Prop. 8 Watch: Jerry Brown Edition

Ah, Jerry Brown.

Brown has apparently decided that the upcoming voter information pamphlet will officially describe proposition 8 as a measure to "eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry." The fact that this is an accurate description has not prevented proposition supporters from protesting on the grounds that it's too loaded. After all, who wants to take away people's rights? (I mean, besides supporters of proposition 8.)

The courts may very well decide that the wording in the pamphlet needs to be changed, but I think a bigger problem is that the arguments against the measure have TOO MANY CAPITAL LETTERS. Learn to use italics, people.

Self-Service In Oregon

Oregon's ban on pumping your own gas came up over drinks last night, and I was thinking that it's kind of weird that that law hasn't been overturned. I mean, presumably if lots of Oregonians really didn't want to pump their own gas, then station offering full service would dominate the market with or without a law.

Apparently, though, on November 2, 1982, voters in Oregon rejected a ballot measure that would have allowed gas stations to offer self-service fueling stations. And by a healthy 58-42 margin, no less. So the voters seem to feel pretty strongly that even letting other people pump their own gas would be bad.

It's National Bike (and Get Hit by a Car on Your Way) to Work Day!

Beware of old ladies in brown Cadillacs who don't signal or check their mirrors. Didn't she know that it's Bike to Work Day?

Don't worry; I escaped the collision with only some bruising and scratches on my arm, for which I feel very fortunate. I was too shaken up to write down her license plate number or chew her out, but hopefully she'll be more careful in the future.

Please, folks, be aware of bicyclists when you drive. We have a legal right to share the roads with drivers, and most of us are pretty great about following the rules.

Blood, Water, Etc.

Mark Kleiman makes an argument against free trade that's a lot like an argument I made when applying to an undergraduate political philosophy seminar at Cal:

Economic exchange is an important means of facilitating cooperation, but it is not the only means. Kinship, norms enforced by reputational effects, and state action also organize cooperation. It is neither irrational nor morally wrong for me to be more eager to benefit, and more reluctant to harm, those with whom I cooperate more, because they are my relatives, because they are my neighbors or my co-workers or my fellow-members of other groups that embody collective social capital, or because they are my fellow-citizens.

The sovereign state has the capacity to pay for public goods by compulsory taxation, thus avoiding the free-rider problem. Wages or profits earned by people or firms that pay U.S. taxes are more important to me than wages or profits earned by those who pay taxes elsewhere, because I get a share of those wages or profits in the form of greater expenditure on public goods or reduced taxation. But even putting that aside, the feeling of community among Americans or Mexicans or Germans or Thais has all sorts of beneficial results (along, of course, with some quite horrible ones).

Does that mean that nations should be entirely selfish? No, any more than the fact that parents care more about their own children than they do about other children means that families should be entirely selfish. In particular, a big, rich country like the U.S. ought to be a generous contributor both to world-scale public goods and to the needs of the global poor.

The thing is, for my application I also had to make an opposing argument.

I agree that it seems very plausible to say that we have special, or additional, moral obligations to "those with whom [we] cooperate more", like relatives, co-workers, teammates, etc. Lumping all of those groups together, though, obscures the fact that even if that's true (and let's just assume it is), the degree of additional obligation is measured on a sliding scale. For example, however much extra weight my parents deserve in my moral calculations, odds are that the woman who lives in the apartment below mine deserves rather less, and that the clerk who checked my ID at Albertsons this evening should get less still. And the further removed an individual is from my day-to-day life, the harder it becomes to discern which features of our relationship warrant this sort of special moral attention. By the time we're talking about call center operators in Virginia, our actual relationship is pretty vague indeed and it seems to me that we've slid pretty far down that sliding scale. How much further down, really, is the Mexican factory worker?

What's more, even if interpersonal relationships create additional moral considerations, so do other factors. Most notably - as Kleiman himself mentions - we're way richer than the other people we're considering trading with. If liberalizing trade would benefit the citizens of other countries at some expense to American citizens, then surely it matters how much poorer than our own those other citizens are. Nobody thinks the rule is to promote your family's well-being at any cost to others.

Now, I think that Kleiman feels like he's accommodating that egalitarian concern by endorsing the idea that "a big, rich country like the U.S. ought to be a generous contributor both to world-scale public goods and to the needs of the global poor." But if it's OK to tax our relatively rich compatriots to help out relatively poor foreigners, why is it not OK to allow certain jobs to move across the border, instead of cash? Free trade, on this account, is just de facto foreign aid, with the additional likely benefit (in many cases) of bringing more, cheaper goods to American consumers.

