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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2009
As each individual abandons himself to the solicitous aid of the State,
so, and still more, he abandons to it the fate of his fellow-citizens.
Wilhelm Von Humboldt, On the Limits of State Action
1 I am using the term “right” very loosely here to mean any claim of justice coupled with a correlative duty which is coercively sanctioned by the state. There may be rights without duties, but they would have little bearing on our problem here, since we are concerned with legitimate redistribution of resources in response to a rights claim. More importantly, not all defenses of redistribution are formulated in the language of rights. I have tried to keep the notion of “rights” loose enough to include those normative proposals which require statesanctioned redistribution, but which for some reason prefer not to defend that redistribution by using the language of rights. In these cases, “rights” is a shorthand expression.
2 For a discussion of some of the issues and literature on this problem, see Feigenbaum, Susan, “The Case of Income Redistribution: A Theory of Government and Private Provision of Collective Goods,” Public Finance Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 1 (01 1980), pp. 3–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 See Buchanan, Allen, “Justice and Charity,” Ethics, vol. 97, no. 3 (04 1987), p. 573.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 Ibid., p. 559.
5 Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Raphael, D. D. and Macfie, A. L. (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982)Google Scholar, II.ii.I.3. I shall refer to this work hereafter as TMS; references will be given parenthetically in the text.
6 That Smith wishes to do this is evident not just from his constant use of “virtue” throughout TMS, but also from his vast knowledge of, and interest in, ancient moral theory and its role in ethics (e.g., TMS, VII)Google Scholar, and from his focus on propriety throughout TMS. Smith's classical orientation is established by Griswold, Charles in “Rhetoric and Ethics: Adam Smith on Theorizing about the Moral Sentiments,” Philosophy and Rhetoric, vol. 24, no. 3 (1991), pp. 213–37Google Scholar. The Smithian idea that there may be more to liberal orders than a commitment to justice is also reflected in Macedo, Stephen's Liberal Virtues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), especially pp. 278ff.Google Scholar
7 Smith's point is causal, not evaluative. Principles of justice are needed to get society off the ground. They are not necessarily superior or more admirable principles. In this connection, Smith throughout TMS accords benevolence and the actions it produces the highest praise from the impartial spectator, but he does not regard it as the most common motive in human life or the basis upon which to structure a social order.
8 It is worth noting that for Smith, as reported by John Millar to Dugald Stewart (introduction to the Oxford edition of TMS, p. 2)Google Scholar, questions of utility or benefit were categorized under the heading of “expediency” and came after the subjects of natural theology, moral theory, and jurisprudence.
9 Buchanan, , “Justice and Charity,” p. 561Google Scholar. A number of the points I am making here and below seem to parallel those made elsewhere by Loren Lomasky in “Justice to Charity,” unpublished manuscript.
10 This is true even of Jeremy Waldron's unique approach to the problem of charity. The adoption of his principle ‘Q’ (“Nobody should be permitted ever to use force to prevent another man from satisfying his very basic needs in circumstances where there seems to be no other way of satisfying them”) in no way takes his solution out of the realm of justice and into a defense of some other virtue, for Q still describes what is owed to others. See Waldron, Jeremy, “Welfare and the Images of Charity,” Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 145 (10 1986), pp. 463–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11 Buchanan, , “Justice and Charity,” pp. 574–75.Google Scholar
12 I have argued for this point at length in The Virtue of Prudence (Bern: Peter Lang, 1991)Google Scholar, ch. 1 and passim.
13 See, for example, TMS, I.i.5 and VII.ii.
14 Cf. Becker, Lawrence, Reciprocity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 148Google Scholar. In a different type of approach to our question, Becker manages to avoid reducing all virtues to justice (while at the same time giving virtue an obligatory character) by restricting the idea of justice. For him, justice is restricted to special cases of “competing or conflicting interests.” Reciprocity-the obligatory virtue-is more basic than justice because it is not so restricted. Apart from being what I would regard as an overly narrow conception of justice, the move simply substitutes one term for another as far as my point here goes. The broader issue, however, is more interesting. Can one be obliged to another without that being an issue of justice? Can charity be obligatory and still remain a distinct virtue on a par with justice? My answer to this comes later and amounts to something like, “Yes, provided that the ethical approach is classical.”
