Obligation, Supererogation and the Welfare State

Disputes about the moral legitimacy of the welfare state often turn on the disagreement between those who believe that we have a moral obligation to come to the aid of those in need, and those who reject this, contending that helping those who are in need, while morally good, is not morally obligatory; it’s supererogatory, a matter of charity.

It seems to me that while sometimes one has no moral obligation to help and in doing so goes beyond one’s moral duty, this is not always the case. To take a typical example, if a child is drowning and someone could easily save him, then at face value he has a moral obligation to do so. If he lets the child drown he has not simply failed to do something commendable; he is worthy of condemnation for failing to do his duty.

Thus I think it’s a mistake to try to defend classically liberal–libertarian–constraints on the state by appeal to the general distinction between obligation and supererogation. The case that must be made is against using the police power of the state to force people to do certain things they are morally obligated to do.

We ought not to allow others to be harmed when we can easily help them. Obviously enough, here morality constrains our attempts to do the moral thing. When Marvin is in need, it does not prescribe that we do whatever it takes to provide him with what he needs. For some ways of seeking to bring about the goals morality prescribes are themselves morally forbidden. If Marvin needs a new liver, and the only one that will work for him is one already in someone else, we ought not to sacrifice her to save him. There are moral constraints on doing what’s right. Some ways of trying to do what’s right are morally wrong.

Further, morality makes “second order” demands upon us: we ought sometimes to try to influence others to do what they ought to do, and we ought to try to influence them not to do what they ought not to do. If Mary refuses to give Fred the help she ought to give him, it might be our duty to try to influence him to do what he ought to do. If Mitch ought not to treat Flora a particular way, then it might fall to us to try to influence him not to treat her that way. Here too there are moral constraints on our attempts to get others to behave morally. This is obviously true and almost universally accepted. Many of us think that someone can have a moral right to do things which are morally wrong. (Many of our basic rights. eg., the freedom of speech, become meaningless on the supposition that they apply only when others accept the moral propriety of our exercise of them.) If someone has a right to do wrong, then it may be morally wrong to do what it takes to get him to do what’s morally right. Irrespective of whether we think people have such rights, we all realize that the consequences of doing what it takes to get someone to do what’s morally right might be so bad as to make it morally wrong to get him to do it.

Fred ought not to steal daisies from Barney’s garden, but it would be morally wrong for Barney to try to prevent this by shooting him, even if this is the only effective method for getting him to stop stealing them. Barney might have no moral alternative to letting his flowers be stolen.

What is not universally agreed upon is the exact nature of the moral constraints on our efforts to improve human conduct.

In the political context, the crucial question is the nature of the moral constraints on the use of violence, including the threat of violence, as a means to bring it about that people do what they ought to do. What’s clear is that the mere fact that acts of the kind we want to prevent are morally wrong does not decide the issue.

There seem to be three main approaches:

1) Whether it is morally permissible to employ violence as a way to get people to do what they morally ought to do depends on a political decision procedure. E.g., if a democratic electorate favors doing so, and doing so is in accord with the forms of legality, then it is morally permissible.

2) Whether it is morally permissible to employ violence as a way to get people to do what they morally ought to do depends on the consequences of doing so. E.g., if the consequences of using violent means to get people to do what they morally ought to do are better than not doing so, then it is morally permissible to do so.

3) Whether it is morally permissible to employ violence as a way to get people to do what they morally ought to do depends on whether their wrongdoing involves violence. A principle of reciprocity implies that it is morally wrong to initiate violence and that only the wrongdoer’s initiation of violence morally justifies our deploying violent means in response.

The third approach is congruent with the classically liberal–libertarian–idea of the state. It is, I believe, a more plausible ground for it than the unlikely notion that we are not morally obligated to help one another. The reciprocity principle that figures in this approach might, in turn, be a specification of a more general egalitarian principle of reciprocity in human relations. It might also be construed as a principle calling for a kind of pacifism.

Egalitarianism

1. An idea which approximates axiomatic status in contemporary political theory springs from the fact that individuals’ “natural endowments,” are undeserved. When someone is born with strength, beauty, superior intelligence, or some other valuable psychological characteristic such as curiosity, gregariousness, or persistence this is a matter of good luck, not desert. The same can be said for whatever characteristics she has a result of her upbringing and childhood experiences. It is not as though she acquired these characteristics a result of choice or effort.

2. From this truism, the inference is that she has no special moral claim on what she acquires as a result of this good luck.

3. And from this the further inference is that it is morally permissible for others to take from her what she acquires as a result of her undeserved characteristics and redistribute it, thus compensating those who have less because they were less lucky in their natural endowments.  The natural talents of individuals are collective assets.  Thus the moral value of equality is served.

4. In principle, one might distinguish what someone has as a result of her undeserved natural endowments from what she acquires as a result of her choices and actions. There might be deserved inequalities resulting from the choices people make. An individual makes good choices and as a result achieves more wealth and social status than someone who makes bad choices. The former deserves to have more and the latter deserves less. However, in practice, it is hard to differentiate what is “deserved” and “undeserved.”

