The whole notion of desert or lack thereof seems pretty iffy to me. Nobody accomplishes anything without some degree of luck and help from others, which at mini

The whole notion of desert or lack thereof seems pretty iffy to me. Nobody accomplishes anything without some degree of luck and help from others, which at minimum includes having been born with a brain and having been fed as a baby, and if you believe in biological and economical determinism beyond that it becomes very hard to say who deserves what. In practice most people seem to evaluate how deserving someone is of his or her accomplishments based on whether or not that person meets an arbitrary cutoff for hardship (as indicated by external signs) and where the exact cutoff level lies depends on the evaluator's own experience with hardship and the local baseline for it. This is more of a tool for establishing social status than for moral judgement per se. Actual accomplishments and the lack of pride (in the sense examined by C. S. Lewis and delightfully summarized at http://squid314.livejournal.com/339814.html http://squid314.livejournal.com/339814.html) seem to me to be a better measure of a person no matter how lucky that person's birth was.