I don't believe in the concept of deserving. Seems to me it's often just used for someone to avoid helping others, to feel superior, or is just based on some emotion they feel. "You said le bad thing, you deserve to get killed", "you owe me sex", etc.
If I'm born into a large inheritance I apparently don't deserve it. But if I'm born into a certain genetics and environment, upbringing, etc, that gives me work ethic, physical and mental health, etc, to make the prudent choices and work my way into wealth then that's somehow more deserved? If both the inheritor and the "hardest worker in the room" decide to not do anything with their money/work ethic and NEET, does the former deserve to be rich and the latter not? Would you then say the inheritor "deserves" to lose their money, since he made the same choices as the other guy? Would you be entitled to his money/would you deserve his money because you spend 8 hrs a day in an office? His gf? What makes someone make a choice, is it done in a vacuum? Where does the choice ultimately come from, is there an element of transcendence/something science can't explain? I'm not entirely certain about any of this, so I choose to not accept the, in my opinion unproven, concept of "deserving" and "blame" at this stage. Doesn't make a ton of sense to me. I can, however, see the practicality of not rewarding people for doing fuck all, or punishing moral transgressions for pragmatic reasons. I suspect that's why we have this instinct in the first place.
So there's no confusion, I do believe in choice and that we select between several different possible futures, causing the various outcomes and effects, whether good or bad. My issue here is what makes what we choose ultimately different, in terms of "deserving", than something we'd do involuntarily. At first glance it seems obvious, but if you start backtracking from the point of a certain decision I don't see why you couldn't make it to the point of conception or beyond (yes, I'm reading Sapolsky).
In my uncertainty I feel at least more certain about the fact that we're obviously faced with different choices. There's also the question of how intentional and how automatic choices are. If I instinctively do something really fast, am I less "deserving" of a reward or punishment? Do I, right now, choose to not break my own middle finger constantly? It wasn't in my mind as a readily available option until I came up with it, if that was the right course of action, and I didn't think of it, do I deserve something bad to happen to me? Who decides? If I work a job and start crashing out, feeling like shit, not performing, and go back to NEETing, do I deserve to not have a gf? But, if I'm giga-chad, get approached by a girl at the job, this stabilizes my mood and I manage continue working, do I then "deserve" the gf?
This "deserve" thing seems to me to be a largely biased emotion that people feel. I'd wager it "mysteriously" makes people feel they deserve more than others, too, since they took their stable upbringing, neurotypicality, mental health, inheritance, whatever, and played their hand well with their highly functioning frontal lobes...
There may also be a problem of using terms like "you", "I", "person", "individual", etc. One way of looking at things I think is that we're made of many parts. Different brain areas, kind of competing. Another, that we're a part of a larger society or ancestral line or such. I don't know, kinda half-baked, but might be interesting to think about.