Thesis: There is more than one way to be deserving, and in particular, more than one way to deserve an opportunity. We sometimes deserve X on the basis of what we do after receiving X rather than what we do before.

HOW DO I DESERVE THIS?

Suppose we know what a person has to do to be deserving. Is there also a question about when a person has to do it? James Rachels says, “What people deserve always depends on what they have done in the past.” David Miller says, “desert judgments are justified on the basis of past and present facts about individuals, never on the basis of states of affairs to be created in the future.” Joel Feinberg says, “If a person is deserving of some sort of treatment, he must, necessarily, be so in virtue of some possessed characteristic or prior activity.”

If we are not careful, we could interpret such statements in a way that would overlook an important, perhaps the most important, kind of desert-making relation. It is conventional that what we deserve depends on what we do, and that we deserve no credit for what we do until we do it. There may be a further aspect to academic convention, though, namely that when we first receive (for example) our natural and positional advantages, if we have not already done something to deserve them, it is too late.