15 It is actually my view that not all matters of justice are enforceable by coercion, and in this there may be some difference between my final view of the nature of justice and that of some classical liberals such as Smith. It may be, in other words, that something is owed to another for which the failure to deliver that good is unjust but does not call for coercion (e.g., as when one unfairly criticizes another and owes that other an apology). I am not, therefore, convinced that justice is limited to enforceable duties. I am, however, convinced that all basic moral rights are enforceable duties. This then raises the issue of whether justice and rights are coextensive. For purposes of this essay (since it is about the right to welfare), I shall take them to be coextensive, because part of the moral reductionism I have been speaking of is the conflation of justice with “social” justice or at least with an exclusively other-oriented conception of justice. It might be the case, however (as Douglas Rasmussen has suggested in comments on this manuscript), that we would need to distinguish between various sorts of justice (e.g., the justice of “rendering each his due” versus the justice of rights respecting conduct versus justice as a virtue or constituent part of a self-perfective life). Yet in light of what I say below, the sort of justice which constitutes the “right to welfare” is strictly social and “demand-sided,” since it involves what others may legitimately require of us independently of virtually any acts or projects of our own. Charity, on the other hand, is a thoroughly “supply-sided” virtue. Justice and charity would therefore remain distinct at an essential or general level. That is all I need here, for my purpose is to show that if justice and charity are collapsed into something like the “right to welfare,” the self-directed (“supply-sided”) character of the virtue of charity is at risk. Perhaps within a strictly self-perfective ethical paradigm the distinctions between various senses of justice and between justice and charity would have to be more subtle. At the moment, however, it is more the confrontation between paradigms that concerns me.
16 The indented passage above could be read as saying that by some social contract “superiors” have been entrusted to make certain that various services are provided. That, of course, would not sound foreign to modern ears; but apart from the fact that Smith is not a contractarian in any normal sense of that term, the lines just cited give a better sense of the context of that passage and thus that it was the inequality that mattered.
17 Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Campbell, R. H. and Skinner, A. S. (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981), I.ii.4–5Google Scholar. I shall refer to this work hereafter as WN; references will be given parenthetically in the text.
18 In this connection, Leo Strauss has noted: “The soul of modern development, one may say, is a peculiar realism, consisting in the notion that moral principles and the appeal to moral principles-preaching, sermonizing-are ineffectual, and therefore that one has to seek a substitute for moral principles which would be much more efficacious than ineffectual preaching.” Strauss, , “Progress or Return,” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Pangle, T. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 242.Google Scholar
19 The virtue of prudence, however, was technically an intellectual virtue, not a moral one. This distinction need not detain us at the moment, for it would only serve to confuse matters further. If interested, see Uyl, Den, The Virtue of PrudenceGoogle Scholar, ch. 1 and passim.
20 It is worth consulting in this connection the Oxford English Dictionary, which discusses the etymology of the term. In general, it notes that the Vulgate (the Latin version of the Bible prepared by St. Jerome in the fourth century) distinguished dilectio (love) from caritas (charity), but caritas was used more often. The English version of the Bible translated the terms this way until the sixteenth century, when “love” was sometimes used where “charity” normally would have been used. By 1881, however, “love” was used for everything, thus eliminating the distinction between dilectio and caritas.
21 Aquinas, St. Thomas, Summa Theologiae, ed. McDermott, Timothy (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1989), II–II, Q23, A2Google Scholar. I shall refer to this work hereafter as ST; references will be given parenthetically in the text.
22 For a further discussion of this distinction between ancient and modern ethics, see Uyl, Douglas Den and Rice, Lee C., “Spinoza and Hume on Individuals,” Reason Papers, no. 15 (Summer 1990)Google Scholar. In the meantime, one of the best contemporary statements about “love” (and thereby “charity”) in the classical sense is given by Norton, David L. in Democracy and Moral Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 40:Google Scholar
[L]ove is not exclusively or primarily interpersonal; it is first of all the right relationship of each person with himself or herself. The self to which love is in the first instance directed is the ideal self that is aspired to and by which random change is transformed into the directed development we term growth. When the ideal of the individual is rightly chosen, it realizes objective values that subsisted within the individual as innate potentialities, thereby achieving in the individual the self-identity that is termed “integrity” and that constitutes the foundation of other virtues.
23 Aquinas notes that justice is exclusively concerned with others (ST, II–II, Q58, A2)Google Scholar, and Aristotle suggests something similar (NE, V, ch. 11)Google Scholar. But my point is not to suggest that supply-sided virtues cannot have others as their object, but only that their ultimate justification is grounded in the person's own good or character development, and that that is the focus of classical ethics, but not modern.
24 But the Dominican fathers believe this has roots in some Roman authors (e.g., Cicero) whom Aquinas is looking to in ST, II–II, Q117, A5Google Scholar, when he says that “liberality is listed by some authors as a part of justice.”
