Stuff we don't need? What if our wealth is ownership of investments that help businesses to run, keeping people employed and out of poverty? What about keepsakes that have no value to anyone else?
This idea embraces the fundamental error that value is a property of things, rather than a relationship between individuals and things that they need, want, or own? That error refuses to acknowledge that voluntary exchange makes both parties wealthier, or that wealth is created by human activity. Any analysis based on it is fundamentally flawed, and must not be trusted.
I think a lot about this. The "heartlessness" of libertarians is hwhat kept me away from libertarianism for so long. Even today, I refuse to call myself a "libertarian." Just "libertarian~ish". If you feel guilty about not giving away everything you don't need, you're gonna drive yourself nuts! Even my leftist friends treat themselves to Shawarma from time to time!
Here are the principles that I try to live by:
1. First, you are primarily responsible for yourself. You must make sure you are not starving and will not starve if you lose your job or become too disabled to work. hWhich happens to a lot of people over the age of 70. So, don't discount that possibility too much.
2. Then, your kids. You must ensure that they're safe, warm and not hungry: above the 15th weight percentile for their age.
3. Your wife can help herself. It's nice to treat her. But usually, you don't NEED to. Unless she's like 8 months pregnant working a physically demanding noxious fumes factory...
4. You have no obligation to your adult children, unless they can't help themselves. Like they're disabled or something.
5. You have no obligation to your parents unless they are doing everything to help themselves and they are absolutely poor. i.e. They are disabled, can't work, already sold the house and are now freezing to death cause they can't pay the gas bill in their apartment.
6. You have no obligation to help those who are hurting themselves, like to save a suicidal person, a drug addict or an obese person. Even if these people end up gying. You have only so many fucks to give.
7. You have no obligation to help those who are not helping themselves. i.e. Those who _could_ provide for themselves but instead go on welfare, etc.
8. Points 6 and 7 only apply to people's current situation. If someone was a drug addict for 20 years, cleans up and gets a job hwhen they're 50, works till they have a stroke at 70 and now can't work and they're freezing to death, you MAY have an obligation to help. Tough love for PRESENT and FUTURE mistakes is reasonable. Tough love for PAST mistakes is a harder pill to swallow. But I think you are just more heartless than me, sir. 😛
9. You DO have an obligation to help those who tried their best, but through no fault of their own are suffering from absolute poverty. For example, the disabled or starving children in third-world countries.
10. However, your obligation is NOT "joint and several", it's just "several" (proportionate). For example, if there's a Billion people starving to death in the world and a Billion people in the world who are able to help them, you are not obliged to feed the hwhole Billion. Just one. I think this is one of the main reasons people reject the principle of a moral obligation to help those in need, because they feel: IF there is such a moral obligation, I should not permit myself ANY luxury, so long as there is anyone starving in the world. And they realize (correctly) that: Such a life would make them absolutely miserable! So, they go the way and say: Fuck it! I have NO obligation to help anyone else. I think my compromise is a LOT more reasonable.
11. Your obligation to help those in need does not stop at your borders. If there are starving people overseas, you should help them, too. In fact, you should probably start with them. Because helping people in absolute poverty in poor countries is a lot cheaper than helping struggling Americans, due to various factors like cheaper cost of living, warmer climates, and simpler needs. Americans who try their best but can't make ends meet, in America, probably have more "complex" needs that would be more expensive to fix.
12. Notwithstanding point 11, point 10 is a bit of an oversimplification. You should do enough to help the AVERAGE person in need. Let's say there's a Billion people in need, some with simple needs that would be cheap to fix, some with more complex needs. But the total cost is $1 Trillion USD. Then, the average cost is $1000 each. Even if you can feed a Kenyan for $365, you're not done! You should still give $1000, but it's good to focus that money on where you can get the most "bang for your buck" first. Once we feed all the starving children in Africa, THEN we can worry about the homeless Americans.
