fast
Contributor
If (through a subsidy) an individual is financially harmed for the sake of a purported collective good, does a cost benefit analysis in favor of the collective good justify the harm to the individual?
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NobleSavage
Veteran Member
It depends on the issue and which side of the fence you are on with respect to that issue.
Depends on how you define harm, the relationship between the individual and the group, and the nature of beneift/harm involved.
For example, I suspect few people would object to one wealthy person being fined a dollar in order to make the payments on a life-saving treatments for five other people. A reduction in benefits the individual is already receiving above others is the classic permissable harm.
On the other hand, few people would support killing an individual, even if their organs could be used to save multiple lives. Despite the attraction of a simply arithmetic approach to benefit and harm, people don't tend to think that way.
I'd suggest the extent to which it is permissable to harm others, or to pursuade others to harm themselves, in order to benefit others, depends very much on the nature of the relationships within the group.
For example, I suspect few people would object to one wealthy person being fined a dollar in order to make the payments on a life-saving treatments for five other people. A reduction in benefits the individual is already receiving above others is the classic permissable harm.
On the other hand, few people would support killing an individual, even if their organs could be used to save multiple lives. Despite the attraction of a simply arithmetic approach to benefit and harm, people don't tend to think that way.
I'd suggest the extent to which it is permissable to harm others, or to pursuade others to harm themselves, in order to benefit others, depends very much on the nature of the relationships within the group.
untermensche
Contributor
Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of a few?
Ask Spock.
Ask Spock.
bilby
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Underseer
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That depends on the "harm" in question and the benefit in question.
If Paris Hilton is "harmed" by having to buy fewer pieces of jewelry for her pet chihuahua so that a large number of children can avoid starving to death, would you find the "harm" justified?
fast
Contributor
If I'm reading the responses correctly, harming others financially is sometimes justifiable, especially when the victim has substantially superior financial resources to cover the financial needs of the poor--and it's just a matter of how people feel.
What about things like school vouchers and child tax credit?
I'll give an example that I've spoke on before. I have well-water. Several years went by before the water and sewer company decided to force home owners to connect to city water. You didn't have a choice. If you were in so many feet of the road, you had to connect whether you wanted to or not. I am too far away to connect, so I didn't have to, and I'm glad because I didn't want to. I got lucky. However, whether you connected or not, every homeowner still had to chip in and pay $75 a year for each piece of real estate owned.
I'm particularly interested in school vouchers, as it's something I hear about on occasion, but I need a better understanding, in a generalized sense, about the ethical implications of subsidies. To me, the advantages and disadvantages of vouchers notwithstanding, I still don't have a good grasp on the overarching moral justification of using what seems to be a Robinhood approach for securing social advantages to the detriment of those that would sometimes prefer not pay the cost of the benefits unwillingly forced upon us.
People can come up with reasons to justify their actions, but that can be a play on words, because a justification given is not therefore a moral justification. We here it all the time about people who try to justify their actions, but we know all too well that many times that what is voiced is not therefore a true moral justification simply because of the reasonings voiced.
Togo said, "I suspect few people would object to one wealthy person being fined a dollar in order to make the payments on a life-saving treatments for five other people." I happen to think the issue is an objective matter such that it doesn't matter whether people would object or not. I think it's dangerous to take subjective viewpoints and make a conclusion regarding what would seem to me to be an objective matter. In other words, it either is or isn't morally justified to take from the wealthy AND that the answer is independent of people's objections.
Noble savage speaks about what side of the fence I'm on. If there is a moral justification on one side of the fence, then it seems to me that if I'm not on that side of the fence, then no matter how I might spout 'justifications', I'd be mistaken in my belief that my position is morally justified. In other words, I can be wrong about what I think is right.
Underseer invokes what appears to be an emotional appeal, almost such that the harm is negligible and thus permissible. Liberal members of society may look at the rich and brainstorm all sorts of rationales: the rich was born into money and the poor wasn't, and since the poor are struggling, it's okay to take. The list of things people can think of don't necessarily equate to true moral permissibility. I'd rather hear someone say, "yeah, it's technically wrong, but the harm is negligible, so we're gonna take from them" than "the harm is negligible, so it okay to take from them".
Are school vouchers wrong but so beneficial that it's okay? It's like I'm having trouble with what truly equates to a justification that doesn't fall back on subjective beliefs. Consider what something else Togo said, "few people would support killing an individual, even if their organs could be used to save multiple lives." Again, I think it doesn't matter one iota what people think, as doing such a thing is wrong independent of what people might think.
[/thinking out loud]
What about things like school vouchers and child tax credit?
