The Paradox of the Self-Made Man

People often dispute the legitimacy of wealth and whether certain people truly deserve their fortunes. This has been especially true more recently, with riotous populism afoot, tycoons more brazenly intermixing business with politics, and the uppermost tier of society has seemingly accessed some kind of escape velocity that’s catapulting them to newly stratospheric echelons of economic dominance. Litigating which billionaires, if any, have merited their command of such colossal sums of money has become commonplace. Some people adhere to a view that being so rich is unallowable per se; others suspect that it’s theoretically possible to be deservedly rich, but that most jet-setters benefited too much by serendipity to warrant their towering fortunes. Meanwhile, some right-wingers regularly deny that economic conditions are intertwined with luck in any nontrivial way whatsoever.

The conversations surrounding this routinely interrogate the issue of whether some particular fat cat (or cabal of fat cats) is “self-made.” There’s some tacit consensus about this being absolutely crucial to adjudicating the proportionality and tastefulness of someone’s bank account. But what makes a billionaire self-made? This is a subtle and challenging question, actually. It’s more obvious what’s disqualifying. Inheriting money plainly isn’t self-making, for example. Taking out a “small loan” of maybe a million dollars from your parents could disqualify you as well. Handshake deals to access elite colleges and springboarding into lofty positions using nepotism are probably unhelpful in petitioning for the moniker of “self-made,” too. Rumors of family emerald mines in Africa seem to be exceptionally penumbral and unflattering, but even attending too good of a private high school or having parents who are partners at white-shoe law firms could jeopardize your self-made status in some eyes.

Regardless, the common ground here is what’s interesting—there’s an underlying consensus that, to be properly deserved, someone’s circumstances should somehow be an unadulterated outgrowth of their own doings. This feeling extends beyond issues of wealth, too: can someone really be blameworthy for malfeasance if the actions originate from features of their character over which they didn’t select or somehow author themselves?

But if we conclude that deserving something necessitates self-making, then potentially no one really deserves anything, because how can anyone make themselves? The notion is at least superficially paradoxical. How can someone manage to get wholly upstream of their own choices and actions? Famously, Nietzsche was already poking fun at this concept long ago:

The desire for “freedom of the will” in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui, with more than Münchhausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness.1

We’re too desensitized to exactly how suspicious this widespread notion of being self-made is. The suggestion that someone pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, for example, was originally a joke;2 it’s unembarrassed adoption as a credo for the unforgiving careerism of modern times is inspiring from a certain angle, but willfully ignorant from another. The line demarcating courage and thickheadedness is wafer-thin, and the the popular outlook of conservatives, libertarians, and overly meritocratic liberals—that ownership of one’s economic circumstances is honorable and fitting—reminds me of how witnessing someone intrepidly volunteer to attempt the impossible can be inspiring and brave: it’s the economic equivalent of Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade.

As I mentioned above, this commonsense idea that being self-made is a prerequisite for furnishing just deserts generalizes beyond matters of wealth distribution. Here’s a version of a well-known argument (the “Basic Argument”) against the possibility of moral responsibility, outlined about thirty years ago by Galen Strawson3:

1. No one is the original cause of their own character.
2. Without being the original cause of their own character, no one is responsible for who they are.
3. Without being responsible for who they are, someone cannot be morally responsible for what they do.4

I’ll sort through some responses and counter-responses to this argument in future posts, but it’s fairly potent and exceptionally simple. The notion that your character arises from an array of traits and foibles beyond your control is known as constitutive luck. Maybe you’re extremely forgiving, rigidly close-minded, or super affable. Maybe, like Honoria Glossup (one of the fiancées that Bertie Wooster narrowly avoids marrying in PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels), you’re “a confirmed back-slapper,” and have a laugh “like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge.” So long as your actions wholly result from a mélange of unchosen personality traits, it’s implausible that awarding credit/discredit on that basis is warranted.

Accusations that someone isn’t self-made typically stem from obvious circumstantial luck (e.g., being born into an aristocratic family with plentiful resources and profitable connections) rather than constitutive luck, but is constitutive luck any less lucky? Folks often classify talent as a legitimating factor in someone’s prosperity (“her success is a result of her talent and hard work”), but is it sensible to credit someone for their advantageous genetics? Biological inheritance is a windfall orchestrated by fortune to an equal degree as something like a choice job placement; there’s good reason talents are often called “gifts.” The unthinking immunization of talent from classification as something that is too lucky for underwriting the notion of being self-made is mystifying—like the shape of Long Island to the seagulls circling above in The Great Gatsby, it’s “a source of perpetual confusion” for me.

Someone’s arsenal of talents doesn’t even resemble an ordinary target for ascribing someone credit/discredit, such as their actions or choices. Where is the moment (or amalgamation of moments) of authorship supposed to be? Maybe people have adopted a quasi-Lockean view of talents and desert—that intermixing natural abilities with practice develops skill (the true basis for desert) and transmogrifies chance advantages into something rightly credible to their wielder. But then, would some heiress leveraging her connections and access to capital vaporize the effects of her undeserved head start? Or does a seedling of happenstance irretrievably poison future harvests? More crucially, someone’s inclination and capacity to convert talents into skills is likewise a drawn lot, so trying to incorporate those windfalls to purify another is a hopeless enterprise. This is like two peasants trying to knight each other.

