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.
