I rolled a 6 and they rolled a 1 when the gameboard was getting set. No one should feel bad about being lucky.
It's fun to see this view coming from someone who (presumably) also thinks that capitalism is at least weakly meritocratic.
Even setting that point aside, though, I'd suspect that something like this view is both common and not well-examined in most people who hold it. Imagine a world where lifelong advantages and disadvantages are literally decided via dice roll: when a child is born, their parents roll a d100, and the higher the number the more wealth, power, luxury, and comfort that child would have. This actually isn't manifestly unfair, I don't think: using something like a random number generator to allocate scarce goods is (at least in some sense) extremely fair, and it's not obvious to me that anyone is claiming that people who rolled 100 in that scenario should "feel bad" for being lucky.
In fact, that kind of world is significantly more fair than the one we live in, because the "randomness" in our world isn't coming from anything like an unbiased dice roll. To make the thought experiment more accurate, we'd have to add something like a weighting (or modifier) to each person's roll based on the roll that their parents got; if my parents rolled a 92 and a 87, for instance, I might get to roll the dice 5 times and take the best one. If they rolled a 13 and a 21, however, I have to roll 10 times and take the worst one. Thus, people who got good rolls themselves are significantly more likely to have children with good rolls, and the worse your parents' rolls were, the harder it is to roll well yourself. This is manifestly less fair, and much more representative of our world.
Even still, I don't think most people are (primarily) claiming that high-rollers should "feel bad" about their rolls. In fact, the moral guilt of high-rollers is worse than useless to low-rollers: it's condescending and actively harmful, especially if high rollers have the ability to make the system more fair through their actions and instead choose to spend their time performing their agonized guilt. This is something that liberals fundamentally misunderstand about the discourse surrounding privilege, intersectionality, reparations, and related concepts: when someone points out that the dice are loaded in your favor, they're not asking you to feel bad about that--they're asking you to help unweight the dice.
It's fun to see this view coming from someone who (presumably) also thinks that capitalism is at least weakly meritocratic.
Even setting that point aside, though, I'd suspect that something like this view is both common and not well-examined in most people who hold it. Imagine a world where lifelong advantages and disadvantages are literally decided via dice roll: when a child is born, their parents roll a d100, and the higher the number the more wealth, power, luxury, and comfort that child would have. This actually isn't manifestly unfair, I don't think: using something like a random number generator to allocate scarce goods is (at least in some sense) extremely fair, and it's not obvious to me that anyone is claiming that people who rolled 100 in that scenario should "feel bad" for being lucky.
In fact, that kind of world is significantly more fair than the one we live in, because the "randomness" in our world isn't coming from anything like an unbiased dice roll. To make the thought experiment more accurate, we'd have to add something like a weighting (or modifier) to each person's roll based on the roll that their parents got; if my parents rolled a 92 and a 87, for instance, I might get to roll the dice 5 times and take the best one. If they rolled a 13 and a 21, however, I have to roll 10 times and take the worst one. Thus, people who got good rolls themselves are significantly more likely to have children with good rolls, and the worse your parents' rolls were, the harder it is to roll well yourself. This is manifestly less fair, and much more representative of our world.
Even still, I don't think most people are (primarily) claiming that high-rollers should "feel bad" about their rolls. In fact, the moral guilt of high-rollers is worse than useless to low-rollers: it's condescending and actively harmful, especially if high rollers have the ability to make the system more fair through their actions and instead choose to spend their time performing their agonized guilt. This is something that liberals fundamentally misunderstand about the discourse surrounding privilege, intersectionality, reparations, and related concepts: when someone points out that the dice are loaded in your favor, they're not asking you to feel bad about that--they're asking you to help unweight the dice.
Like this post. Well said in final para.