A premature declaration of prematurity

The view that Obama's Nobel Peace Prize has been premature is incoherent. Here's why. Either Obama already deserves the prize or he doesn't. If he does, then it isn't premature. And if he doesn't, then it's only a guess - or if you prefer a hypothesis - that he will at some point come to deserve it. In that case the award is just wrong since he may never come to deserve it. Who can know the future? Not even the Nobel Peace Prize committee. This is not like a premature declaration of the innings in cricket, where we know for sure, for example, that had Adam Gilchrist not declared when he did, he could have declared later and not lost the Test. It's not like a premature baby, where we have a strong evidential basis for thinking the baby would have been born later had it not been born now. So, whether deserved or undeserved, the award to Obama can't be said to be premature - although one day we may able to say that it was premature. I argued when the award was first announced that I thought it was deserved. Whether this is right or not, we can be confident that the award isn't (yet) premature.