As a booster of civil society, I believe that whenever possible, uplifting the poor is better left to their family, friends, and communities. In addition, while I affirm the superiority of voluntary action, I believe every person has an inescapable moral obligation to help the poor.
At first glance, the latter point seems to contradict my first point. If serving the poor is that high an obligation, shouldn’t it be enshrined in law like the moral obligation to care for our children or not murder our neighbor?
To answer that, we must examine the state’s capacity to enforce moral obligations.
That starts with the belief that, as created beings, our lives are not our own. God created us with moral obligations (also called duties). Some duties are unique to our situation; for instance, our duty to honor our parents. Likewise, if we have children, it’s our duty to provide for them. Other obligations are universal. Examples include the cultivation and preservation of the environment for future generations and our duty to assist people in need, to the degree we can.
In our era, it is far more popular to talk about rights (i.e., protections or provisions we are owed) than duties. But without duties even the most fundamental rights cannot be implemented. For instance, a child’s right to life, liberty, and property is of no use if his parents abandon him to the elements at birth. If you have a right to property, then others must have a duty to respect it. To put it another way, all genuine rights are the other side of someone else’s duties.
Ironically, those who contend that expansive rights eliminate the need for personal responsibility quickly discover their system relies heavily on the state’s assumption of duty for their vision to succeed. For example, universal basic income only works if the state sees providing money to citizens as its duty. And unless the fond hopes of material abundance promised by AI-boosters come to pass, the state would only have resources to give if most citizens feel duty bound to continue working rather than spend more time fishing.
That affirms what many in the charity space have discovered: When people fail to do their duty voluntarily, others suffer. If no adoptive family fulfills their duty to the less fortunate, abandoned children are forced into a revolving foster care arrangement. And even if a child is adopted, while he may grow to love his adopters, he may never fully recover from the years of neglect he suffered before being taken in. While both arrangements are better than abandonment, they’re not nearly as good as if his parents had done their duty in the first place.
Yes, the government occasionally enforces moral duties, such as the duty to not murder (an inverse of the right to life) or a parent’s duty to send a child to school. However, the state is limited as to which duties it can effectively enforce. It can require specific, tangible actions. But it cannot mandate mental states, relationships, or anything approximating love.
What happens if it attempts to do so? Let’s say a law mandates that all citizens honor their mothers by buying them birthday cards. Without doubt, some cards—and the motives behind them—would be genuine and heartfelt. Yet equally without doubt, the mandate would diminish many mothers’ perception of their children’s sincerity—and therefore the card’s value.
And it would only be a matter of time until a well-intentioned bureaucrat observed it would be much more efficient to forgo individual enforcement and just have the government write and send the cards on the children’s behalf. Many who never cared to write cards might be happy it’s being done for them.
After a while, it would be expected—and a second generation of children would grow up thinking filial gratitude was an essential function of government. Why bother crafting crayon creations when a nice government card is on the way? Eventually, legislators would dismiss the idea that the market and civil society should provide cards, seeing it as a pipe dream from a bygone era.
Despite the self-evident foolishness of mandating love, the current regime of state-sponsored “charity” attempts to do just that. But as the card illustration shows, while material aid can be transferred by force, it will never be attended by the heartfelt concern and relational capital that accompanies genuine charity.
Such charity refines the character because it expands our capacity for compassion, love, and mercy through subsidiarity—that is, aid rendered by those closest to the situation who can also provide the non-monetary things that the poor need. These tailored and personal interventions include encouragement, a listening ear, skills coaching, useful connections, and economic opportunities. It is better morally, and it and works better practically. Food stamps are a poor substitute for a food co-op, employer connection, and a church community. Public welfare is like a stale crust of bread: Enough to sustain you, but not enough to nourish you.
Some good things can only exist at the person-to-person level. To institutionalize them drains them of their moral power. As Illich expounded in his assessment of the Good Samaritan, the state can aid the man who fell among the thieves, but the state cannot be his neighbor. While this leaves open the possibility that the state is well intentioned, and even achieves some positive effect, it can never fulfill our duty to love our neighbors.
If we shirk our duty to love our own neighbors, a vicious cycle ensues. The dysfunction of poverty leads to voters demanding that lawmakers, “Do Something.” “Something” inevitably results in some new program that assuages voters’ guilt with a slick sound bite—but condemns the poor to assistance as impersonal as a block of government cheese.
And yet, a positive cycle is just as possible. When more individuals take it upon themselves to dine with the down-and-out, fewer people in need will cling to public assistance as their only lifeline. This cycle is worth the pursuit and requires us to bring out our best dishes as we inform Uncle Sam that he no longer needs to bring the stale (and very expensive) bread to the party.
Indeed, a call for less government provision is not a call for a more selfish society but for a more generous one. Without question, voluntary charity is best—but only if we understand it as an essential duty.
Image Credit: Eugène Delacroix, “The Good Samaritan” (1852) via Wikipedia.