P.S. - Of course, Brad DeLong's response to all of this is going to be much simpler. My understanding is that he's a pretty strict utilitarian, and so would reject from the start the suggestion that, say, family members "deserve" any special moral consideration at all. Sure, maybe as a rule of thumb it's good to make the well-being of one's family a higher priority than the well-being of strangers, because this will probably tend to create the greatest happiness overall. But it's not like your aunt, qua your aunt, is somehow more special than other peoples' aunts. After all, it's hard to imagine something more random than the fact of you being related to your aunt. As they say, you don't pick your family.

What About The Victim?!?

Matthew Yglesias observes that pro-lifers "don't oppose abortion rights because they think such rights are bad for the health of pregnant women...They oppose it because they think fetuses have moral rights that ought to be instantiated as legal rights." He's right that this makes many anti-abortion arguments pretty disingenuous. I bring it up, though, because it reminds me of the only angle of the abortion debate I find interesting to discuss.

Basically, I'd go a step further than Yglesias and say that it's not just dishonest for opponents of abortion to appeal to public health arguments - that the procedures are physically dangerous, or emotionally traumatic, or whatever - but also contradictory. If you actually think that fetuses are people, with all of the ethical and legal rights that personhood entails, then there's no reason to be concerned about the health of a woman undergoing an abortion in the first place. After all, if a fetus is a person, then abortion is murder, and we don't arrange homicide laws to protect the health of murderers.

In fact, I would imagine that ordinary homicide is a pretty dangerous activity to engage in; you may be initiating an aggressive confrontation you can't win, for instance, or traumatizing yourself for life. Nevertheless, if I were to advocate stricter laws against murder on those grounds, I think people, and conservatives in particular, would be pretty uniform in their judgment that I was failing to adequately appreciate the wrongness of murder and the extent to which being a murderer costs you many of your rights.

The point is, Who cares about a murderer's health and well-being? It seems to me that to the extent that pro-lifers advocate protecting the health of would-be aborters, they don't really think abortion is all that serious of a moral infraction.

John McCain: Panderer

John McCain must be a pretty sensitive guy. He can only be accused of being "too liberal" so many times before his feelings get hurt. Hence this:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain, looking to improve his standing with the party's conservative voters, said Sunday the court decision that legalized abortion should be overturned.

"I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned," the Arizona senator told about 800 people in South Carolina, one of the early voting states.

McCain also vowed that if elected, he would appoint judges who "strictly interpret the Constitution of the United States and do not legislate from the bench."

Sigh. He's also jumped on the Rumsfeld-was-bad bandwagon. I guess he thinks you really can please everyone.

In other news, McCain has unveiled a strong three-point platform declaring that puppies are adorable, pizza is delicious, and that NASCAR is "sweet." The man knows his audience.

(Thanks for the tip, Feministing.)

This isn't going to work like a bus boycott

Recently on Pandagon, Roxanne requested that her readers suggest fun, simple, affordable wedding reception ideas for her friend Lauren. Unsurprisingly, one commenter, Tara, got offended that Roxanne was inviting others to get excited about a heterosexual wedding when same-sex couples are not legally allowed to marry. Subsequent commenters struck her down with various arguments, though all were sympathetic to the reality that legal marriage is, in its current manifestation, unfairly unavailable only to same-sex couples. The comment that kicked it off:

... ‘Getting married’ is a political act. The institution, and its use to discriminate against sexual others ..., only exists because people — many of whom consider themselves tolerant, even ‘allies’ — still decide to get married and/or perpetuate their being accorded privileges (some physical, some symbolic), even when they know others aren’t being allowed this right. I hope I’m not seen as someone who’s raining on someone else’s parade, but it just seems presumptuous to parade around hetero-privilege. I get offended. [emphasis added]

This isn't a new conversation. But it illustrates that many people target marriage itself, not the people who dictate marriage laws, as the source of the disparity. This is an incredibly ineffective rhetorical approach to the problem of discriminatory laws. The whole point of supporting gay marriage is that we want everyone to be allowed to marry, not that we want fewer people to have access to an institution that grants rights. It's not the bus's fault that Rosa Parks had to sit at the back.