25 Andrew, Edward, Shylock's Rights (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), pp. 7–9.Google Scholar
26 I am not, however, saying that the mere fact that something is obligatory renders it a matter of justice, but rather that when something is conceived of as obligatory outside of the self-perfective framework and within the strictly social or modern framework, the problem of the conflation of justice and charity would be likely to arise. It is also worth noting that this article in Aquinas is also cited by Andrew along with Q58, A12 and Q66, A7–8. How he misinterprets Q32, A5 is explained above in the text. The other citations also do not support his contention that Aquinas does not want to separate justice from charity, assuming again that “separate” means something close to “distinguish” (for if it did not, Andrew's point would be trivial).
27 One should not now assume that therefore others are simply instrumental to one's own self-perfection. Giving alms for “God's sake” is another way of saying that one's love of God causes one to recognize the love of others for their own sake. Aquinas would argue that it is in the absence of that sort of love that we treat others as instruments.
28 Elsewhere (ST, II–II, Q66, A7–8Google Scholar, noted by Andrew and cited in n. 26 above) Aquinas does seem to say that those in need have a “right” to the surplus of others and that this has something to do with justice. Moreover, he says (ST, II–II, Q58, A2)Google Scholar that justice is exclusively other-oriented and (ST, II–II, Q58, A12)Google Scholar that justice is the supreme moral virtue. But this should not be interpreted to mean that justice and charity collapse into one another. In the first place, charity as a theoretical virtue is obviously the broader notion. Secondly, we have already seen at least one case where they are distinguished, and we have observed the manner in which their distinction was the basis for the problem of categorization. Finally, as I have already noted, the fact that something is the object of a virtue does not necessarily make it the ground of the virtue. So even if others were the exclusive object of justice, it would not necessarily be the case that justice must be understood exclusively in terms of others. That would be like saying we must understand courage solely in terms of risky circumstances, without reference to the agent. It would still not be accurate, then, to say that for Aquinas one owes the other the goods as a matter of justice, although other Christian thinkers do hold that position.
29 Both of the following quotes are drawn from Hobbes, Thomas, English Works, 11 vols., ed. Molesworth, W. (Evanston, IL: Adlers Foreign Bks., 1966).Google Scholar
30 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Tuck, Richard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 30.Google Scholar
31 Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Laslett, Peter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Book 1, ch. 4, sec. 42. It is not my intention to imply that Locke was the first to look at matters in the way described below. Pascal, for example, favorably cites St. Gregory, (Provincial letters, 12)Google Scholar: “When we give the poor what is necessary to them, we are not so much bestowing on them what is our property as rendering to them what is their own; and it may be said to be an act of justice rather than a work of mercy.”
32 See Andrew, Edward, Shylock's Rights, p. 5Google Scholar. Later in chapter two (p. 58) Andrew cites the same passage from Locke that I do above. Nevertheless, he refuses to believe it, asserting instead that his thesis about early liberals separating justice and charity must be correct so we should not read this in terms of what it says but in terms of something else. No further textual evidence, however, is provided, and from my point of view it is because Andrew has at least partially misconstrued the problem that he cannot read the texts correctly.
33 Recall that early liberals such as Smith saw commercial societies not as a means of entrenching a wealthy class, but of closing the gap between rich and poor that older systems had solidified. The rise of the middle class was thought to be the great product of liberal orders.
34 Mandeville, Bernard, “An Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools,” in The Fable of the Bees (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1988), p. 253Google Scholar. All references to Mandeville will be to this edition. Hereafter, page numbers will be given in the text.
35 Cf., e.g., Kant, , Foundations of the Metaphysics of MoralsGoogle Scholar, sec. I. Kant shares with the classical moral tradition a recognition of the importance of principle and a rejection of social utility as the foundation of ethics. Nevertheless, Kant's formalism, rule orientation, and impersonalism are antithetical to the classical virtue of charity as I have described it here. Moreover, attempts to turn Kant into a virtue ethicist are unconvincing (see Uyl, Den, The Virtue of Prudence, ch. 5)Google Scholar. Nevertheless, the second formulation of the Categorical Imperative does share something of the basic spirit of classical charity. I thank Thomas Hill for showing me this.
36 This is not to suggest that taxes cannot be onerous, but the degree of the burden is a separate issue from the replacement of charity as a virtue with charity as a commodity.
37 This is not to say individuals in this system might not also confuse compassion and charity. A critic might be more likely to respond that the private system allows “charitable” deeds to be done more from motives of “pride” and “vanity” than a public system which, in a sense, removes motives altogether. But part of the issue here is whether having to occasionally appeal to those vices is worse than systematically abandoning the possibility of charity being a question of personal responsibility.
38 Some attempt to begin such a defense is contained in my two books: Liberty and Nature (with Douglas Rasmussen) (La Salle: Open Court, 1991)Google Scholar, and The Virtue of Prudence.