13. Notwithstanding point 11, if it's your money, you get to pick and choose who you wanna help. For example, you might prefer to help your American cousin with HIV/AIDS than a starving African child. That's cool. Even if you use up your charity budget on your cousin and can't afford to help any starving African children.
14. Notwithstanding point 13, I don't get the "My country FIRST!" mentality. Like, given the choice of helping a fellow Canadian stranger or a Kenyan stranger, I am indifferent. Given the choice of helping TWO Kenyan strangers or one Canadian stranger, I would choose to help the two Kenyans in a heartbeat. I honestly think people who would choose to save one Canadian over two Kenyans to be slightly racist. They still fulfill their moral obligation of helping those in dire poverty (_somebody_ has gotta help the poor Canadians) but they are still kinda racist. In fact, I would go as far as choosing to save two Kenyan strangers over my own cousin! But maybe I am weird. Or maybe everyone else is weird and I'm the only sane one left! Still haven't figured out hwhich...
15. You should do hwhat you can to help the person become self-sufficient. Better to "teach a man to fish..." But even this, should go throw a cost-benefit analysis. Maybe in some cases, it actually is cheaper to just feed a man for the rest of his life than to teach him to fish. You should do hwhat is most efficient.
16. Helping those in dire need is a moral obligation. Just like not killing people. As such, you can and should enforce it by law.
17. Your obligation to help those is dire need trumps your property rights. So, yes, the government does have the right to rob you to help them.
18. You are not obligated to help people beyond hwhat they need for basic survival. For example, you are not morally obligated to reduce income inequality or donate to children's sports teams or fund pretty much most of the stupid things that government wastes your money on. So government should abolish most of these programs.
19. However, for now, if you don't pay your taxes, the government can fine you, seize your assets, throw you in jail, garnish your pay and do a LOT of things that would make it difficult to accomplish points 1 and 2 (provide for yourself and your kids). So you should prolly just pay your taxes.
20. If the government is effectively doing your share on your behalf (for example, if you're American and the US government is lifting 342 million people out of dire poverty), then you have no further moral obligation.
21. If, even despite the high taxes you pay, the government is not effectively doing your share on your behalf, then you are required to fill in the gaps, through private charity. The government's failure does not absolve you of your responsibility. I had a leftist friend who didn't believe in private charity. He thought that was the government's role. I joked with him: "So, if you are on a boat and you sea someone drowning at sea, do you say: 'Well, I certainly hope the Coast Guard is coming for you!' ... 'What's that? They're not? I know. Such a shame. They're massively underfunded! But hey, don't blame me! *I* voted for the NDP!'" 🤣
22. We should work to fix structural problems that leave people in poverty, such as closed-borders, stupid economic policies, etc. But that doesn't absolve us of our obligation to help others in dire poverty as a result of such policies. For example, there's a Kenyan who is starving to death. He wouldn't be starving to death if the US government let him come and work in the US. But the US government is run by idiots who are voted in by idiots. So, that's not happening any time soon. You should still help the starving Kenyan stuck in Kenya.
23. We should give enough to "save a person's life". But sometimes we need to save their life again and again. For example, let's say we can't permanently fix someone's situation to permanently end their dependency. They're gonna need to be "subsidized" for the rest of their life. Well, we have an obligation to help them for the rest of their lives.
24. Giving someone enough to get enough food, clean water and shelter, is simple and cheap enough. Health care can get expensive! So what if someone needs medical care to save their life? Do we have a moral obligation to help with that? Here, it gets to be more of a grey area... If you could save someone with just $20 worth of pills, then by all means, we should buy them the damm pills! But if someone requires a Billion dollar surgery? Maybe not. And, as you get older, healthcare gets more expensive and less effective. Do we really have to help an 85-year-old pay for a Million-Dollar surgery that has only a 10% chance of success? Probably not. Like I said, this is a grey area and I haven't really drawn firm lines yet. But, for now, I would say, we have a (proportionately shared) moral obligation to help pay medical expenses up to $1 Million for anyone under 70.