My stupid bus analogy is a good segue for the second component of that comment thread: heteros boycotting marriage is not the equivalent of the Birmingham bus boycotts, and straight couples poo-pooing matrimony are not progressing the gay marriage movement. Effective boycotts work in two ways: first, they deprive the discriminator of money; second, they create enough bad publicity to shame the discriminator into adopting new policies. When southerners boycotted public transportation in solidarity with Rosa Parks, the racist bus company owners actually stood to lose money and gain a lot of negative attention.

Who suffers when straight couples boycott marriage in solidarity with gay couples? Do you think these guys feel the hurt when progressive different-sex couples don't get married? Do these asshats stand to lose anything when straight yuppies stay home instead of tying the knot? Do you think George W. Bush (and every other politician who insists that marriage is "the union of a man and a woman") wakes up in a cold sweat because his straight marriage quota wasn't met that month? Though anti-gay marriage advocates claim that they care very deeply that everyone get married and have babies in a "traditional" family, they actually don't give two shits what a pair of straight liberal kids do with their personal lives. The only people losing out are wedding planners and hotel owners, and they don't carry a lot of political clout.

If boycotting marriage isn't going to spur change, what action can straight couples take if they want to get married and promote the gay marriage cause at the same time? Of course the usual political activities (voting, contacting legislators, blogging) are the best start. But if you insist on making the act of marriage an agent of change, maybe start by stripping your wedding ceremony of patriarchal and heterosexist symbolism. (Damned if I'm walking down any aisle to be "given away" by one man and "reclaimed" by another.) If you believe that marriage should only be a civic, rather than religious, process, maybe your ceremony can reflect this sentiment. Or preform the civic and the spiritual elements of your union separately. Promote marriage for what it should be--the legal joining of two people who love each other--rather than as a tool of discrimination and subjugation of women and homosexuals.

What a Girl Wants

Something I’ve written about before, in other forums, is the likely misconception that many women adopt their husbands’ surnames not because society demands that they do so, but because they think it’s just a nice gesture. This strikes me as unlikely for two reasons. First, it seems much more reasonable, to me, to suppose that what’s really going on in cases that look that way is that the woman is coming up with a ad hoc justification for not taking the more courageous step of bucking the status quo. Declining your husband’s name probably invites lots of uncomfortable questions from all sorts of people, quite possibly including the groom. That a woman wouldn’t want to deal with all of that is entirely understandable, even in the face of a strong emotional attachment to her own name. In that context, taking the “it’s just a sweet thing to do” argument at face value seems kind of naïve.

The second problem is the plain empirical fact that you don’t see men deciding to give up their last names as a symbol of their love. If the niceness of the gesture is its most salient feature, then you’d expect to see men and women making it at roughly comparable rates. But you don’t. In fact, you almost never hear about a man taking his wife’s name. Almost never:

All Michael Buday wanted to do was marry Diana Bijon and live happily ever after, with one tiny twist: He agreed to take her last name.

Quickly, the couple were plunged into what they describe as a bureaucratic inequity that has sparked both a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and new legislation to alter marriage licenses.

Buday said California discriminates by making it easy for women to take their husband's name upon marriage, but not vice versa.

...

Their complaint, filed Dec. 15 in a Los Angeles federal court, says:

• Los Angeles County's marriage application provides a space for the bride to enter her married name, but not the groom.

So rare is the practice of the groom adopting the bride's name that the marriage paperwork doesn't even accommodate it.

It's no surprise, of course, that women change their last name far more often than men, but what did strike me was that a number of parties seem to have the conviction that the problem with LA County's application is that it discriminates against men. The Sacramento Bee, for instance, takes the following position:

The path to full gender equality is a long and tortuous one, and it turns out that it's not only women who face discrimination.

...

When Buday sought to change his name to that of his fiancée, Diana Bijon, he was confronted by a four-step process requiring him to petition the state, pay a $32 application fee (in addition to the $70 marriage license fee), publish the change in a local newspaper for four weeks (which in another case cost a man $475), then go to court to get a judge's blessing.

Buday was not amused. Neither was the American Civil Liberties Union, which has filed suit in federal court on behalf of the now-married couple, charging that Buday is a victim of discrimination under the Constitution's 14th Amendment. Six states allow men to change their names as easily as women can. California should do the same.

That seems like a peculiar way of looking at the situation. It seems to me that the underlying problem is discrimination against women, not against men. The reason that Buday can't change his name on his marriage application isn't that the government especially cares about whether he does so. Rather, it's that society and the government have conspired to pressure women into getting rid of their family names for the sake of men.