39 Barry, Norman, “The Philosophy of the Welfare State,” Critical Review, vol. 4, no. 4 (Fall 1990), p. 551.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
40 See Wolfe, Alan, Whose Keeper? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 154ffGoogle Scholar. See also Wagner, Richard, To Promote the General Welfare (San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute, 1989), ch. 8, pp. 159ffGoogle Scholar. Wagner discusses (pp. 164ff.) the “Samaritan's dilemma” where the provision of welfare produces the moral hazard of the demand for more welfare. I do not wish to trade on this as part of a criticism of welfare liberalism, and as I state in the next paragraph, I believe defenders of welfare are also concerned to avoid such hazards. But the system of private charity would be more likely to avoid this problem, although it might be charged with undersupplying the benefit (see below). Wagner also discusses this last problem in economic terms (p. 172) and notes that it is not all that clear that welfare is a public good undersupplied by the market.
41 But in a sense my argument of the first section was that this would no longer be a welfare state but, if you will, a charity state.
42 Leibniz is one of the few moderns who understood this. His concept of justice is based on a basic inequality that has roots in the classical order. Its connection to charity was that he defined justice as “caritas sapientis” (charity of the wise). See Uyl, Den, “The Aristocratic Element in Leibniz's Political Thought,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 15, no. 3 (07 1977).Google Scholar
43 Loren Lomasky's argument, for example, seems to be a combination of the agency and the RNY arguments. See Lomasky, Loren, Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), especially pp. 125–28.Google Scholar
44 An example here might be Brody, Baruch in “Redistribution Without Egalitarianism,” Social Philosophy & Policy, vol. 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, where “redistribution programs … are forms of compensation for the violation of rights” (p. 86)Google Scholar. This view, however, would be closest to a type of reciprocity argument.
45 Gerald F. Gaus correctly notes that this is the Rousseauian perspective on political philosophy, where property cannot be antecedent to political society but is itself the product of convention, law, and politics. See Gaus, Gerald F., “A Contractual Justification of Redistributive Capitalism,” in Markets and Justice, ed. Chapman, John W. (New York: NYU Press, 1989), p. 90.Google Scholar
46 This seems to be the view of Waldron, Jeremy in “Welfare and the Images of Charity” (see n. 10 above).Google Scholar
47 And of course there are contractarian cases. See, for example, Gaus, , “A Contractual Justification of Redistributive Capitalism”Google Scholar; and Morris, Christopher W., “A Hobbesian Welfare State?” Dialogue, vol. 4, no. 27 (Winter 1988), pp. 653–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
48 A better argument, and one more consistent with other things that at least Lomasky says in his book, is to say that agency is a necessary condition of human communities. To let anyone's agency lapse without taking action is equivalent to a lack of commitment to a necessary condition for a human community which, in quasi-Hobbesian terms, puts one in a state of nature with respect to the community. So one's property can be taken either because one is an enemy of the community or because as a member one is committed to doing what is necessary to maintain the conditions of community. So far as I know Lomasky does not make this argument, but this argument may represent his own view, since his approach often seems to me to be at least partially contractarian. Incidentally, this is an argument I would accept, though not as a foundational argument, but rather as one that has force within a self-perfective context. It would not, in my view, imply a right to welfare, although it might at least partially establish an obligation to aid. For further information on my own position, see Rasmussen, Douglas and Uyl, Douglas Den, Liberty and Nature, pp. 144–51.Google Scholar
54 I find it strange that a sustained argument on reciprocity exists anyway. As Adam Smith points out, it is virtually a natural sentiment. If there is virtue in it, it would come from transforming the sentiment into a “moral sentiment,” but that has less to do with reciprocity than it. does with the other features of a moral outlook for Smith, such as impartiality. But other than Becker's maxim 7 (“returns should be made for goods received, not merely for goods accepted”), and insofar as we are no longer speaking of simply natural inclinations, the rest of the maxims would have been captured under the traditional virtue of charity or the pagan virtue of magnanimity. This is also a way in which the discussion would be less likely to get confused with justice. I am by no means suggesting that Becker's project is a failure. Indeed, the discussion is often brilliant and always sensitive, and since I have forced the argument in a direction Becker himself does not take, I should be circumspect about criticism. Becker's discussion is, as far as I know, the only position that gives a central and fundamental place to reciprocity.
55 See Wolfe, , Whose Keeper?, pp. 89–94 and 168–77Google Scholar. Wolfe himself, however, regards the evidence as mixed. In addition, one could make the case that our current bankrupt and ineffective system of welfare-where the numbers of poor keep increasing despite no real lessening of welfare expenditures-can have the effect of encouraging the virtue of charity. More and more people are realizing that the state is so inept at actually relieving suffering that, if individuals do not help on a private basis, no relief will be forthcoming! In such a case we have an uneasy tension between the welfare paradigm and the charity paradigm as they both try to exist together.