25. Giving to charity when you're young takes away money that you could be investing. That comes with a high opportunity cost. So, maybe you'd be better off investing hwhilst you're young and giving a mega-donation from your estate hwhen you die. However, you need to make up for all those years that you didn't donate + interest. But given a decent ROI, you probably can! Plus, it's easier cause you don't need the money, anymore. I think we can and should assume a lower discount rate for the charity and/or the recipients than your ROI. Charities are in the giving game, not really the investment game. This point is one that I only thot of recently. I have yet to fully flesh out the logistics of it.
I will be paying attention to people who advocate for giving away all "surplus wealth" just as soon as two conditions are met. (1) define surplus wealth in a way that passes the sniff test, and (2) do so themselves.
Your second point, David, is spot on. Those who advocate for welfare often expect everyone else to contribute while they don't beyond the law. I enquired with ChatGPT to find records of where John Rawls or Bernie Sanders gave to charity. Surprise, it came back with no records found.
These arguments, both in this case and in the case of Peter Singer, have a major issue both authors avoid. If we should have collective responsibility that overrides personal responsibility with income, I have never heard the same argument in response to crime. So, if a man in a western democracy chooses to not work and is therefore poor, I am required to give him some of my surplus income, why wouldn't the same be true if my neighbor committed a crime? After all, do I not have surplus time to sit in prison as a subsidy for my neighbor who robbed a retail store? If the justice system requires 3 years of punishment, why wouldn't I get 6 months for his crime. Moreover, would I be ethically required to give away my time to sit in a cell as a subsidy for my neighbor? Almost nobody argues that. My time is still my property, so why would we differentiate if "stuff" is a function of the value of our time?
Some cultures do have a normalized concept of collective punishment. I first read about it in relation to the Opium Wars; a British sailor committed a crime, and the Chinese expected *some* sailor to suffer punishment; who exactly was immaterial. It was noted that this concept was abhorrent to the British who expected the perpetrator alone to be punished.
Precisely. All the arguments in favor of collective responsibility tacitly assume that no one other than you the reader have responsibility for your situation, or will ever make decisions other than perfectly morally correct ones (whatever that means seems to be a function of the writer). In reality, if everyone is required to give up everything they have above the minimum level of someone else, everyone will only produce enough to meet that level, starting with the people who don't like producing anything and rapidly becoming the norm. Hooray, everyone is now impoverished.
That is the defining feature of the distinction between emergency aid and long term aid.
More completely: a donation to charity may be just a transfer from you, who has more resources than necessary, to a third party (or chain of parties), who already has more resources than necessary, leaving the intended target of the donation in the same state they began in.
I think your post succeeds precisely because it doesn’t soften the premise. By taking Hassoun’s claim at face value and following it to its logical end, you reveal the gap between moral assertion and lived reality. If the duty truly applies whenever surplus exists and suffering remains, then the obligation never terminates and the fact that almost no one can live by it isn’t a flaw in human character but a sign that the principle is being asked to do work it can’t sustain. In that sense, the problem isn’t lack of compassion; it’s the attempt to collapse moral life into a single utilitarian axis without accounting for the conditions that make generosity, prosperity, and responsibility possible over time.
Hassoun’s problem is with her initial utilitarian premise. Her personal cop-out is intellectually illogical and morally weak (on the basis of her own premise).
In fact, as highlighted by another of your recent posts, she is not only compelled to self-sacrifice by her own moral position, but also compelled to other-sacrifice as well. She should not only donate every last dollar (beyond maintaining her own subsistence), but work every waking minute (beyond what is required to earn her subsistence) to encourage everyone else to donate their every last excess dollar as well.
Excellent post! This matters for most systems of ethics. As a Christian and utilitarian (secondarily) I give away over half of my income. Is that enough, tho ?I coudl do iwht much less. I coudl also use guidance. Most ethicical systems seem to ignore that they apply to the individual as well as the government. Of course, the govt is totally secondary. It only comes into play to force people to do what they should do ethically anyway.
Stuff we don't need? What if our wealth is ownership of investments that help businesses to run, keeping people employed and out of poverty? What about keepsakes that have no value to anyone else?