In other words, there's a real asymmetry here in the way the government treats the sexes. The source of that asymmetry, though, isn't that the government is forcibly preventing men from doing something highly desirable, it's that the government is helping to force women to do something undesirable. It can't be right to say that men are the victims of society's unreasonable demands here, can it? Men are just getting an unfair assist from the state in their own misogynistic project.

A Tremendous What?

Given that I've knocked Right on the Left Coast for ranting rather than arguing in the past, I think it's only fair to mention that I think this is basically right.

It turns out that the teacher who also happens to paint stuff with his butt in his spare time has been fired. As Darren says, "when doing something entirely legal, completely outside of school, becomes a cause to fire a teacher, we've gone too far." One wonders why we shouldn't just outlaw butt painting altogether.

Darren inexplicably fails, however, to mention this quote, from the teacher's attorney:

Chesterfield [County public schools] lost a tremendous asset today.

Sloppy Metaphysics

Ugh...

Far from being extracts from the extreme end of science fiction, the idea that we may one day give sentient machines the kind of rights traditionally reserved for humans is raised in a British government-commissioned report which claims to be an extensive look into the future.

Visions of the status of robots around 2056 have emerged from one of 270 forward-looking papers sponsored by Sir David King, the UK government’s chief scientist. The paper covering robots’ rights was written by a UK partnership of Outsights, the management consultancy, and Ipsos Mori, the opinion research organisation.

“If we make conscious robots they would want to have rights and they probably should,” said Henrik Christensen, director of the Centre of Robotics and Intelligent Machines at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Sure, but so what? We're not 50 years away from conscious robots. We might be 50 years away from robots that seem to all outward appearances to be conscious, but that's not the same thing.

It's not even that consciousness couldn't be artificially created. If, for instance, consciousness is just an emergent property of brains set up and functioning like our own, then there's no reason, in principle, that we couldn't replicate the necessary conditions to give rise to consciousness artificially. That's not the way robots or artificial intelligence work, though. And why should they? It seems pointlessly complicated to try to create a robot that functions mechanically the way we do, since all we're really after in a robot is the functionality of responding in the desired way to stimuli we provide.

In fact, the prospect of artificially inducing consciousness seems like an awfully good incentive not to take the consciousness-inducing strategy with a robot, since then you get into precisely those sorts of thorny ethical issues.

Butt it's art!

The Education Wonks are showing their prudish side:

TipWonk KauiMark has pointed us to the incredible story of Virginia art teacher Stephen Murmer. It seems as though Mr. Murmer has been suspended from his classroom because of his somewhat...er...ah.. peculiar habit of painting pictures with his backside and/or his genitals. (We didn't make this up---- honest!) Of course it goes without saying that the American Civil Liberties Union couldn't wait to get itself involved.

Reading that, you'd think Murmer was dropping his drawers in the classroom. (Crazy ACLU!) But as they say, always follow the link:

To hear the students tell it, Stephen Murmer is a fun, popular art teacher who is always quick to crack a joke. But there is another side to Murmer...Outside of class and under an alter ego, the self-proclaimed "butt-printing artist" creates floral and abstract art by plastering his posterior and genitals with paint and pressing them against canvas. His cheeky creations sell for hundreds of dollars.

This has not gone over well with Chesterfield County school officials, who placed Murmer on administrative leave from his job at Monacan High School.

...

Murmer went to great lengths to keep his work life separate from his activities as an artist, said ACLU executive director Kent Willis. As a butt-printing artist, he goes by the name "Stan Murmur," and appears in disguise in photographs and videos promoting his art.

"As a public employee, he has constitutional rights, and he certainly has the right to engage in private legal activities protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution," Willis said.

The students seem to agree. As do I. The school district wants to say that Murmer is "expected to set an example for students through their personal conduct" and "that teachers, like parents, are role models." All of which is correct, and none of which provides a reason to kick Murmer out of the classroom. Unless Virginia has some law against painting with your butt that I don't know about, it's not obvious what's supposed to be the poor example being set. Are we expected to worry that a cohort of kids will grow up to be butt painters?

I don't understand old people.

So THAT'S why he hasn't proposed yet!

And here you thought your partner just had cold feet. From the depths of the Meaningless Protest/Shittiest Excuse Ever archives comes this little gem: "The Sit-In at the Altar: No 'I Do' Till Gays Can Do It, Too." A few hetero couples have decided not to tie the knot until this country evolves from its homophobic, bass-ackwards funk and gives gay couples the same matrimonial rights as straights.

