I see a discussion treating beggars as human beings whose welfare
we are interested in, that assumes that they respond to incentives.
(This is somewhat tangential to your actual comment so don’t look on this like it’s a counter-argument.)
This idea of using incentives to guide their behavior is to impose our value system on them. It’s one thing to say that you don’t want to help these people at all, but to actually try to use the power (through money) to influence the way these people live their lives is morally not justified. Just because we have the power, doesn’t mean we have the moral right to say how each of these individuals should live their lives.
Of course, we do impose our value systems in using our money in other circumstances too, but in this context we have a really unbalanced relationship where the other side typically doesn’t have this particular power at all and those considering helping have loads.
If you are concretely deciding whether or not to give money to someone begging and you base the decision on what the person is going to spend the money on, you are using your power in this context to try to dictate how the other person lives his/her life. What if the thing he most needs right now is to buy a pack of cigarettes or get drunk or whatever? What gives you the right the impose your values on the person?
What if the thing he [sic] most needs right now is to buy a pack of cigarettes or get drunk or whatever?
This is a valid question, but I think you also need to allow the possibility that these things are not what the beggar most needs right now. Not all attempts to substitute one’s own decisions for someone else’s involve “impos[ing] your values on the person.” Sometimes people make decisions that do not further their own values, and in such cases, I think it is morally justified to try to respect their values rather than just their choices. Not to say that this is easy, and that we shouldn’t be incredibly wary of the possibility that we’re actually just projecting our own values on others. But claiming that others’ decisions are morally inviolable seems like an overreaction to me (albeit one that is founded in a legitimate concern).
It’s worth noting that a non-trivial percentage of homeless individuals are considered mentally ill, which generally means that society has, for better or worse, deemed them systematically incapable of making appropriate choices.
A lot of the homelessness problem in the USA came about from the big deinstitutionalization push in the 60s that… didn’t really work as intended. Policy on homelessness since then has mostly been built around “make them go somewhere else”.
I am uneasy with that sentiment although I’m having a hard time putting my finger one exactly why. But this is how I see it: there are vastly more people in the world than I could possibly ever help and some of them are so poor and downtrodden that they spend most of their money on food since they can’t afford luxuries such as drugs. Eventually, I might give money to the drug user if I had solved all the other problems first, but I would prefer my money to be spent on something more essential for survival first before I turn to subsidizing people’s luxury spending.
Imposing my values on somebody seems to more aptly describe a situation where I use authority to compel the drug user to not use drugs.
This position conflicts with consequentialist ethics.
Situation 1: I give money to those beggars who are more likely to buy bread than drugs, because this way my money brings more expected benefit to the beggar: it might help this particular one to bounce back, whereas with a crack addict there’s almost no chance.
Situation 2: I give money to those beggars who are more likely to buy bread than drugs, because I enjoy the power rush of controlling other people like the controlling father that tried to control Aaron Swartz with his controlling money.
The net result is the same, only the thoughts differ. Discriminating between the two situations sounds like deontological ethics. It works okay on the small scale but breaks down very quickly when the stakes rise and you realize that the universe doesn’t care about your personal hangups.
(This is somewhat tangential to your actual comment so don’t look on this like it’s a counter-argument.)
This idea of using incentives to guide their behavior is to impose our value system on them. It’s one thing to say that you don’t want to help these people at all, but to actually try to use the power (through money) to influence the way these people live their lives is morally not justified. Just because we have the power, doesn’t mean we have the moral right to say how each of these individuals should live their lives.
Of course, we do impose our value systems in using our money in other circumstances too, but in this context we have a really unbalanced relationship where the other side typically doesn’t have this particular power at all and those considering helping have loads.
If you are concretely deciding whether or not to give money to someone begging and you base the decision on what the person is going to spend the money on, you are using your power in this context to try to dictate how the other person lives his/her life. What if the thing he most needs right now is to buy a pack of cigarettes or get drunk or whatever? What gives you the right the impose your values on the person?
All credit to Aaron Swartz.
This is a valid question, but I think you also need to allow the possibility that these things are not what the beggar most needs right now. Not all attempts to substitute one’s own decisions for someone else’s involve “impos[ing] your values on the person.” Sometimes people make decisions that do not further their own values, and in such cases, I think it is morally justified to try to respect their values rather than just their choices. Not to say that this is easy, and that we shouldn’t be incredibly wary of the possibility that we’re actually just projecting our own values on others. But claiming that others’ decisions are morally inviolable seems like an overreaction to me (albeit one that is founded in a legitimate concern).
It’s worth noting that a non-trivial percentage of homeless individuals are considered mentally ill, which generally means that society has, for better or worse, deemed them systematically incapable of making appropriate choices.
A lot of the homelessness problem in the USA came about from the big deinstitutionalization push in the 60s that… didn’t really work as intended. Policy on homelessness since then has mostly been built around “make them go somewhere else”.
I am uneasy with that sentiment although I’m having a hard time putting my finger one exactly why. But this is how I see it: there are vastly more people in the world than I could possibly ever help and some of them are so poor and downtrodden that they spend most of their money on food since they can’t afford luxuries such as drugs. Eventually, I might give money to the drug user if I had solved all the other problems first, but I would prefer my money to be spent on something more essential for survival first before I turn to subsidizing people’s luxury spending.
Imposing my values on somebody seems to more aptly describe a situation where I use authority to compel the drug user to not use drugs.
This position conflicts with consequentialist ethics.
Situation 1: I give money to those beggars who are more likely to buy bread than drugs, because this way my money brings more expected benefit to the beggar: it might help this particular one to bounce back, whereas with a crack addict there’s almost no chance.
Situation 2: I give money to those beggars who are more likely to buy bread than drugs, because I enjoy the power rush of controlling other people like the controlling father that tried to control Aaron Swartz with his controlling money.
The net result is the same, only the thoughts differ. Discriminating between the two situations sounds like deontological ethics. It works okay on the small scale but breaks down very quickly when the stakes rise and you realize that the universe doesn’t care about your personal hangups.