This idea embraces the fundamental error that value is a property of things, rather than a relationship between individuals and things that they need, want, or own? That error refuses to acknowledge that voluntary exchange makes both parties wealthier, or that wealth is created by human activity. Any analysis based on it is fundamentally flawed, and must not be trusted.
I think a lot about this. The "heartlessness" of libertarians is hwhat kept me away from libertarianism for so long. Even today, I refuse to call myself a "libertarian." Just "libertarian~ish". If you feel guilty about not giving away everything you don't need, you're gonna drive yourself nuts! Even my leftist friends treat themselves to Shawarma from time to time!
Here are the principles that I try to live by:
1. First, you are primarily responsible for yourself. You must make sure you are not starving and will not starve if you lose your job or become too disabled to work. hWhich happens to a lot of people over the age of 70. So, don't discount that possibility too much.
2. Then, your kids. You must ensure that they're safe, warm and not hungry: above the 15th weight percentile for their age.
3. Your wife can help herself. It's nice to treat her. But usually, you don't NEED to. Unless she's like 8 months pregnant working a physically demanding noxious fumes factory...
4. You have no obligation to your adult children, unless they can't help themselves. Like they're disabled or something.
5. You have no obligation to your parents unless they are doing everything to help themselves and they are absolutely poor. i.e. They are disabled, can't work, already sold the house and are now freezing to death cause they can't pay the gas bill in their apartment.
6. You have no obligation to help those who are hurting themselves, like to save a suicidal person, a drug addict or an obese person. Even if these people end up gying. You have only so many fucks to give.
7. You have no obligation to help those who are not helping themselves. i.e. Those who _could_ provide for themselves but instead go on welfare, etc.
8. Points 6 and 7 only apply to people's current situation. If someone was a drug addict for 20 years, cleans up and gets a job hwhen they're 50, works till they have a stroke at 70 and now can't work and they're freezing to death, you MAY have an obligation to help. Tough love for PRESENT and FUTURE mistakes is reasonable. Tough love for PAST mistakes is a harder pill to swallow. But I think you are just more heartless than me, sir. 😛
9. You DO have an obligation to help those who tried their best, but through no fault of their own are suffering from absolute poverty. For example, the disabled or starving children in third-world countries.
10. However, your obligation is NOT "joint and several", it's just "several" (proportionate). For example, if there's a Billion people starving to death in the world and a Billion people in the world who are able to help them, you are not obliged to feed the hwhole Billion. Just one. I think this is one of the main reasons people reject the principle of a moral obligation to help those in need, because they feel: IF there is such a moral obligation, I should not permit myself ANY luxury, so long as there is anyone starving in the world. And they realize (correctly) that: Such a life would make them absolutely miserable! So, they go the way and say: Fuck it! I have NO obligation to help anyone else. I think my compromise is a LOT more reasonable.
11. Your obligation to help those in need does not stop at your borders. If there are starving people overseas, you should help them, too. In fact, you should probably start with them. Because helping people in absolute poverty in poor countries is a lot cheaper than helping struggling Americans, due to various factors like cheaper cost of living, warmer climates, and simpler needs. Americans who try their best but can't make ends meet, in America, probably have more "complex" needs that would be more expensive to fix.
12. Notwithstanding point 11, point 10 is a bit of an oversimplification. You should do enough to help the AVERAGE person in need. Let's say there's a Billion people in need, some with simple needs that would be cheap to fix, some with more complex needs. But the total cost is $1 Trillion USD. Then, the average cost is $1000 each. Even if you can feed a Kenyan for $365, you're not done! You should still give $1000, but it's good to focus that money on where you can get the most "bang for your buck" first. Once we feed all the starving children in Africa, THEN we can worry about the homeless Americans.
13. Notwithstanding point 11, if it's your money, you get to pick and choose who you wanna help. For example, you might prefer to help your American cousin with HIV/AIDS than a starving African child. That's cool. Even if you use up your charity budget on your cousin and can't afford to help any starving African children.