I'll give an example that I've spoke on before. I have well-water. Several years went by before the water and sewer company decided to force home owners to connect to city water. You didn't have a choice. If you were in so many feet of the road, you had to connect whether you wanted to or not. I am too far away to connect, so I didn't have to, and I'm glad because I didn't want to. I got lucky. However, whether you connected or not, every homeowner still had to chip in and pay $75 a year for each piece of real estate owned.
I'm particularly interested in school vouchers, as it's something I hear about on occasion, but I need a better understanding, in a generalized sense, about the ethical implications of subsidies. To me, the advantages and disadvantages of vouchers notwithstanding, I still don't have a good grasp on the overarching moral justification of using what seems to be a Robinhood approach for securing social advantages to the detriment of those that would sometimes prefer not pay the cost of the benefits unwillingly forced upon us.
People can come up with reasons to justify their actions, but that can be a play on words, because a justification given is not therefore a moral justification. We here it all the time about people who try to justify their actions, but we know all too well that many times that what is voiced is not therefore a true moral justification simply because of the reasonings voiced.
Togo said, "I suspect few people would object to one wealthy person being fined a dollar in order to make the payments on a life-saving treatments for five other people." I happen to think the issue is an objective matter such that it doesn't matter whether people would object or not. I think it's dangerous to take subjective viewpoints and make a conclusion regarding what would seem to me to be an objective matter. In other words, it either is or isn't morally justified to take from the wealthy AND that the answer is independent of people's objections.
Noble savage speaks about what side of the fence I'm on. If there is a moral justification on one side of the fence, then it seems to me that if I'm not on that side of the fence, then no matter how I might spout 'justifications', I'd be mistaken in my belief that my position is morally justified. In other words, I can be wrong about what I think is right.
Underseer invokes what appears to be an emotional appeal, almost such that the harm is negligible and thus permissible. Liberal members of society may look at the rich and brainstorm all sorts of rationales: the rich was born into money and the poor wasn't, and since the poor are struggling, it's okay to take. The list of things people can think of don't necessarily equate to true moral permissibility. I'd rather hear someone say, "yeah, it's technically wrong, but the harm is negligible, so we're gonna take from them" than "the harm is negligible, so it okay to take from them".
Are school vouchers wrong but so beneficial that it's okay? It's like I'm having trouble with what truly equates to a justification that doesn't fall back on subjective beliefs. Consider what something else Togo said, "few people would support killing an individual, even if their organs could be used to save multiple lives." Again, I think it doesn't matter one iota what people think, as doing such a thing is wrong independent of what people might think.
[/thinking out loud]
fast
Contributor
As I recall, the captain held a contrary position to Spock, yet in the end, Spock came around to the captains way of thinking. (I watched every episode of every series)
Hm.. You need to be a bit careful here.
First of all I'm not arguing that morality is dependent on subjective opinion, merely that it indicates where a moral code would mostly likely fall. It is likely that a moral system will need to distinguish between similar-seeming cases where there is a high consensus of what is moral behaviour. A particular moral system, such as utilitarianism, may well decide that such cases are identical and the consensus is wrong, but these are the kinds of cases by which moral systems are evaulated, and in practice a moral code that offends most people's moral sense most of the time is unlikely to be practical.
As for what truely equates to a justification that doesn't fall back on subjective beliefs, you really have only a few options, and most of them are bad.
Moral Imperatives
You have a set of moral beliefs that are so obvious, so well established, and so universal, that they are beyond question. Religious-based moral systems are obvious candidates, but so is Kant's system of categorical imperatives, and any system based on a number of a priori statements that are held to be true absolutely.
The Master
Another system popular with the religious, this is where you don't have any moral principles of your own, but take them from an unimpeachable source. Muslims, Biblical literalist christians, and atheists who claim to base their moral beliefs on entirely scientific principles would fall into this category.
The Void
The declaration that all moral principles are false. This is popular with cynics, particularly atheist cynics. It leads to moral systems that boil down to 'don't get caught' and which are very very difficult to follow in practice.
Moral Calculus
This idea that morality is about outcomes, and only about outcomes, and that those outcomes can be measured, and a value assigned to each. Morality thus is reduced to mathematics. Utilitarianism is the most famous example of this, but other systems have been suggested. The issues with these systems is that they tend to be that they are relatively easy to subvert, leading to fairly horrific actions being labelled as moral. As a result they are either seen as simplistic, or become so complicated in an attempt to plug loopholes that they become unuseable in practice.
Values-Based Morality
The idea that morality is all about values - a number of ideals that are to be aimed for. These values are not, in contrast to Moral Imperative systems, absolute, and instead may be fairly categorised as 'subjective beliefs'. These systems rarely give useful rules for deciding between competing values, and may break down entirely when faced with difficult moral problems.