For those hoping to eschew Strawson’s reasoning and preserve commonplace attitudes about people being self-made and the justice of economic outcomes turning on that idea, it’s tempting to try constructing some makeshift philosophy from the aphorism that “it’s not the cards you’re dealt, but how you play them,” which nicely captures naive attitudes about this stuff.

Our behavior may well be ‘in the cards’ in the sense that we simply have to play the cards that are dealt us. Further, just as an astronaut may still control the lift-off of the rocket, even though she did not build the platform that makes the launch possible (or ever have any control over the platform), we can be accountable for playing the cards that are dealt us, even if we did not manufacture the cards, write the rules of the game, and so forth. We can exercise precisely that sort of control of our behavior that moral responsibility requires, without having an inflated or exalted power of self-creation.5

But there’s a subtle hang-up with this metaphorical analysis that’s worth delineating more clearly, and I’ve heard it put like this: how you play your cards is also one of the cards that’s dealt to you. For example, maybe you inherited an indefatigable work ethic and naturally maximize your other skills. Your metaphorical card-playing abilities are equally “dealt to you” as the other cards you’re holding, so this comforting platitude about how people play their cards doesn’t supply inroads for self-creation whatsoever, but it perfectly captures the defective commonsense philosophy undermined by the Basic Argument. The locus of agency and control someone has (if there is any) must be confined to the mere action of playing the cards rather than any decisions about how to play them, which is a far more humble basis for ascribing credit/blame than presumed by ordinary social practices, and doesn’t involve absurd notions like self-creation.

Is there any method for ironing out these commonplace views? Surely, it’s fairer for someone to accumulate a fortune via toiling for income than to effortlessly inherit it, and surely it’s defensible for someone to be financially advantaged by doing especially dangerous or unpleasant labor, even if they aren’t responsible for their makeup. Since consequentialist grounds for inequality are unaffected by Strawson’s Basic Argument, some variance in remuneration and wealth isn’t completely undercut by the absence of desert and the impossibility of metaphysically unadulterated self-design.

While the notion that someone is genuinely self-made is nonsensical, reworking the world to totally disconnect labor from payment is an over-commitment, and expunging this faulty outlook from society wouldn’t necessarily revolutionize our current setup for moneymaking or redistribution. There are solid incentive-/consequentialist-related motivations for pairing labor with earnings, and maybe those can be characterized as a version of desert. The constitutively lucky person, equipped with talents and ambition, still needs to be motivated to perform the work they’re luckily capable of. If the possibility of amassing wealth generates an incentives schema that broadly improves society, then maybe our divided instincts about whether riches are laudable or unjust can be rationalized.

If, however, the socially beneficial temptation to prosper is equally driven by the potential to bequest those monies, then it’s questionable whether incentives and consequentialism alone could warrant sharply asymmetric rulings on the legitimacy of various fortunes based on criteria like whether someone inherited it. More importantly, as I wrote in my previous article about deserving to be rich without free will, people seem reluctant to completely forfeit the project of redistribution to whatever optimizes utility:

It’s easily imaginable that the severe inequality and sizable profits required for optimally calibrating the economy to society’s benefit would startle progressives,¹ but the inverse is also true—maybe we’ve substantially overshot the ideal values along those dimensions. Regardless, it’s not like everyone subscribes to consequentialism, and almost nobody appears eager to wholly restrict debate over inequality and redistribution to matters of utility.

Instead, ideological adversaries bitterly contest whether particular high-profile fat-cats—CEOs and financiers especially—are (un-)deserving of their elevated social standing and mind-bending bank accounts, depending on whether they benefited too much from propitious circumstances, nepotism, etc. (i.e., whether someone is “self-made”). Others try distinguishing between the deserving and undeserving poor. Few are prepared to completely jettison popular notions about economic desert.

Suppose that some empirical results incontrovertibly showed that heavy-handed taxation and redistribution improved the overall well-being of society—a largish portion of right-wingers would still disfavor such interventions and characterize them as thievery or as offensive handouts to unscrupulous layabouts. Conversely, a nontrivial portion of leftists might opt to reduce payouts to the ultra-wealthy even without any sort of countervailing benefit.

While none of the arguments above entirely resolve whether various tycoons are too rich, they do show that they’re undeservedly rich. And no one is self-made. Reducing the concept of desert to stuff like allocating profits via utilitarian considerations salvages a positive view of capitalizing on talent and hard work, but it undercuts the commonplace outlook that most people truly deserve their affluence or their penury, and if the consequences warranted redistributing that property differently, we’d be justified in doing so. If someone wants to establish otherwise—that people deserve their economic circumstances such that the status quo should be preserved even when social welfare would be bettered by rearranging existing wealth—then they must overcome the Basic Argument and navigate the seemingly impossible task of self-creation.