Duties To Help Others
On Friday I decided that one treated people as ends in themselves by not harming them. Is that all that is required in order to treat people as ends in themselves? Peter Singer would surely claim that we also had duties to help people. But I do wonder whether any such duty is really consistent with treating people as ends in themselves.
We are simply considering this from the point of view of the helper. But what about the helpee? If I found myself down on my luck, then would it not be selfish for me to expect that anybody else had a duty to help me? One difficulty here is that I have never been in a situation where I have felt like I actually needed anybody else's help. I don't think that I have ever asked anybody for help in my life, and I probably would feel selfish if I did anything like that.
I am not the only person to have this sentiment. I think that we have all heard of people who are too proud to accept charity. I certainly do not refuse help if someone offers it to me, but I do not ask for it. Then again, think of situations where people are doing something such as a household chore or some other such practical activity. You always offer to help them in these circumstances, and it would be considered rude not to. In these circumstances, however, it does not harm you to offer a helping hand. So possibly it is simply that one has duties to help others as long as this does not in some way harm oneself. To use language from Ayn Rand, one might have duties to help others in ways that are nonsacrificial.
Consider how this applies to charity. In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand compares human suffering to a bottomless pit. One could pour the rest of one's money into it for the rest of one's life and all that one would have done is feed it and make it grow. I can see the argument for this if all one is doing is giving people money or other handouts. This may be a condescending analogy, but it is a bit like feeding the animals in the wild. You are advised not to do this for a number of reasons. First, it makes the animals dependent on humans for survival if they learn that they can simply get handouts from humans instead of hunting or gathering it themselves. Second, it makes them more dangerous because they lose their fear of humans.
Similar reasons surely apply to humans giving handouts to other humans. You do not want people to get used to accepting handouts. It robs them of their incentive to support themselves. It is even worse if people come to feel a certain entitlement to an unearned share of other people's wealth. It fosters the mentality that these other people are mere means to ends, which we have already decided on Friday is just plain wrong.
On the other hand, I do think that hand-ups are a good thing. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, but teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Consider the economic phenomenon of the Celtic Tiger. Ireland experienced rapid economic growth from 1995 to 2007. What I understand is that this is, in large part, because it received a substantial amount of grant money from the European Union in that time. This money was not in the form of handouts, but was targeted at public works designed to give Ireland better infrastructure. It went towards roads, water supply, sewers, power grids, telecommunication, and so forth. This infrastructure vastly improved Ireland's economic competitiveness. It was a hand-up that benefited Ireland enormously.
Hand-ups are a nonsacrificial means of helping others. They are limited in time, so that our commitment to give a hand-up to any one entity will not last indefinitely. An indefinite burden would lower one's own standard of living, but a limited burden will not. An indefinite burden would also be tantamount to enslaving one group of people for the sake of another. This would be to treat the enslaved group as mere means to ends, and is absolutely wrong.
How does Kant's Second Maxim apply to charity, then? First, charity should be aiming at hand-ups, not handouts. Second, I think that one's own charity also must always be limited in scope, simply because human suffering is a bottomless pit. If one bears the weight of the world on one's shoulders, then one would once again have an indefinite burden. This would be true even if one gave nothing but hand-ups. There are so many worthwhile charities that it is ludicrous to expect that any one person could give to them all. Hence one does not have to give to every charity who asks for help. If one is reasonably well-off, then I would think that one did have an obligation to give to some charity or other at least most of the time. But that is because such a person would find such giving to be nonsacrificial. It must also always be one's own choice about which charity it is to which one is to give.
We are simply considering this from the point of view of the helper. But what about the helpee? If I found myself down on my luck, then would it not be selfish for me to expect that anybody else had a duty to help me? One difficulty here is that I have never been in a situation where I have felt like I actually needed anybody else's help. I don't think that I have ever asked anybody for help in my life, and I probably would feel selfish if I did anything like that.
I am not the only person to have this sentiment. I think that we have all heard of people who are too proud to accept charity. I certainly do not refuse help if someone offers it to me, but I do not ask for it. Then again, think of situations where people are doing something such as a household chore or some other such practical activity. You always offer to help them in these circumstances, and it would be considered rude not to. In these circumstances, however, it does not harm you to offer a helping hand. So possibly it is simply that one has duties to help others as long as this does not in some way harm oneself. To use language from Ayn Rand, one might have duties to help others in ways that are nonsacrificial.
Consider how this applies to charity. In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand compares human suffering to a bottomless pit. One could pour the rest of one's money into it for the rest of one's life and all that one would have done is feed it and make it grow. I can see the argument for this if all one is doing is giving people money or other handouts. This may be a condescending analogy, but it is a bit like feeding the animals in the wild. You are advised not to do this for a number of reasons. First, it makes the animals dependent on humans for survival if they learn that they can simply get handouts from humans instead of hunting or gathering it themselves. Second, it makes them more dangerous because they lose their fear of humans.
Similar reasons surely apply to humans giving handouts to other humans. You do not want people to get used to accepting handouts. It robs them of their incentive to support themselves. It is even worse if people come to feel a certain entitlement to an unearned share of other people's wealth. It fosters the mentality that these other people are mere means to ends, which we have already decided on Friday is just plain wrong.
On the other hand, I do think that hand-ups are a good thing. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, but teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Consider the economic phenomenon of the Celtic Tiger. Ireland experienced rapid economic growth from 1995 to 2007. What I understand is that this is, in large part, because it received a substantial amount of grant money from the European Union in that time. This money was not in the form of handouts, but was targeted at public works designed to give Ireland better infrastructure. It went towards roads, water supply, sewers, power grids, telecommunication, and so forth. This infrastructure vastly improved Ireland's economic competitiveness. It was a hand-up that benefited Ireland enormously.
Hand-ups are a nonsacrificial means of helping others. They are limited in time, so that our commitment to give a hand-up to any one entity will not last indefinitely. An indefinite burden would lower one's own standard of living, but a limited burden will not. An indefinite burden would also be tantamount to enslaving one group of people for the sake of another. This would be to treat the enslaved group as mere means to ends, and is absolutely wrong.
How does Kant's Second Maxim apply to charity, then? First, charity should be aiming at hand-ups, not handouts. Second, I think that one's own charity also must always be limited in scope, simply because human suffering is a bottomless pit. If one bears the weight of the world on one's shoulders, then one would once again have an indefinite burden. This would be true even if one gave nothing but hand-ups. There are so many worthwhile charities that it is ludicrous to expect that any one person could give to them all. Hence one does not have to give to every charity who asks for help. If one is reasonably well-off, then I would think that one did have an obligation to give to some charity or other at least most of the time. But that is because such a person would find such giving to be nonsacrificial. It must also always be one's own choice about which charity it is to which one is to give.
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