Pojman\'s View on Merit According

¶ … POJMAN'S VIEW ON MERIT

According to Louis Pojman's 1999 essay Merit: Why Do We Value It?, society should reward individuals for the extent to which they contribute to the betterment of society and the welfare of the human community. Likewise, society should punish individuals who contribute negatively to the community in proportion to their harmful conduct. Undoubtedly, there is a satisfying element of fairness, or as Pojman refers to it, of just deserts to that dynamic. Indeed, it is entirely consistent with the general proverbial concept of "Karma" as a means of ensuring a far balance of good and evil in human affairs. Since there is absolutely no evidence of any divine or controlled mechanism to implement karma, Pojman's approach would impose that result by direct human action.

Conceptual Criticism

Critics of Pojman's view suggest that the "lottery of underserved" talents and abilities concept to which he refers substantially determine the direction of the lives of individuals and that the most significant differences between the quality that they add to society (or extract from it, as the case may be) are largely out of their control. In that sense, the talented intellectual deserves no more to be rewarded for the completely natural (if not inevitable) course of his life than the petty criminal deserves to be punished for the most natural course of his life.

In principle, none of us is responsible for the mix of talents and limitations that facilitate or inhibit our successful contribution of something of value to our societies, precisely because we are born with them. Many of those influences on the course of our respective lives not attributable directly to biology are associated with elements of our external environment and our family and developmental circumstances. According to that view, the manner in which the individual contributes positively or negatively to society is merely a manifestation of the mathematical or statistical outcome dictated by inputs in the realm of natural (i.e. hereditary and other biological and physiological) attributes combined with the realm of external circumstances into which the individual is born. Since the individual is morally responsible for neither element, it is unjust to excessively reward or (especially) to punish any individual for the quality of his or her contribution to society. The renowned physicist and philosopher Albert Einstein (1879-1955) made precisely that point in explaining some of the reasons he absolutely rejected any notion of a conscious, observing, and judgmental "god" who rewarded and punished human behavior.

"A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to [me] for the simple reason that a man's actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God's eyes he cannot be responsible any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it undergoes. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education and social ties, and needs. No religious basis is necessary."

Einstein, 1954 [emphasis supplied]

Alternate Suggested Application of Pojman's Thesis

From many ethical perspectives, the implications of Pojman's analysis with respect to punishment (i.e. "just deserts"), is more problematic than his suggestions about rewarding positive human behavior at the other end of the spectrum. In fact, there is no reason that Pojman's entire thesis need be discarded just to purify it of its most problematic implications. For example, the following description of a human community would resolve many of the most serious ethical criticisms of Pojman's approach while still allowing some of his more beneficial aspects of his merit-and-just deserts-based analysis: The envisioned society would de-emphasize penal law to the extent it is designed for the purpose of retributive punishment of wrongdoers. On the other hand, it would sanction punitive confinement as necessary to protect potential victims and it would sanction any form of compensatory mechanisms and obligations on wrongdoers to make their victims whole.