14. Notwithstanding point 13, I don't get the "My country FIRST!" mentality. Like, given the choice of helping a fellow Canadian stranger or a Kenyan stranger, I am indifferent. Given the choice of helping TWO Kenyan strangers or one Canadian stranger, I would choose to help the two Kenyans in a heartbeat. I honestly think people who would choose to save one Canadian over two Kenyans to be slightly racist. They still fulfill their moral obligation of helping those in dire poverty (_somebody_ has gotta help the poor Canadians) but they are still kinda racist. In fact, I would go as far as choosing to save two Kenyan strangers over my own cousin! But maybe I am weird. Or maybe everyone else is weird and I'm the only sane one left! Still haven't figured out hwhich...
15. You should do hwhat you can to help the person become self-sufficient. Better to "teach a man to fish..." But even this, should go throw a cost-benefit analysis. Maybe in some cases, it actually is cheaper to just feed a man for the rest of his life than to teach him to fish. You should do hwhat is most efficient.
16. Helping those in dire need is a moral obligation. Just like not killing people. As such, you can and should enforce it by law.
17. Your obligation to help those is dire need trumps your property rights. So, yes, the government does have the right to rob you to help them.
18. You are not obligated to help people beyond hwhat they need for basic survival. For example, you are not morally obligated to reduce income inequality or donate to children's sports teams or fund pretty much most of the stupid things that government wastes your money on. So government should abolish most of these programs.
19. However, for now, if you don't pay your taxes, the government can fine you, seize your assets, throw you in jail, garnish your pay and do a LOT of things that would make it difficult to accomplish points 1 and 2 (provide for yourself and your kids). So you should prolly just pay your taxes.
20. If the government is effectively doing your share on your behalf (for example, if you're American and the US government is lifting 342 million people out of dire poverty), then you have no further moral obligation.
21. If, even despite the high taxes you pay, the government is not effectively doing your share on your behalf, then you are required to fill in the gaps, through private charity. The government's failure does not absolve you of your responsibility. I had a leftist friend who didn't believe in private charity. He thought that was the government's role. I joked with him: "So, if you are on a boat and you sea someone drowning at sea, do you say: 'Well, I certainly hope the Coast Guard is coming for you!' ... 'What's that? They're not? I know. Such a shame. They're massively underfunded! But hey, don't blame me! *I* voted for the NDP!'" 🤣
22. We should work to fix structural problems that leave people in poverty, such as closed-borders, stupid economic policies, etc. But that doesn't absolve us of our obligation to help others in dire poverty as a result of such policies. For example, there's a Kenyan who is starving to death. He wouldn't be starving to death if the US government let him come and work in the US. But the US government is run by idiots who are voted in by idiots. So, that's not happening any time soon. You should still help the starving Kenyan stuck in Kenya.
23. We should give enough to "save a person's life". But sometimes we need to save their life again and again. For example, let's say we can't permanently fix someone's situation to permanently end their dependency. They're gonna need to be "subsidized" for the rest of their life. Well, we have an obligation to help them for the rest of their lives.
24. Giving someone enough to get enough food, clean water and shelter, is simple and cheap enough. Health care can get expensive! So what if someone needs medical care to save their life? Do we have a moral obligation to help with that? Here, it gets to be more of a grey area... If you could save someone with just $20 worth of pills, then by all means, we should buy them the damm pills! But if someone requires a Billion dollar surgery? Maybe not. And, as you get older, healthcare gets more expensive and less effective. Do we really have to help an 85-year-old pay for a Million-Dollar surgery that has only a 10% chance of success? Probably not. Like I said, this is a grey area and I haven't really drawn firm lines yet. But, for now, I would say, we have a (proportionately shared) moral obligation to help pay medical expenses up to $1 Million for anyone under 70.
