Poverty: The Stages of Blame

“A person deserves his problem if there are reasonable steps he could have taken to avoid the problem.”

Do you really believe this as a general principle? Being a victim of violent assault is surely a problem, and often a bad one. Does it follow that, if someone is walking through an unsafe neighborhood alone at night and is assaulted, and they could reasonably have taken a safer route, they therefore _deserved_ to be assaulted?

Re: Nicholas’s comment – I think the word “deserve” carries too much emotional baggage.

Turn the knobs on your hypothetical a bit:
(1) If someone is walking through an unsafe neighborhood at night wearing a “Please assault me!” sign and they are assaulted, did they “deserve” to be assaulted if they could have reasonably not worn the sign?
(2) If someone is walking through an unsafe neighborhood at night and then they trip and fall, did they “deserve” to be injured if they could have reasonably taken a safer route?
(3) If someone is walking through unsafe woods at night and they are attacked by a bear, did they “deserve” to be attacked if they could have reasonably taken a safer route?

These all have the same essence as your scenario, but with these I feel less indignant when I consider a “yes (to some extent)” answer.

@Nicholas, you are hovering around in the gray area. Consider a more extreme version of your example. For example, suppose someone actively seeks out the roughest neighboorhoods, so much so that they walk an additional half hour home each night instead of taking the direct route. Everyone they see they heckle and insult, just begging them to lash out. You’ve talked to this person a dozen times about how dangerous this is, and they keep doing it anyway.

Such a person deserves what they get when someone inevitably attacks them. That doesn’t mean the attacker is in the right, and it doesn’t mean anybody is happy about the situation. It just means you wouldn’t go “poor Johnny, he never did anything to deserve being beat up in an alley”.

How can it fail to be morally wrong to refuse to help someone who deserves help?

The sort of libertarianism that is hinted at here strikes me as the same that Milton Friedman espoused when he favored a negative income tax. As he once explained to William F. Buckley, he only favored it because it was superior to the then current welfare programs. He said he did not think that people should be forced to pay for any programs to help the poor against their will, and he hoped inflation would gradually eat away at such a program’s benefits.

Well, that’s a nice cop out, isn’t it? It’s like the pacifists who oppose the draft, even when the country they live in actually comes under dire external military threat. Instead of staying and fighting, they flee the country, if the enemy starts closing in.

People like Einstein were practical enough to give up pacifism in the face of the threat of fascism in World War II. Even Gandhi favored letting the Allies use Indian bases to conduct military operations during that war.

But, wide-eyed, holier-than-thou, crazily idealistic libertarians are locked into an all too convenient ideology, which allows them to hide from the consequences of the human condition by denying the nature of that condition and of humanity itself. Some of them even take it as far as anarcho-capitalism, which has all of the realism of Leninism and Stalinism, with just as much morality.

In the real world, adults sometimes have to make decisions and choose winners and losers. Such choices will never be perfect or fair, and no system is without ludicrous injustices.

All of politics is a contest of force and will, with the force of violence as the ultimate arbiter. You can hate this and you can deny it, but you cannot escape it. There is not a government in the world that will not ultimately enforce its laws with the threat of violence, including its tax laws. And I cannot imagine how it can ever be different. It certainly never has historically.

The only question is, toward which ends should force be applied?

It’s far worse to stand aside, pretending to be superior and trying to make judgments about who deserves help, than to pitch in, get your hands dirty, and be willing to break a relatively small number of cheapskates who don’t want to contribute to universal entitlements or national security.

Some of us are adult enough to understand that freedom is always limited and that we must fight to make sure our preferred freedoms and limits prevail. We certainly need more libertarianism in a number of ways, but the idea of trying to decide who deserves help, and even then not to force tax money into the hands of those who need it most, is disgusting.

How about this line of thinking:

(1) If Poor John risked his health to save someones child, and Poor John was seriously injured in attempt, he didn’t deserved his poverty, although he had reasonable chance to avoid his own poverty by simply – not risking his life.

