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by jirdperson 2157 days ago
Does the problem really lie in those people, themselves, or in the circumstances that led to their labor being worth so little?
1 comments

This is a purely moral judgement - you can argue, in the most extremal case, that every aspect of a person's behavior is purely "circumstantial". After all, your personality and capabilities are entirely shaped by circumstances like genetics and life experience.

Of course, we understand this is a pretty useless way of looking at things.

From a consequentialist standpoint, the incentives work out the best when we use the heuristic of assigning responsibility for low labor value to the person performing the labor, so that's the approximation I choose to use. You could choose to think that e.g. being very stupid is no one's fault, so a very stupid person should get paid as much as a brilliant doctor, but the net social consequences of this are pretty well explored and pretty bad.