when asked to defend it, they might say something like, “I don’t think incels are entitled to have no one criticize them.”
But this is totally bankrupt. Of course in a literal sense it’s true. Whether we use incel to mean involuntarily celibate asshole or just person who is involuntarily celibate, they’re obviously not “entitled” to ban people from saying mean things about them. But neither is a person “entitled” to not pay taxes. This still doensn’t mean we should tax people for no good reason. Even if you’re allowed to do something, that doesn’t mean you ought to.
The ambiguity in the word entitled allows people to be assholes to others for no reason. It allows people to, with a clear conscience, make fun of the downtrodden, as long as they’re not downtrodden in a way that they’re entitled to not be.
This is quite bad, and it largely stems from the fact that the word entitled just sucks. It does more to enable equivocation than perhaps any other word. So let’s stop using the word. You’re not entitled to use the word entitlement.
Later Edit: Turns out Scott got to this before I did. He had an article complaining about the word entitled too.
Eugenics is rightly maligned because it is associated with Nazism and forced sterilization campaigns. A negative description of those events in history is useful, even if we should have other words that have different connotations for the concept of positive human genetic modification. It would be good to retain that negative descriptor and bad to lose it!
“Entitlement” is used in this context to refer to a “right” someone has, which implies corresponding duties that others have. This is another term that is very confused and people disagree wildly over, particularly because there is not yet an agreed upon meta ethical foundation to ethics.
Libertarians just assume rights out of the ether, leading to the non-aggression principle, which isn’t very helpful in hard cases when these supposed rights conflict. Where rights come from must be in reference to the Rawlsian agreement you referred to.
I discuss this in the link below if you are interested. Hopefully we can get closer to figuring out our exact entitlements.
https://open.substack.com/pub/neonomos/p/there-are-no-natural-rights-without?r=1pded0&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post