How on earth could someone refuse to marry simply because their government doesn't recognize same-sex marriages? That'd be like deciding not to eat all of your mashed potatoes simply because there are starving children in Africa. Isn't that the opposite of what your parents taught you? Speaking of analogies ...

“I usually explain that I wouldn’t go to a lunch counter that wouldn’t allow people of color to eat there, so why would I support an institution that won’t allow everyone to take part,” said Ms. White, 24, a law student at the University of California, Davis. “Sometimes people don’t buy that analogy.”

Count me among those who think that analogy is, for lack of a better phrase, completely moronic. A better analogy, using Ms. White's ingredients, would be if you refused to eat sandwiches because sandwiches are served at lunch counters, and people of color aren't allowed to eat at some lunch counters. Don't throw out the sandwich with the lunch counter. There's nothing intrinsicly heterosexist (or misogynistic) about state-recognized partnerships; right now the government's application of marriage is unfair and bigoted, but that's an error of the government, not of the institution of marriage. Certainly marriage has some unsavory historical roots, but so does the United States interstate highway system. Don't tell me you boycott the 580 because it was Hitler's idea.

Some protesters seem to oppose hetersexual marriage in part because of the cultural connotations associated with traditional weddings.

“I didn’t have the wedding fantasies some little girls have,” said Sarah Augusto...

This implies that the kind of women (or men) who want to get married and have a wedding are buying in to an antiquated, anit-feminist fantasy that's inculcated into children by heterosexist culture. Where is it written that a wedding has to be look like a page torn from a story book? Why do you even have to have a wedding, per se, in order to be married? I'm pretty sure all you need is a form, an application fee, and a few witnesses. Don't piggyback your revulsion toward traditional weddings onto a legitimate concern about equal rights.

Very obnoxiously, one woman they interviewed seemed quite turned on by the idea of shaking things up for the sake of shaking things up.

Referring to each other as “partner” usually helps avoid the misperception, but that can be tricky, too. When Ms. Augusto, the sociology graduate student, speaks of her partner, people ask if she’s a lesbian. “I say, ‘My partner is male,’” she said. “‘We’re not getting married because it’s not a universal right, and I feel that the word boyfriend trivializes our relationship.’ It’s really shocking to the people I tell that to. Probably as shocking as if I were a lesbian.”

Probably as shocking as if I were a lesbian?! That assumes that (a) being a lesbian is shocking, (b) not getting married is shocking, and (c) anyone cares enough about your life to be shocked by it. Family members, maybe, wacky conservative Christians, sure; but Joanne Schmo on the street doesn't give a damn about your baseless protest. Mostly it seems like these people are trying to be co-martyrs; maybe they feel guilty that they were born straight and thus can't "suffer" as gays and lesbians do, so they're adopting useless burdon to compensate. Or maybe they just want attention.

Oh yeah, this argument was supposed to be about gay rights, not about some straight couples' attempts to look for a reason to avoid marriage, remember? The New York Times actually got a hold of some gay rights groups' leaders, and, according to the article, many such groups aren't advocating the anti-marriage platform.

Molly McKay, a founder of Marriage Equality U.S.A. in Oakland, said its goal is to increase the number of people who have the protections that come with marriage. “We love weddings,” Ms. McKay said.

You mean people who advocate for the expansion of marriage aren't suggesting that fewer people get married? Crazy.

Hating On Unions

I'm always a little disappointed to see people even entertaining the possibility that the answer to this question is "no":

When teachers and their employers are at loggerheads over salaries and working conditions, should they be able to strike, thereby closing the schools?

I mean, that's the point of having a union, right? You're not left with much when you take away the credible threat of a strike.

You heard the same sort of union skepticism when the public transit workers were striking in New York City last year. There was lots of, "Oh, I support unions in general, but I really don't think they should be able to strike when it's so inconvenient for other people," and , "But why do they have to strike right now?"

If you want people to work, you either meet their demands, or you come to terms with the fact that they're not going to do it. What's the alternative supposed to be?

A Hard-Right Question

Eugene Volokh says:

It seems to me that the proposition that Congressional judgments about the proper scope of surveillance (even surveillance aimed at catching foreign terrorists) prevail over Presidential judgments is hardly a "hard-left" view. If the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act prohibits the NSA program (my reading is that it does), the Authorization for the Use of Military Force doesn't implicitly authorize what FISA forbids (and it's at least quite plausible to say that it doesn't implicitly authorize it), and the Congress has the constitutional power to constrain the President this way (and again it's at least quite plausible to say that it has such a power), then the NSA program is illegal. And even if the program is nonetheless valuable for national security, there are perfectly sensible non-hard-left arguments for concluding that the rule of law should trump even national security concerns (especially if one believes, as I do, that the constraints on the program are statutory and can thus be removed, if necessary, simply by getting Congress to change the law).

