Ruminations-Moral Deserts

Moral deserts is a term that I learned from the book written by Michael Schur titled: How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question. Schur is a television writer; he created the show The Good Place. The book is a summary of moral philosophy that was the basis of the television series, a summary that is easy and non-philosopher friendly, but easy does not mean facile or devoid of nuance. Easy means that Schur was able to digest the difficult philosophical concepts in all their complexities and successfully communicate them without losing the meaning.

Moral deserts is a mental assumption that we seem to have ingrained in our minds. It can be explained as a transactional view of doing the good, that we  keep a moral ledger which tallies up all the good and moral acts that we perform in our daily lives —a metric for our own altruism and laudable acts — and subsequently, our belief that we are entitled to be rewarded for our morality. The reward is recognition for the good work, whether it takes the form of being lauded publicly or a subconscious credit in our ledger, a credit that we can cash in for some later moral failure.

Charities and organized religions employ the idea implicitly in their appeal to the public. In the case of charities, the listing of contributors and boosters serve as an extrinsic reward for the donors, thereby giving the donors a reason to feel good about themselves, which also serves as a reminder/motivation to donate the next time the charity comes calling. I am not against this practice, after all, charitable fund raising is their raison d’ etre.

On the other hand, there is something uncomfortable when it comes to organized religions using the same ploy for their fund raising. Many will say that the two cases are equivalent. I would argue that there is a significant difference, that difference is that the charity benefits their main mission: serving the needy, whereas in organized religion they serve the needy as well as serve the church. One can argue that the charity organization and the church are merely clearinghouses for the donations; but the church gains much more. In the end, the beneficiary of the generosity of the masses is not necessarily the needy; depending on the organization’s relative honesty, either secular or religious, the beneficiary may be the organization itself.

Religious organizations are more overt however. All religion reward good work, kindness, and generosity — all intrinsic qualities — by dispensing extrinsic rewards: recognitions, status, and indulgences. Moral desert is deployed pervasively in all religions, it cuts across all cultural divides.

In Asia, Buddhist monks and nuns depend on the largess of the believer for their daily subsistence. It preys on the giver’s sense of moral desert by framing it as an act of mercy for those who devote themselves to their religion. This appeal to our transactional morality exists in all  religions however, because all religions need to elicit material support from their believers in order to persist, subsist, and propagate; it is an essential part of their business model. It is a doctrine that is well defined within their religious structure. Our own demand for a return of our investment in being moral is a powerful tool for these religions, such practices as tithing and the selling of indulgences is moral desert on steroids.

Even though I take exception to the  deployment of moral deserts as a business ploy for organized religions, it is their prerogative, and it feeds the extrinsic material needs of their organization which enables that organization to serve their constituents through good work, kindness, and generosity.

Even as religions attempts to systematically appeal to our moral desert to act morally and to do the right thing, it is anomalous to me that we, as individuals, should need to be motivated by the promise of rewards and entitlement to be moral. There just seem to be something hypocritical and immoral about employing moral desert as our motivation for living and acting morally. Some would argue that motivation should not matter as long as the ultimate goal, acting morally, is achieved. I beg to differ.

When I was young, one of our family friends was devoted to studying Buddhism,  Taoism and Confucianism, he was unsparing in recognizing his own moral failings. He was the first example of someone who lived the right life in my life. We had a few long conversations about the topic of religion and morality. He was adamant that any act with a moral dimension should always be done willingly, without hesitation, and anonymously, that any benevolent act should always be anonymous and should never be advertised. He believed that the integrity of the moral act is compromised if one did it for the recognition; in other words, if the moral act was performed as motivated by moral deserts.  One must act morally because it is the right thing, rather than because we are being rewarded by attention or because we feel we are entitled to that attention.  

This line of reasoning is emphasized  by the Stoics.

The Stoic Virtue of Justice.

Justice is our duty to our fellow man, and to our society. It’s the morality behind how we act, specifically in relation to our community and the people within it.

Maimonides defines eight levels of charity in his writing, the very top definition of charity is: anonymously giving to people who are anonymous to the giver.

Both of those two reasoning appeals to me. I am of the belief that the ends do not justify the means, that this idea of moral desert is too transactional and an anathema which corrupts the meaning of our existence. It shifts the emphasis from morality for a selfless reason to morality for a selfish reason. Having to balance out an imaginary ledger, a ledger that does not actually exist, a ledger that is used as a justification for us to live and act morally because we are petty and need to be bribed.

Schur argued that there are benefits to moral deserts, that seeing others being moral will motivate us to be the same in order to take part in the groupthink, that in the end it is the accumulation of needed donations which eventually will benefit those who we are trying to benefit. I can see his reasoning, but I don’t agree completely. In the end, it is more important to do both: act morally and to do so humbly.