> If someone has a great idea that can double food production - they owe all the money and food to the society because they would not have had the idea or been able to implement it otherwise.
I don't see why this makes any more sense than "they owe it all to the singularity that started the Big Bang, because it wouldn't have happened otherwise". Or, for that matter, anything in between. Kids, this is your brain on bad counterfactual reasoning. Look for proximate causes: in other words, necessary and sufficient conditions.
I'd argue both statements do make the same amount of sense. The wording of "owe" doesn't make as much sense for the big bang but my overall argument was that people shouldn't feel ownership over a causal chain they happened into and haven't had any true impact on.
I don't think proximate causes are a good basis for societal decisions - for example many people blame poverty on bad decision making but that neglects previous generational disadvantages that could affect genetics (e.g. lead poisoning related to redlining) and it overlooks that people grow up in different environments. This seems like it's basically an excuse for people to not care about the bad effects of a system they're participating in by saying "don't worry this isn't your concern you can just blame those people".
I think a lot of this boils down to a free will argument. While that's still ultimately up in the air, if we're looking at necessary and sufficient conditions then it seems like there's more evidence that we don't have free will than that we do. I think the "necessary and sufficient" relationship for free will would be that free will exists if we could have made a different decision than one that we did, and we don't have any way to test for that.
In the absence of free will people are just a result of their starting point and environment afterwards, and thus don't have a reason to claim disproportionate ownership over the output of that larger system.
Don't want this to come off as combative - I'm super interested in debate on this! I'd love to be proven wrong but it seems like we don't have free will so I feel like it's generally a mistake to try to organize society as if we did. I wasn't really aiming for a counterfactual argument, but how was this a "bad" counterfactual? It was definitely hyperbolic but meant to show in an extreme that the principles would still hold true and that someone wouldn't be able to claim ownership over the output. I feel like we probably just disagree on the axiom of free will but feel free to correct me!
I don't see why this makes any more sense than "they owe it all to the singularity that started the Big Bang, because it wouldn't have happened otherwise". Or, for that matter, anything in between. Kids, this is your brain on bad counterfactual reasoning. Look for proximate causes: in other words, necessary and sufficient conditions.