Deserving

Converse

Deserving something generally builds from some action and what should ideally result from it. Many people invert this process, consciously or unconsciously. A trivial example might be "lawbreakers deserve to go to jail", with the logical converse being "people in jail must have been lawbreakers." This may often be true but ignores the possibility of a miscarriage of justice where an entirely innocent person might be suffering. At its extremes, the converse can lead to victim blaming, where when a terrible event happens to someone, an observer concludes that it is merely just retribution for some misdeed in the past. The just-world fallacy is the worldview that "everything happens for a reason", and that seemingly random events are actually morally fitting, if perhaps on a delayed timescale.