The other day I came across a perfectly ordinary bit of spam that nonetheless stopped me cold:

"Start earning the salary you deserve by obtaining the proper credentials!" the e-mail urged, and suddenly I found myself returning to a familiar subject: Forget the proper credentials — do we actually deserve our salaries in the first place?

Having written a column about work for almost a year now, I feel obliged to come clean about something that's long troubled me: the minor fact that our entire work economy appears to be built on a little-analyzed lie. Bear with me while I try to sort this out — and by all means convince me I'm wrong, if possible.

When money or other tokens of success are given to us, it's supposedly because we did something to deserve them. But what did we do? The abstract concept of deserving our livings is so built-in that we don't much question it, not outside of freshman-year dorm rooms, anyway. Work equals money, duh. I live by this premise like everyone else, but it bugs me that I can't defend it.

You, for instance, with the prestigious banking job. You might argue that you went to school, put in long Saturday nights at the library and made great sacrifices to get this job, and indeed that you continue to put in hard work. Or you, with the groovy sculpture commission, after all those years toiling in obscurity: Surely your creativity and perseverance have earned you this minor recompense allotted by our society.

But I argue that we do these things because we were taught to. Or because we inherited certain genes. Or because life conspired to put us on the track that led here. So what if our work ethic is better than that of the guy down the hall? Any talents, work ethic, intelligence or ambition strike me as qualities we inherited or learned along the way — or else cultivated thanks to other qualities we inherited or learned. A person who pulls herself up by her bootstraps, in other words, is a person lucky enough to have that determination, grit, inclination, whatever.

So given the capricious and arbitrary nature of this arrangement, isn't it capricious and arbitrary whatever rewards we get? Or don't get, for that matter: If we were unlucky enough to have been born in a poor, starving village in Africa, could anyone say that we didn't deserve material comforts?

There's a fairly obvious scenario that my wife and I sometimes imagine, one that always leaves us feeling wholly irrational. A homeless person walks up to us on the street and explains that he'd like half of our money. What logic could possibly justify saying no? We worked for it? Sure, but only because we turned out to be the kind of people who work for it (not to mention other forms of privilege and luck that landed on us). Seems to me that we hang onto our loot out of an emotional rationale more than a logical one: We don't want to give it away.

In search of wisdom I called John Perry, the Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Stanford and one half of KALW's "Philosophy Talk" radio show. I was hoping Perry would disabuse me of this no-just-deserts idea, but he more or less agreed.

"If you're born with $5 million, that's luck," he said. "If you're born with nothing and then work really hard and eventually earn $5 million, people might say you deserved that money. But really it's just a different form of luck to have the thrift, hard work and stick-to-it-iveness necessary to make that money."

Perry ventured that utilitarianism offers an argument for our current set-up.

"A utilitarian would argue that it's good for society at large to reward certain behaviors, even if those behaviors (are the result of an unfair distribution of luck)," he said. In other words, it's best for everyone if the banker and the sculptor keep getting paid, even if they're just doing what comes naturally to them.

Still, Perry's utilitarian response was merely a way to reconcile ourselves to this unfairness — not to endorse it.

I decided I needed to hear from someone who could get fully behind our current arrangement. I phoned Yaron Brook, president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute — one of the few organizations in the world where you'll hear "radical selfishness" defined as a moral virtue. If you're willing to forget their positions on the environment, Iran, animal rights and so forth, Ayn Rand disciples are great defenders of that paycheck in your back pocket.

"The essence of morality is the extent to which you apply your free will. If we're going to get rewarded for anything, it's for this," Brook told me.

And if someone doesn't have that free will for some reason, or doesn't exercise it as effectively as someone else?

"Then they don't deserve it."

Brook and I went back and forth over free will, and whether it really just comes from all those raw ingredients we acquired through sheer luck — my position.

"If we're completely determined, the whole concept of 'deserve' is out. Computers don't deserve anything. Animals don't deserve anything. What makes humans unique is we have the capacity to make choices," he argued. "Some people make choices that lead to success and prosperity and happiness, and some people don't ... (When) people make bad choices, they deserve the consequences."

I couldn't get Brook to agree that people who make bad choices have something in them leading them to do so — something the good-choices people don't have — and that this quality was just a more complex version of height or eye color. But Brook did acknowledge that at least sometimes our stations in life are undeserved: an inheritance, a lucky Lotto ticket, being born on a poor continent. Still, he said, just because our fortunes aren't always deserved doesn't mean we're not entitled to them.

"People are born in Africa and they're out of luck, and it's sad. But the fact they were unlucky enough to be born in Africa doesn't place a claim against me and my life and my wealth," he said. And if he won the lottery, "I wouldn't say I deserve this money. I'd say it's mine, not yours, and I get to decide what I do with it. The fact that I have money, no matter how I got it, doesn't give you a claim against it."

Finders keepers, in other words. I can't say I find it compelling, but at least it addresses the issue.

It's weirdly tough to work with these questions — they get at something that's taken for granted, and it's a little like questioning gravity, or maybe flour. What's more, it rarely goes well when I have this conversation with people. Either I seem to be advocating a life of guilt, or else a total redistribution of property. In truth, I don't advocate for anything except getting to the bottom of things. It's like when you're in school and you realize America was stolen from American Indians — there isn't really a practical solution, but it seems worth knowing.

And maybe there's value in recognizing the absolute randomness at the root of everything we accomplish, or fail to. There seems to be something salutary in distancing yourself from that raise you got, or that layoff last week. It was luck that dumped these things in our laps, and luck could remove them just as easily. Better, perhaps, to focus more on those relationships that don't hinge on the slippery desert concept: the eating of pie, the helping off of a partner's shoes after a long day.

Finally, a silver lining from Perry:

"If it makes no sense to deserve anything, there's no reason to feel bad about it!" he said. "You've destroyed the concept of deserving altogether. You might as well say I don't quadzircle this salary. It's meaningless!"

As I said, feel free to convince me I'm wrong. If I'm going to impugn the living we all make, you quadzircle to have your opinion heard.

Chris Colin has worked as a writer-editor at Salon, and before that a busboy, a bread deliverer and a bike messenger, among other things. He's the author of "What Really Happened to the Class of '93," about the lives of his former high school classmates, and co-author of "The Blue Pages," a directory of companies rated by their politics and social practices. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Mother Jones, the New York Observer, McSweeney's Quarterly and several anthologies. He lives in San Francisco.