25. Giving to charity when you're young takes away money that you could be investing. That comes with a high opportunity cost. So, maybe you'd be better off investing hwhilst you're young and giving a mega-donation from your estate hwhen you die. However, you need to make up for all those years that you didn't donate + interest. But given a decent ROI, you probably can! Plus, it's easier cause you don't need the money, anymore. I think we can and should assume a lower discount rate for the charity and/or the recipients than your ROI. Charities are in the giving game, not really the investment game. This point is one that I only thot of recently. I have yet to fully flesh out the logistics of it.
I will be paying attention to people who advocate for giving away all "surplus wealth" just as soon as two conditions are met. (1) define surplus wealth in a way that passes the sniff test, and (2) do so themselves.
Your second point, David, is spot on. Those who advocate for welfare often expect everyone else to contribute while they don't beyond the law. I enquired with ChatGPT to find records of where John Rawls or Bernie Sanders gave to charity. Surprise, it came back with no records found.
These arguments, both in this case and in the case of Peter Singer, have a major issue both authors avoid. If we should have collective responsibility that overrides personal responsibility with income, I have never heard the same argument in response to crime. So, if a man in a western democracy chooses to not work and is therefore poor, I am required to give him some of my surplus income, why wouldn't the same be true if my neighbor committed a crime? After all, do I not have surplus time to sit in prison as a subsidy for my neighbor who robbed a retail store? If the justice system requires 3 years of punishment, why wouldn't I get 6 months for his crime. Moreover, would I be ethically required to give away my time to sit in a cell as a subsidy for my neighbor? Almost nobody argues that. My time is still my property, so why would we differentiate if "stuff" is a function of the value of our time?
Some cultures do have a normalized concept of collective punishment. I first read about it in relation to the Opium Wars; a British sailor committed a crime, and the Chinese expected *some* sailor to suffer punishment; who exactly was immaterial. It was noted that this concept was abhorrent to the British who expected the perpetrator alone to be punished.
Precisely. All the arguments in favor of collective responsibility tacitly assume that no one other than you the reader have responsibility for your situation, or will ever make decisions other than perfectly morally correct ones (whatever that means seems to be a function of the writer). In reality, if everyone is required to give up everything they have above the minimum level of someone else, everyone will only produce enough to meet that level, starting with the people who don't like producing anything and rapidly becoming the norm. Hooray, everyone is now impoverished.
That is the defining feature of the distinction between emergency aid and long term aid.
The argument breaks down at 5. Effective charities may not exist.
More completely: a donation to charity may be just a transfer from you, who has more resources than necessary, to a third party (or chain of parties), who already has more resources than necessary, leaving the intended target of the donation in the same state they began in.
Current population is over 8 billion, not 7.
I think your post succeeds precisely because it doesn’t soften the premise. By taking Hassoun’s claim at face value and following it to its logical end, you reveal the gap between moral assertion and lived reality. If the duty truly applies whenever surplus exists and suffering remains, then the obligation never terminates and the fact that almost no one can live by it isn’t a flaw in human character but a sign that the principle is being asked to do work it can’t sustain. In that sense, the problem isn’t lack of compassion; it’s the attempt to collapse moral life into a single utilitarian axis without accounting for the conditions that make generosity, prosperity, and responsibility possible over time.
Given the decline of Cato, this is no surprise.
Damn Logic!
Well said.
Hassoun’s problem is with her initial utilitarian premise. Her personal cop-out is intellectually illogical and morally weak (on the basis of her own premise).
In fact, as highlighted by another of your recent posts, she is not only compelled to self-sacrifice by her own moral position, but also compelled to other-sacrifice as well. She should not only donate every last dollar (beyond maintaining her own subsistence), but work every waking minute (beyond what is required to earn her subsistence) to encourage everyone else to donate their every last excess dollar as well.
This is why her premise is insane.
Excellent post! This matters for most systems of ethics. As a Christian and utilitarian (secondarily) I give away over half of my income. Is that enough, tho ?I coudl do iwht much less. I coudl also use guidance. Most ethicical systems seem to ignore that they apply to the individual as well as the government. Of course, the govt is totally secondary. It only comes into play to force people to do what they should do ethically anyway.
that the only a narrow subset