Poverty: The Stages of Blame
I’ve repeatedly argued that there’s a connection between (a) how deserving the poor are, and (b) how the poor ought to be treated. Unfortunately, as soon as I make this deliberately vague claim, many readers rush to ascribe specific, silly views to me. To preempt future misinterpretations, I now sketch my view in greater detail.
1. Claims about desert and poverty are meaningful. Asking, “Does he deserve to be poor?” can be rude, but that doesn’t mean the answer is “No.”
2. A person deserves his problem if there are reasonable steps the he could have taken to avoid the problem. Poverty is a problem, so a person deserves his poverty if there are reasonable steps he could have taken to avoid his poverty.
3. Common sense can usually resolve whether reasonable steps to avoid poverty were available to a particular person. A good rule of thumb: If you wouldn’t accept an excuse from a friend, you shouldn’t accept it from anyone.
4. The fact that a person deserves his poverty does not imply that it is morally wrong to help him.
5. However, the fact that a person deserves his poverty is (a) a strong moral reason to give him low priority when weighing how to allocate help, and (b) a strong moral reason not to force a stranger to help him.
6. The fact that a person does not deserve his poverty does not imply that it is morally wrong not to help him.
7. However, the fact that a person does not deserve his poverty is (a) a strong moral reason to give him high priority when weighing how to allocate help, (b) an extra moral reason for individuals morally responsible for his poverty to cease and remedy their wrongful behavior, (c) a moral reason to force these morally responsible individuals to cease and remedy their wrongful behavior, and (d) a plausible though not totally convincing moral reason to force strangers to help the deserving person if the benefits heavily outweigh the costs.
Coming soon: What these claims imply about government policy and personal behavior.
HT: Bill Dickens for spurring me to clarify my position.
The post appeared first on Econlib.
Point 2 (a person deserves his problem if there were steps he could’ve taken to prevent his problem) is obviously wrong if you stop to think about it even a little bit.
Let’s say someone was murdered while walking in a dark alleyway at night. He could have not done that and therefore not be murdered. Does he deserve to be murdered?
Another example would be laws. If there’s a law against criticizing the government, one could avoid punishment by not criticizing the government, yet someone who does clearly doesn’t deserve the punishment.
I think it can be very hard to determine if there were "reasonable steps the he could have taken to avoid the problem". If he is poor then he could have picked himself up by his bootstraps and gotten job. But what if he was born physically or mentally disabled in a way that makes it impossible to get a job? Are there reasonable steps he could have taken to prevent himself from being born with that handicap? Almost certainly not.
But what about the man who is not obviously physically or mentally handicapped? Then surely he could have taken reasonable steps to get a job. Easy for someone who happened to be born with a lucky combination of genes and environment to foster job-getting abilities- not so easy for someone with less a less luckily combination.
Ultimately we are all somewhere on the luckiness scale and none of us can take credit or assign blame for where we or someone else lands on that scale. Everything we do and everyone else does is ultimately driven by luck. If you think your high agency means that you can transcend luck, then you are just not looking deep enough because it was only luck that gave you the ability to be high agency.
I think a much better principal is to simply try to incentivize outcomes that we prefer. Still hard, but at least avoids anyone having to try to judge what is "reasonable" for someone else to do.