On metaphysically plausible assumptions, the choices a human being makes are caused by her desires and beliefs. However, these reasons for action in turn have causal histories reaching back to her genome and her early family and social environments. Mary, a college student, chooses to take hard classes and do her homework. Another student, Marvin chooses to take easy classes and these he often skips. Mary graduates and is offered a high salary position. Marvin has to leave school and settle for a job selling fast food. Years later, as a result of the choices they made as young adults, she is rich and he is poor. Perhaps we want to say that they get what they deserve. But why regard inequalities which are the effect of undeserved characteristics as any more deserved than the characteristics themselves? Mary is brilliant and hardworking; Sally suffers from mental retardation caused by congenital birth defects. It would be absurd and cruel to suppose that Sally, who can earn little or nothing, deserves a life of penurious misery.  So why imagine that Mary, whose superior capacities are no more ultimately the result of her choices than Sally’s inferior capacities are of hers, deserves a life of luxury?

Beyond any consideration of the causal history of choices, the egalitarian may find attractive the idea that individual choices have little bearing on the situation in which one finds oneself. That some are rich and others are poor might have much more to do with luck, say in the form of large socioeconomic forces over which one has no control, than individual decisions and actions.

5. Even if a person’s choices somehow escape the net of natural cause and effect, it would remain difficult to identify certain types of inequality as deserved and thus immune from redistributive projects. For even if choices were metaphysically unfettered, so an effort resulting in someone being better off than others need not be merely the effect of some fabulously complex chain of causes and effects stretching off into the past, it would nonetheless be true that she was able to conceive of, and carry out, the acts that made her better off than others only in a cultural context and social environment created and sustained by the actions of other persons. Without the cooperation, witting or unwitting, now and in the past, of any number of other persons, Mary could not have made the choices that made her rich, even if she is in some mysterious way the ultimate cause of those choices.

The egalitarian concludes that while she deserves a share in what she has produced, so does “society,” without whose cooperation she could have produced nothing.  In the absence of any clear means to identify the contribution that is hers in contrast to society’s,  “society,” or in reality those agents of government who purport to serve and speak for it, have complete discretion to decide precisely what her share amounts to.  What she produces may, as the state determines, be distributed in such a way as to render her share negligible. Whatever she produces can be expropriated in the name of equality.

We may, of course, note that for the classical liberal, in contrast to the redistributionist egalitarian, free markets are precise and reliable instruments for measuring what things are worth, i.e., what they are worth to others.  This includes an individual’s contribution to what is produced.

6. Consider the extreme: Molly is born with two functional kidneys, Polly with none. It is Molly’s good luck that she has one more kidney than she needs, just as it Polly’s bad luck that her kidneys are useless.  Molly has no special moral claim to the kidneys that happen to be part of her undeserved natural endowment.  Her moral claim is simply to be given equal consideration, along with Polly and everyone else, in the (re)distribution of kidneys–and anything else–in the attempt to achieve equality. The egalitarian will, one hopes, draw back from what appears to be the gruesome implication of the doctrine. But it is a very bad doctrine, for it amounts to the idea that individual human beings are the property of “society.”  Whatever a person is and has belongs to “everyone else,” which means in practice that each and every individual belongs to the state, which, in the name of equality, may take whatever it pleases and redistribute it in accord with its vision of equality. The left’s egalitarianism may trade on the rhetoric of human liberty, but its essence is pre-liberal and pre-modern: the citizen is the property of the state.

7. So far as I can tell, the egalitarian position relies on two inferences, neither one obviously valid.

First, while it is clear that no one deserves his natural endowment, it is not clear that he has no special moral claim on it or what he comes to have as a result of exercising it.

The assertion that one’s natural endowment is “undeserved” amounts, on inspection, to little more than a way to state the obvious fact that one’s natural endowment is not the result of one’s efforts. Possibly, the only moral claim someone could have on something is in virtue of his having it as a result of his efforts, but this needs to be defended, not tacitly assumed. One might reasonably suspect, for instance, that if someone possesses something because someone else gave it to him, then he has a moral claim on it, despite not having earned it.  If a mugger were  to relieve you of your watch, and upon reading the inscription, claim to be justified in taking it because you did not earn it, but received it as a gift from your wife, you would think he’s joking.  Without introducing theistic assumptions (as in Locke) we cannot characterize the valuable natural endowments with which we are born as gifts, but we can so characterize those one acquires because of how one’s parents raise him.  Receiving a gift is a way to acquire a moral claim on something without deserving it; there might be other ways.

Second, it is not clear that the fact that someone has no moral claim on something implies that it is morally permissible to take it from him. Particularly in the political context, where the “taking” the egalitarian proposes involves physical force, or the threat of physical force, it is reasonable to suspect that this implication does not hold. The fact that someone does not deserve something he has, or even that he has no moral claim to it, does not imply that it is permissible to do whatever one wants to him. Employing physical force against a human being requires moral justification. If Bob and Ray are walking on the beach and Bob picks up a pretty shell, the fact that he did not deserve to find it, that his seeing it first rather than Ray is a mere matter of luck, does not make it permissible for Ray to hit him, knock him out, and take it away from him. Such acts require serious moral justification. Conceivably, the goal of an equal distribution of the goods that exist as a result of undeserved natural endowments provides that justification, but that needs to be substantiated.