(2) If Poor John is poor because he was injured risking his health to save your child, and Poor Ahmed is poor because he is injured risking his life to save my child, you have somehow stronger moral obligations to help Poor John than to help Poor Ahmed.

(3) If Poor John risked his health to save your children, he wasn’t injured, but he is poor because he is lazy, you have stronger moral obligation to help Poor John than to help Poor X who is just lazy.

(4) If you’re citizen of USA, then every mentally healthy adult USA citizen risks his health to save your children. His very decision to be US citizen means that he accept the possibility that he might be recruited to fight against aggressor. Admittedly, it is not much of risk and not much for your children, but yes, it is some risk and to some degree, for your children.

I think the do not deserve people are more the following than the examples mostly given above.

A person that refuses to look for a job.

An addict (drugs, alcohol, gambling, etc) that won’t try to get clean.

Someone that will not even try to learn to cope with current society when given numerous opportunities.

One that is a criminal by choice.

And so on as there are numerous types of people that we should never be forced to help/enable.

Interesting. I’m left-leaning but I didn’t find anything offensive. A few reactions, though.

If we are going to attach desert to material wellbeing, that opens up a whole can of worms. If we shouldn’t offer support to the poor who deserves it, what does that imply we do to the wealthy who does not deserve it? I’ve got no clue.

There is one demographic of the poor that never deserves it and that is children. I believe in helping children first and foremost. You made a good case for that. Thanks!

Interesting that you always use the masculine pronoun. Never feminine. That’s usually a bad thing. In this case not so much. I think if we were to identify the “deserving poor” it would be majority male. So again, let’s focus on the moms and kids. I’ve got no problem with that.

The poor are on average less intelligent, disciplined, and hard-working than the non-poor, but we know that IQ is highly heritable, and there is some evidence that character is as well. The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment showed that self-control of preschoolers was positively correlated to later life outcomes.

To what extent the poor deserve to be poor is arguable, but giving them money because they are poor discourages them from becoming self-sufficient. Programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, which makes large payments only to poor people with children, may encourage them to have more children, who will inherit the same genes increasing the likelihood of poverty. These considerations should be weighed against the declining marginal utility of income. Previous blog posts have noted that happiness is more highly correlated to log(income) than income.

Scott said:

How can it fail to be morally wrong to refuse to help someone who deserves help?

I think it depends on what kind of help we’re talking about here. If I see someone drowning and I fail to throw them the life raft I’ve got handy, I think everyone would characterize that as wrong. On the other hand, suppose I don’t have a life raft, the seas are really rough, and I’m not a great swimmer to begin with. Am I obliged to jump in the water and try to save the person, at great risk to my own life? I think most people would say no, even though they’d agree that virtually anyone who’s drowning is “deserving” of help. In the same sense, I don’t think people are morally obligated to make big sacrifices of their own property or wealth or time or what have you to help others, even if those people are deserving of help. What constitutes a “big” sacrifice, though, is going to mean different things to different people.

This is related to what Bostonian said:

How can desert be dependent on taking reasonable steps to avoid problems when being able to identify and take those steps depends heavily on things like IQ and conscientiousness which are highly heritable, and therefore essentially randomly endowed? You didn’t “deserve” your parents in any meaningful sense.

Doesn’t this render “deserving” meaningless? At least as a moral tool. It may still make sense to act as if it’s real, punish cheaters, execute murderers, and reward inventors, etc, because that gets the most out of imperfect people.

But I’d bet we get better results by dropping the sloppy thinking and emotional baggage of desert as a moral concept. This answers all the difficult questions you dodge in your post about what happens when someone else deserves something more than you. You have to pick and choose when to apply your reasoning and give up what you have for someone else, whereas I just get to say “there is no such thing as deserving.”

@Finch and Bostonian,

Wouldn’t your points on IQ and its relations to heritability and poverty be something that is part of capacity defining rather than an attack on the idea of “moral desert?” While IQ and poverty are correlated that does not mean all people who are poor are low IQ, or that all of them did not recognize actions they could take to avoid those circumstances. Your point is thus an empirical one on the extent of deserving vs. undeserving poor, not a point on the existence of that distinction as you seem to be making by my reading.

