Accusing young people of entitlement is a buzzword of our times. But what philosophical argument is typically used to justify the negative connotation? Why doesn’t the world owe me, or you, or anyone else a living?
Well, for one, to take it to an extreme, if one person has the right to sit on their duff and collect, then we all do. If we all sit on our duffs waiting for someone else to work and give us a handout, then no one does anything productive and in a month or two we’re all dead.
Wealth does not come from the world, it is created by people’s hard work. In order to give it to you, it has to be taken from the people who worked hard to earn it. To suggest that your are entitled to live off of the hard work of other’s is to imply that people should be your slaves.
There’s nothing wrong with entitlement if one is really entitled to something. After I put in a certain number of hours at work, I am entitled to a paycheck.
I’ve never heard anyone say that people should be entitled to live comfortably off the dole. This post and the one above don’t address the issue.
To answer the OP, the reason there’s a negative connotation about the sense of entitlement is because the people expressing it are not sympathetic. Example time:
A decorated war veteran makes it to 19 years and is looking foward to retirement, when he gets caught dancing at a gay bar (pre-DADT repeal) and gets the boot. Do not pass go, do not collect your 40 or 50 or 60 years of nearly-earned retirement benefits.
He goes around bitching about how he got screwed. Technically, yeah, he violated the terms of his agreement with the US gov’t, and technically he’s not entitled to squat because he only did 19 years. But he did what he was supposed to do, and the reason he’s not getting his retirement is stupid. He’d be right to complain, and I don’t think anyone would brand him with having a “sense of entitlement.”
Meanwhile, a kid grows up wanting to be an architect, so he works hard in school, gets into a good college, takes out some loans, graduates at 22, and suddenly discovers that the market for entry-level architects is absolutely saturated. Does the world owe him a job? Of course not. We don’t need all that many architects, and if every George Costanza got his dream job the world couldn’t function. But from this guy’s perspective he did everything right. He’s spent the last 10 years or so working towards a goal that he was told was attainable, he didn’t get in trouble, he didn’t slack off.
Unlike the gay war veteran though, nobody gives a fuck about the aspiring architect. So instead of righteous indignation, he gets branded as an entitled brat.
Yeah, I guess it depends on what the person feels entitled to: “wealth”, or simply existence? People tend to work a lot, but some other animals don’t seem to work much at all. From the Wiki page on gorillas: “During the day they have rest periods and travel or feeding periods. … Little competition exists between mountain gorilla groups for resources since they rely on food that is readily available and easily accessed.” So maybe a person who desires to not work is actually desiring to return to a natural ancestral condition.
Basically, the pejorative use of entitlement to mean lazy, greedy bastard comes from federal programs that identify certain federal services as entitlements because of laws legally passed by congress, and signed into law by the president. By virtue of that law, we the people have decided that all, or certain citizens are entitled to the benefit of our combined national good fortune. If you don’t like the person who is entitled to the benefit, you use that connotation. If you don’t like the greedy selfish bastards who begrudge any sharing of the good fortune our nation has gained, you consider it to be an entitlement based on law.
Mostly it is an indication of why you want a government. Either you want your shit protected from everyone else, or you want everyone protected from the greedy, and selfish.
We call it entitlement because it is legally precisely that.
Tris
It’s another way of saying “kids these days”. Every generation thinks that the subsequent one isn’t as tough or self-reliant as they were. This is perpetuated on the newest generation, who grew up in the era of “self-esteem” emphasis and “everyone wins” sporting events. Kids who lacked for nothing, but seem to be always wanting more.
Damn, kids these days! And stay off my lawn while you’re at it!
I’m not sure that’s a fair comparison. Aside from the DADT-era anti-Gay stuff, a veteran is guaranteed through what is essentially a contract with the government certain benefits. For the aspiring architect, all he had was people promising he’d get a job if he put in the work. To be equivalent, we’d have to have some company promise him a job and then rescinding a week before he graduates because they found out he, say, smoked pot once when he was 14.