Cultural Relativity
As Values-Based above, but values are explicitly a facet of culture, and are set by social consensus. Very popular amongst those seeking to avoid one group imposing their values on another, since it labels such activity as morally bankrupt by definition. Cultural relativity often runs into problems when it is demonstrated that sizable minority opinions exist amongst individual cultures, and when faced with cultures that perform acts seen as hopelessly immoral by others, such as the human sacrifice of strangers to that culture. In general only works for socio-cultural areas of morality, such as sex, relationships, and family structure.
It has been argued that to see morality as needing to 'fall back' on anything is a category error, and that the idea of a 'source' of morality is fundamentally flawed as a concept. Any source would in turn have a source, and so on until you get to either The Master or The Void.
I would suggest that morality really works best when seen as a struggle between competing values, which are in turn subjective beliefs. However this involves treating subjective beliefs as if they were important, which many are reluctant to do.
George S
Veteran Member
We have farm subsidies. Cotton farming would be a losing proposition absent subsidy. Dairy farms are subsidized by calculating their distance from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. We have oil depletion subsidies. We have sugar subsidies. Political favors given for political support.
untermensche
Contributor
fromderinside
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Mammaries..... Oh wait that's the Bachelor. In any case none of this is philosophy so why not remember just a little further back, say like about 2500 years ......
untermensche
Contributor
2500 years ago? The death of Darius I?
I don't understand your question. Who receives the subsidy, and what is the nature of the financial harm?
How can a person be financially harmed, if they are given a subsidy? How does giving someone a subsidy, harm another person.
Why are hypothetical questions so vague?
fast
Contributor
If we divided the people of a given area into two groups (group A and group B) and decided that group B needs something, then the members of group B can go ahead and pull together and fund their needs. Of course, it would be expensive. So, here's an idea, let's make all the members of both groups share in the expense! That would surely financially harm group A.
But wait, we can't just blatantly harm others without framing things a bit so that it doesn't appear wrong. With a bit of a twist, two heaping loads of clever maneuvering, we can adjust the purported goal of what's really going on and make it look like a shining attempt to help everyone--and what happens in actual practice is irrelevant because it's all about the justification of making it affordable to group B.
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Yeah, but the question of whether it's right hasn't been satisfied.
Your hypothetical philosophical conundrum just hit the reef of reality. What is the distribution of wealth in this given area. Suppose Group A owns all the land and holds a great majority of the wealth. Group is impoverished and has no choice but to work for Group A, for very low wages. We'll assume Group A holds all political and military power.
Group A makes an enlightened decision to subsidize Group B, because if they don't, they face a bloody and expensive peasant revolt.
Group A decides it is better to give up some money, instead of hanging from a lamp post.
Suppose it's not quite as dire. What does Group A gain from refusing to subsidize their poorer neighbors. By gain, I mean "increase of wealth," not preservation of status quo.
fast
Contributor
Wait, I'm thinking more in lines of government subsidies whereby money from group A is helping pay for the needs of group B because not splitting the cost amongst everybody fails to decrease the per person expense to members of group B.
Yeah, I thought it would come to that, sooner or later.
I think there is a grammar problem here. Group B receives the money. They are not paying, so it is not an expense to them. The per/person expense is simply arithmetic and not related to from where the money was collected.
But, I ask again, what does Group A gain by not helping Group B. What is their incentive to refuse to participate?
fast
Contributor
There's some kind of problem here. Maybe I don't know the inner workings of a subsidy. I suppose there might be subsidies where one group pays nothing, but I figure often times, there are subsidies where both groups pay.
What does group A gain? They get to retain (!)--their money. Take my well-water example. I would get to keep my $75 if I didn't have to support the neighborhoods the whole damn thing was truly started over. I don't get your next question. It doesn't make sense to pay for stuff you don't want, so things are done in such a way to make you benefit so they can justify you paying, and when that doesn't work, they have to come up with something, and if it helps the community in which you live, then there's a way to articulate it so that it sounds good. Either way, you're stuck with some unwanted benefit that was never truly designed with you in mind, and you're stuck sharing the cost; otherwise, the true beneficiaries would have to annieup more per person.
untermensche
Contributor
The question is: Did Group B have the same opportunity to gain wealth as Group A?
Is there a level playing field?
If we look at a concrete example, in the US, and everywhere, it is far easier to use capital to gain wealth than to use labor. Returns from capital exceed returns from personal labor.
And a person can be a member of Group A from birth and through no effort of their own. As long as they have the luck to be born to the right parents.
In the face of social inequities unrelated to personal effort should the government let some suffer simply because they were unlucky?