Now, I know Professor Volokh is all lawyerly and stuff, but aren't there also plenty of "perfectly sensible non-hard-left arguments" against the NSA eavesdropping program that don't have anything to do with "the rule of law"?

For instance, one of my objections to the program is that you shouldn't trust the Executive with the power to monitor the correspondence of citizens without at least moderately adversarial oversight by another entity. This is because you can't trust the Executive to autonomously and reliably hold its own actions to the standards that must be met to justify governmental invasion of an individual's privacy. Is this a "hard-left" position? It seems to me that it's actually a very common view, historically. What, exactly, would be a "hard-left" position on this issue?

Moreover, it's not just the case that the privacy argument is an objection in addition to the rule of law argument; one of the purposes of the law is precisely to protect the right to privacy of the individual. The rule of law argument will, in all cases, depend ultimately on additional, less legal, more strictly ethical, arguments about the actual impact of the laws in question. I'm therefore wary of the implication (even if made only by omission) that those other, more normative arguments are necessarily "hard-left".

Really, I think what we're really dealing with is a hard-right question, namely, Should the President be allowed to spy on American citizens without a warrant?

He Earned His Hormones Fair And Square

I'm not a sports person, but sports do provide plenty of opportunities to examine our ideas of justice, fairness, and desert. So, springboarding off of my earlier post on the doping charges being leveled against Tour de France winner Floyd Landis, I want to talk (read: gripe) a little bit about the way we typically think about deserving something.

Landis's defense:

Sounding more defiant than the day before, eyes flashing and voice steady, Floyd Landis looked into the cameras Friday and said he would prove he "deserved to win" the Tour de France.

In his first public appearance since a urine test showing a testosterone imbalance cast his title into doubt, the American said his body's natural metabolism - not doping of any kind - caused the result, and that he would soon have the test results to prove it.

What difference, exactly, does it make whether Landis's high levels of testosterone are the result of a regimen of drugs or just a natural fact of his physiology? Insofar as higher levels of testosterone give Landis an advantage over his competitors, it seems like those levels are unfair and undeserved. What makes Landis so special that facts about his physiology totally beyond his control make him "deserve" anything at all? That testosterone didn't literally fall out of the sky...but it might as well have.

Now, in the case of sports, you can sort of wave this talk away as pointlessly academic because, after all, you can just treat sports as ways of evaluating whose natural physiology is best suited to such-and-such activities. That works because the outcome of a game is just precisely insofar as the winner has abided by the rules. (This is part of the reason I find sports so inconsequential and, therefore, boring.)

Most of the rest of the world isn't like that; the outcome of an event typically has implications for the welfare of at least one person. Frequently, as in the case of many government activities, the outcome has very significant implications for the well-being of many individuals. In terms of the concept of "desert", though, the analogy to sports survives entirely intact.

We tend to think things like, "Mr. Jones earned his money because he's a smart, capable, hard-working individual. He deserves the things he has." And once we tie an asset (e.g., money) to the idea of desert, we become increasingly disinclined to see that asset redistributed. "What did that poor person do to deserve Mr. Jones's money?"

Well, nothing. That poor person certainly didn't earn Mr. Jones's money. But, then, neither did Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones didn't earn his intelligence or his capability. For that matter, he didn't earn his work ethic, either. Those are all characteristics that are inherited through genes or sculpted by external forces. Nobody chooses to be hard-working, at least not ultimately. Such a choice, in any event, is itself going to be the result of entirely accidental facts about one's physiology or environment. To put it another way, you can't choose to choose to be hard-working.

Desert, as a concept, often plays a very useful role because it inclines us to set up institutions that allow for very large degrees of autonomy and privacy. At the margins, though, we run into cases in which by infringing upon the demands of the concept of desert we can create a situation that is, on balance, more just. In such cases it's useful to remember that desert is a useful idea, but not an intrinsically valuable one.

P.S. - There is an unfortunate use of the word "desert" that allows us to say things like, "All people deserve to be treated with respect." I think those statements are true, but they seem to use a somewhat different definition of "desert" - one less tied up with the idea of "earning" something - than the one I'm referring to above.