In philosophy, “paradox” often doesn’t mean that something really is self-contradictory, but rather that it seems self-contradictory. There are what Quine called “veridical paradoxes” which seem at first to be contradictions but actually turn out to be true but non-obvious. That’s the case for a lot of “paradoxes” arising from math, for example the birthday paradox.
(In any event, “deserve” is much more complicated than “paradox”!)