Is there an obligation to provide for others?
                                     by
                                 lazarus Long
                             lazarual@vaxxine.com

        The history of mankind has always seen one group of people worse
        off than another. Is there a moral duty to provide for those that
        have less than yourself?
        By looking at problem of the world's hungry, we can examine this
        question.
        First we must distinguish between people starving and people being
        starved. The verb starve is both a passive and an active verb, the
        former designates something that happens to someone, and the latter
        designates something inflicted by one person on another.
        In the case of one person starving another by deliberately
        withholding food, the wrongness is easily apparent. For this is
        deliberate murder as would be the case of shooting the person.
        In the case where the problem results from crop failure, drought or
        other natural conditions, the answer is not that simple. There is
        no obvious guilty party as in the first case.


        Is letting someone die the moral equivalent of killing them? Some
        writers would have us believe that this is so. I would say not.

        This calls in to question the distinction between justice and
        charity.
        Justice, in this sense, is those things which we may be forced to
        do. Charity is a desire to benefit others because they need it.
        The difference to the libertarian is that Justice is something that
        you are compelled by the state or community to do, while charity is
        something that is given freely and voluntarily.

        The question of whether feeding the hungry of the world should be a
        question of justice or one of charity is a moral issue and one that
        is important to the libertarian.
        There also arises a different view that says that it is positively
        wrong to feed the hungry. Writers, such as Garret Hardin, think
        that feeding the hungry is misguided charity. By feeding the hungry
        we create a larger problem in the future. For by feeding the hungry
        now, we will be allowing them to enlarge their population, thus
        when the next crop failure occurs, there will be even more people
        starving than there is today.

        This brings up another distinction: the difference between
        principles and policies.
        If you are in favour of feeding the hungry as a matter of
        principle, does that mean that your policy is to always feed the
        hungry, no matter what the facts are in each case.
        Let us use the example of Country E, where the starvation of
        hundreds of thousands is caused by government in an attempt to
        starve out a civil war. If your principles say that you should feed
        the hungry, and the government of E won't let you send food to the
        hungry; is it worth going to war in order to get food to the
        hungry?

        To return to our question of justice or charity, let us examine the
        difference of starving and allowing to starve. Are they the same?
        I would argue that they are not. If you intentionally withhold food
        from someone, you are depriving them of something that they
        normally would have received. If however, someone starves because
        they didn't grow enough food, you are not responsible for their
        misfortune. If you did not exist, they would still have not grown
        enough food and would still be starving. How can you be said to be
        repsonsible for something that would have occurred even if you had
        not existed.

        If you take the position that we have a duty of justice to feed the
        poor, I would argue, if this be the case, that no one should engage
        in a career such as art or music, as that person is shirking their
        duty to grow and provide food for the hungry. This is obviously
        ridiculous, because there will always be hunger somewhere in the
        world. Somewhere there will always be a crop failure.
        Would the proponents of the duty of justice argument say that Karen
        Kain, the ballerina,  should have forsaken her career in ballet and
        taken up the hoe, in an attempt to feed the hungry?

        Advocates of welfarism talk as if there were a single point of
        view (welfare) that dominates everything else.
        Not so. As pointed out by Narveson, "there are all kinds of points
        of view, diverse, and to a large extend incommensurable".
        "It is not certain, not obvious, that we  `add more to the sum of
        human happiness" by supporting Oxfam than by supporting the
        opera'". (Narveson, Moral Matters)

        Should the state then intervene and force the citizens to feed the
        hungry of the world. I would argue no. The state should let each
        citizen decide for himself whether he wishes to engage in charity.

        For if someone is disadvantaged, we may pity them or we may be
        indifferent. The question, so far as our obligations are
        concerned, is this: Did our actions in the past cause his
        situation? If so, such as my factory deposited salts onto his
        farmland rendering it barren, then I have an obligation to make
        restitution for the damage. Whether that restitution be in the form
        of soil renewal or in my supplying him with food, is up to the the
        injured party and myself to work out. If however, the situation
        results from him establishing his farm on marginal land and poorly
        farming it, thus causing the soil to become barren then I would
        argue that I have no obligation to provide aid. I may feel moved to
        assist him, but there is no duty.

        continued .....






--- Maximus 2.02
 * Origin: Rational Anarchist (905)646-8229 Claslibnet HQ (350:2/100)

Ä %CLIB-PHILOSPHY (350:50/110) ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ %CLIB-PHILOSPHY Ä
 Msg  : 49 of 100                                                               
 From : Lazarus Long                350:2/100               02 Jul 95  13:52:00 
 To   : All                                                 02 Jul 95  18:58:56 
 Subj : Charity 2                                                               
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....continued from part 1

        In contrast to the previous liberty-respecting view is the "Hair
        Shirt" view.
        This view suggests that we should count the satisfaction of others
        as being equal in value to our own. According to this view, if I
        can create more pleasure for someone by spending my money on him
        than I would create for myself if I had spent the same money on my
        own pleasure, then I would be obligated to spend the money on the
        other person.
        Under this way of thinking, one should continually defer to others
        until one is as poor as those whose suffering you are supposed to
        be relieving.
        This deferral is, according to the social welfarist, preferable to
        the imagined guilt that one should carry around for simply be more
        fortunate than another.
        This is the Marxist line of thinking at its simplest. Of course, in
        practical application of marxism, the marxists don't wait for you
        to voluntarily give to the less fortunate, they simply take from
        the haves and redistribute to the have-nots.

        A more practical and liberty-minded method of dealing with charity
        is the concept of mutual aid. Which would see people voluntarily
        giving in times of need, with a reasonable expectation that this
        charity would be a short term thing and that the aid may be
        reciprocated in the future( although this may never come to pass).
        Charity should never be allowed to become dependency, for
        dependency is a loss of liberty for both parties.

        File as hunger.txt