@Scott,

I just find it interesting that you decry libertarians for being crazy idealists, when the libertarian in question is crafting a nuanced point on a moral question, while you seem to want to take the more black and white stance of those who don’t deserve to be poor do deserve to be helped. I’m not taking a stance as to whether those are the same thing, but rather simply pointing out that that also sounds idealistic (and so does the “people have to go out and act” line). Perhaps it’s more cynicism that you’re complaining about?

Chris H, you make a reasonable point.

Perhaps one must have an awful lot of faith in the concept of free will to believe in desert? I might lack that faith – I believe in physics, so I view what I do as largely a consequence of the state of the world an instant prior. I can imagine other people thinking differently.

Chris H, why would you go from a “utilitarian” position to who cares? Counting utils would be meaningless without describing and delineating values. It’s a process of everyone figuring what they care about, which, if you believe it, is simply a de facto description of how the world works anyway. There would be no noticeable difference between a utilitarian approach, and a values approach, unless the values had changed.

@BCaplan:

If suffering is greatly out of proportion to a person’s mistake, how does that modify our sympathies?

For instance: Your friend becomes poor because he lost his temper, told off his boss, and was fired. His fault. In Actual America, he goes on unemployment or uses the social safety net to skate by until he figures things out. Your friend still likely grows old and enjoys modest comforts.

Now how about Dystopian America, where everyone who becomes poor dies of starvation within one month?

My question is: does this modify how sympathetic we would behave toward our friend, who is admittedly at fault? In other words, is it purely a question of fault, or does desert also depend on how much suffering results?

This is not me trying to puncture the argument, because Third World poor are probably both more deserving and have greater levels of suffering. But, conversely, if relatively small mistakes can lead to relatively severe suffering, it becomes at some point improper to say a person “deserves” their suffering. Consider: a policeman makes the mistake of forgetting his bullet proof vest, fails to wear it per departmental policy, and is shot and killed.

Did the policeman deserve to die?

No. His mistake was small and the price he paid was total. Even if there are other people who had even less a chance of survival and made even smaller mistakes, I do not think that policeman deserved to die.

Desert is not solely determined by our actions, but also by the consequences. I don’t know if I’ve seen you address this before, but I would like to.

“Being a victim of violent assault is surely a problem, and often a bad one. Does it follow that, if someone is walking through an unsafe neighborhood alone at night and is assaulted, and they could reasonably have taken a safer route, they therefore _deserved_ to be assaulted?”

Who’s the assailant with poverty?

“…that it is morally wrong to help him.” Who is doing the “helping” here? If the government takes resources from one and gives to another, is this not morally questionable, no matter the circumstances? It undoubtedly has the potential to create a moral hazard problem. How do we avoid this conundrum? Let private actors do the helping.

Charities, churches, and individuals are much better-equipped to dish out “help” to the poor. Let’s not forget that churches throughout history have done “more” for the poor than any coercive government.

Your point is well thought out and I believe supported my most people. If you look at poverty policy in the United States, it reflects your view to some degree. For instance, Medicaid has always been more generous to children; half of births are paid for by Medicaid. Medicaid eligibility is more generous to poor children than to their parents. Obviously, children have no earning capacity and society takes pity on them since being born into poverty is beyond their control. In addition, universal education provides for the fact that children should not be disadvantaged because their parents cannot afford to pay for schooling them. Likewise, seniors (who are mostly too old to work and suffer health problems) are provided for — most notably through Medicare.

If you look at our safety net, it follows to some degree the notion of deserving poor versus those who could avoid it with more effort. Children and seniors are the ones we (as a society) view as most deserving of assistance. Single adults without dependents, not so much.

“Am I obliged to jump in the water and try to save the person, at great risk to my own life? I think most people would say no, even though they’d agree that virtually anyone who’s drowning is “deserving” of help.”

Part of the problem here is that our intuitions in the US are formed under the framing of equality or at least not dramatic inequality, but the reality is of very pronounced inequality. The rich are not being asked to jump in the water at great risk to their own life, they have three life rafts on their yacht right now.