Just Deserts

I had a curious encounter outside a barber shop toward which I was headed because my hair had somehow succeeded at the neat trick of being both thin and shaggy. On the sidewalk before I entered a complete stranger, quite a bit younger than I, stuck a finger in my face and said with what appeared to be genuine anger, “You’re going to get what’s coming to you, buddy.”
 
From the “buddy” rather than a name, I gathered this was not someone whom I didn’t happen to recognize but who knew me from somewhere. I suspected (and still do) that it was just completely mistaken identity. Perhaps someone on the street who looked vaguely like me had made some remark to him or bumped into him or stolen his parking spot or something and he assumed I was the fellow. Or perhaps he meant my type of person, whatever type that might be, rather than me personally. Whatever the case, I was too taken aback to respond before he sneered and walked off. Evidently he was prepared to let karma wreak its own vengeance. Another approaching pedestrian who had overheard this eyed me with a raised eyebrow. “It really would be pretty awful if we all got what we deserved, wouldn’t it?” I remarked to him as he passed. “Yeah, that is a scary thought,” he said. “Can you imagine?” Neither of us commented further. I shrugged and entered the shop.
 
The anonymous passerby and I were being wry but serious, too. In some ways this evinced an old-fashioned world-view. This is a narcissistic age, and more than a few us seem to think that what we deserve is admiration and mountainous swag rather than anything alarming. For them, the words of the finger-pointer would be heartening. I don’t think there is much risk of either outcome – not from karma anyway. I’m not a believer in cosmic karma. We get away with some transgressions and are falsely accused of others. We may be over- or under-rewarded and over- or under-punished for what we do – or don’t do. Good and bad things happen to us, sometimes earned by our own actions and sometimes randomly. Nor is there any guarantee of balance to those outcomes: one or the other can predominate for no particular reason. There are few observations triter than “life is not fair.”
 
Fairness itself is a notoriously tricky ethical concept anyway, especially for secularists. (If one has faith that morality is inherent in the universe, then that is that.) Some thinkers such as John Locke tried to derive ethics from nature. The atheistic Ayn Rand went further and devised a severely rational system of ethics (Objectivism) that is self-consistent from the fundamentals up. However, as in any rational system, her conclusions follow only if you buy her premises; one first has to hold some “truths to be self-evident.” Not everyone does, at least not the same ones. Marx certainly didn’t. A nihilist has little patience with either. Nietzsche regarded competing ethical systems to be simply tools to achieve or maintain power: those in power devise moralities that will justify keeping them there (as a matter of fairness) while those out of power devise moral definitions that will justify deposing the powers-that-be in favor of themselves (as a matter of fairness). Then there is the age-old simple proposition that might=right. It is extraordinarily difficult to dispute this formula on a purely rational basis. I am not a Platonist (for many reasons that are off-topic here) but Plato was pretty good at putting into the mouth of Socrates strong refutations of other philosophers – typically by getting them to refute themselves. Yet one of his least satisfactory counters (despite Plato having written both sides of the argument) is to the “might is right” assertion of Thrasymachus in Book I of The Republic. Thrasymachus argued that justice is whatever the stronger party says it is, whether the nobles in an aristocracy or the demos in a democracy or, for that matter, a shepherd and his sheep: “and by the same token you seem to suppose that the rulers in our cities – the real rulers – differ at all in their thoughts of the governed from a man's attitude towards his sheep.” Socrates counters that a shepherd must look after the interests of his sheep (in essence, act justly) in order to do well for himself; an abusive (unjust) shepherd soon won’t have a flock. Yet, this really doesn’t answer Thrasymachus’ point that the shepherd eats the sheep, not the other way around. Existentialists also dismiss codes of ethics as anything other than human-made and insist that none of us can escape the freedom to choose his or her own, whether pre-packaged or original, but that we act in bad faith if we refuse to accept the consequences of our choices.

Well, I do have some ethics to which I try to adhere with varying degrees of success, though I freely admit that choosing the premises for them had more to do with taste than anything more solid. They are rather old-fashioned on the whole, which is why I chose the ominous interpretation of the sidewalk prophecy rather than the auspicious one. However, since the prophet was someone with whom I had no history of interaction, what’s coming to me (with regard to him) would be nothing. Even were this otherwise though, the world is too chaotic a place to be sure of outcomes most of the time.
 
The Joker’s comment in The Dark Knight nonetheless comes to mind: “The thing about chaos? It’s fair.”
 

Dorothy – What's Coming to Me