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By Root 634 0

until people have freely chosen to do wrong, they have a right to be left alone. It is wrong to imprison people when they have not yet done anything wrong. They may never do anything wrong if they have free will. It’s up to them. Scientism can’t be so lenient. If we know that someone is going to do wrong, core morality requires that we take steps to prevent it, sometimes even detaining the potential wrongdoer when he or she has done nothing wrong. More than one government (left-wing and right-wing) has adopted this policy, alas. Scientism can at least temporarily excuse itself from endorsing such actions. Human behavior is determined, but we almost never can know with enough certainty that someone will do wrong if not detained. We don’t have to put people in protective custody yet, but this is a problem all societies will face when neuroscience has advanced far enough.

There is another radical consequence that follows from scientism’s denial of free will. As we have just seen, once you adopt determinism, you have to rethink the de-meritocracy; you can’t treat lawbreakers as morally bad and worthy of punishment. But you must also entirely rethink the meritocracy, too. If you buy into core morality and scientism, you will have to accept some radical changes in the distribution of wealth and income. The morality of the meritocracy is based on the same principle as the de-meritocracy: criminals deserve what they earn by their character and their misdeeds; similarly, those who get rich by the free exercise of their character and their efforts earn their wealth. Given free will, the differences in outcomes between the unsuccessful criminal (punishment) and the successful rags-to-riches entrepreneur (wealth) are ones they have both earned.

Core morality tells us that people have a right to what they earn by their own efforts freely exercised. You may not always have a moral right to what you inherited from your parents or what you found on the street or won in the lottery. But core morality insists that you have a moral right to what you have earned. Inequalities, even large ones, between people are morally permissible, perhaps even morally required, when these inequalities are earned. It’s because you earned your rewards in life that you deserve them. That’s why you have a right to them and why taking them away is wrong. It is this part of core morality that Ayn Rand objectivists, libertarians, and other right-wingers tap into when they insist that taxation is slavery.

The trouble with such arguments is that nothing is earned, nothing is deserved. Even if there really were moral rights to the fruit of our freely exercised abilities and talents, these talents and abilities are never freely acquired or exercised. Just as your innate and acquired intelligence and abilities are unearned, so also are your ambitions, along with the discipline, the willingness to train, and other traits that have to be combined with your talents and abilities to produce anything worthwhile at all.

We didn’t earn our inborn (excuse the expression “God-given”) talents and abilities. We had nothing to do with whether these traits were conferred on us or not. Similarly, we didn’t earn the acquired character traits needed to convert those talents into achievements. They, too, were the result of deterministic processes (genetic and cultural) that were set in motion long before we were born. That is what excludes the possibility that we earned them or deserve them. We were just lucky to have the combination of hardwired abilities and learned ambitions that resulted in the world beating a path to our door.

No one ever earned or deserved the traits that resulted in the inequalities we enjoy—greater income and wealth, better health and longer life, admiration and social distinction, comfort and leisure. Therefore, no one, including us, has a moral right to those inequalities. Core morality may permit unearned inequalities, but it is certainly not going to require them without some further moral reason to do so. In fact, under many circumstances, core morality