It’s a difference between a contractual obligation and an expectation based upon social standards. I suppose there’s still some legitimacy there because it sucks when people put in work and end up on the bad end of the bell curve of expected outcomes. However, he’s still not owed anything by virtue of that work because there was no legally enforceable promise that some reward would follow.
Either way, the term “entitlement” seems to have been throroughly ruined because, as Trisk points out, it mostly has a negative connotation. No one seems to think that a 30-year veteran isn’t entitled to whatever benefits he was promised, because we as a society value the contribution and those benefits never seem to get described as entitlement programs, at least not when the whole idea that they’re a bane on society and a massive tax burden and all that.
There are only three things to which we are entitled: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. There are no guarantees that we will catch it, though.
It’s not actual lawful entitlements that I complain of. it’s a sense of entitlement that has people thinking they’re supposed to receive things that they aren’t.
A case of a really bad sense of entitlement: A rich kid who is accustomed to all the finer things in life disobeys his father to the point that his luxurious lifestyle and access to the family fortune is cut off. So he goes and gets a minimum wage job, but still thinks that he should be able to eat caviar and ride in limos etc., and wants to increase the minimum wage because he feels he has a right to limos and caviar beyond his means to provide them.
It’s not as bad a sense of entitlement to think all people are entitled to the basic necessities in life, without earning it, but it’s still bad.
A sense of entitlement that we should care for those cannot care for themselves is justified.
I very much agree with you here…but I’ve worked with and have met numerous people that wrongly feel that they should be considered part of the group that cannot care for themselves and that Uncle Sam should.
If young people feel overly entitled, could this be because over the past few decades American childhood has become a series of constructed situations with predetermined outcomes? When that’s all you’ve been exposed to from age 0-21, it’s a hard lesson that the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.
I like to think of it - by which I mean put words in conservatives’ mouths - as the way Rep. Cantor talks about “equality of opportunity, not of outcome.” To my understanding, this means you get one chance to make something of yourself, and if you muff it, for whatever reason, it’s over. Because a second chance, a third, etc., would bring equality of outcome just that little bit closer. Special pleading. Entitlement.
Not saying Cantor or other conservatives necessarily believe this. Just taking things to a logical conclusion.
FWIW, I really do think the generation after me is not as tough or self-reliant as yours truly. I don’t hate them for it- I think conditions in this country have been getting progressively softer for ~70 years or longer. Maybe that is changing now that the Chinese &etc are ready to compete head-to-head with us.
Anyway, to the OP, I don’t think a sense of entitlement is always illogical or unethical. Babies expect to be fed and kept warm. Kids expect to be taught things. Growing up, everybody has some expectation of being a part of society. For its own good, society owes them something, surely. The rub comes with questions of ‘how much is enough?’ and ‘No fair, that’s better than I got!’ and ‘time for you to do your duty: pay up’.
It does; otherwise there’s no rational and not much moral reason for someone to not simply pick up a weapon and take what he or she needs to survive. People obey the rules of society largely because doing so is better than the alternatives; when obeying the rules means death or great suffering that’s not true anymore. If society denies people what they need to live, then sooner or later they’ll start just taking it. If you want to see real social unrest, just imagine all those millions of unemployed people faced with the prospect of starving to death.
Because in this context, “the world” means other people who are forced to provide that living. When you claim that everyone else owes you a living, you’re claiming that you own other people’s time, talent and work, that its yours by right. All that you’re “entitled” to are the things you earn.
The same people who set up the rules and system that you are failing to survive under. The people who set up the rules are responsible for the consequences of those rules. We live in a system designed to produce extreme winners and losers, one that puts a disproportionate burden on the less prosperous, and to maintain a constant minimum percentage of unemployed people.
It’s silly to expect people to slink off and die quietly in a corner out of some suicidal dedication to the system. If nothing else, people are owned a bare living as a payment for for adhering to the social contract and not simply saying to hell with the system, arming themselves and grabbing what they want.
If nobody ever got anything for free, we’d all act as if we were raised by wolves and it would be a complete mess. Libertarian freedom isn’t appropriate for minors, say.
So, you don’t believe in charity, just in paying people not to hurt you? That isn’t any more ethical than dog-eat-dog.