Stephen Kershnar

Stephen Kershnar’s model of the most valuable player fails. It does not track total value and this is what a team values, although perhaps the best model should focus on player-related value. In any case, the model does not succeed as a model of player-value because player-value is indeterminate. The indeterminacy results from boundary problems with the player-role and, perhaps also, indeterminacy in the baseline state. In addition, Kershnar’s framework is misguided because winning is not intrinsically valuable and is not even something wanted for its own sake. The MVP problem remains unsolved.

In general, capitalists deserve profits and losses for their contribution to the general welfare. Market imperfections and the range of permissible prices (at least within the boundaries of exploitation) prevent the alignment from being a direct one, but the connection generally holds. In the context of the market, this thesis preserves the central place of moral responsibility in moral desert. It also satisfies the fittingness and proportionality conditions of moral desert and provides a backward-looking and pre-institutional ground of it. In addition, the focus on contribution unifies several different types of act-based desert, specifically deserved profits and losses, deserved punishment, and deserved wages. Hence, to the extent that desert-satisfaction is relevant in the selection of an economic system, this result strengthens the case for capitalism.

Slavery harmed the slaves but not their descendants since slavery brought about their existence. The descendants gain the slaves’ claims via inheritance. However, collecting the inheritance-based claim runs into a number of difficulties. First, every descendant usually has no more than a portion of the slave’s claim because the claim is often divided over generations. Second, there are epistemic difficulties involving the ownership of the claim since it is unlikely that a descendant of a slave several generations removed would have retained the claim of inheritance given the loss of wealth and disinheritance that often characterizes families. There are also problems in determining the amount of inheritance. This is in part because of the problems of calculating in the effects of offsets, especially crime-related offsets, which are owed by a significant portion of the descendants. Even if this inheritance claim can be established with sufficient confidence certain entities may not be asked to pay it. The federal government does not owe compensation since as a historical matter it permitted but did not cause enslavement. The beneficiaries of slavery do not owe compensation since merely receiving the benefit of an unjust activity does not by itself generate a debt of compensation. When combined these problems constitute an overwhelming case against reparations.