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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2009
Despite what one may be led to believe by breathless reports in the media, the acme of misery in America is not the woes, financial and otherwise, of Donald Trump and Michael Jackson. People lose their jobs, have their assets drained by reversals of fortune, suffer from illiteracy, malnutrition, lack of shelter, and other mishaps. The circumstances in which they find themselves are genuinely distressing. It would be an odd understanding indeed that failed to find these circumstances directly relevant to what morality asks of us. If morality is to count for anything, then surely it must take notice of exigent need. This is not merely the deliverance of a late twentieth-century Western moral consciousness massaged by the blessings of comparative affluence and graced with a newfound awareness of social justice. All traditional ethical codes of which I am aware, sacred and secular, demand that one take the distress of one's neighbor as bearing on one's own activities. “Am I my brother's keeper?” is the question; the well-nigh universal answer is “Yes.” The disposition to be moved by and respond to distress is the virtue of charity.
1 By global misfortune I mean a set of circumstances that, taken together, render a person's life miserable on the whole. A local misfortune is one that disadvantages an individual at some particular time or with regard to some particular aspect of her doings while having little or no effect on the remainder of her affairs. So, for example, destitution is a global misfortune, while being hot, tired, eight months pregnant, and unable to find a seat on the bus is a local misfortune. What counts as appropriate charitable relief will be a function in part of whether the misfortune one aims to alleviate is global or local.
2 E.g., it is not (under ordinary circumstances) an instance of charity to pass a hacksaw to a justly imprisoned felon.
3 Sometimes we teach our children: “Be charitable to those less fortunate than yourself.” This may pass muster as elementary moral pedagogy, but as a general prescription concerning when and toward whom to be charitable it is deficient for at least three reasons: (i) If you are very fortunate, then some of those less fortunate than yourself will be far removed from the domain of eligible charity recipients; multimillionaires are not obliged to bestow largesse on mere unimillionaires. (ii) If you are very unfortunate, then you are not generally obliged to assume further burdens in order to lighten the load of those even worse off than yourself, (iii) Because misfortunes arc local as well as global, charity may call on you to respond to a (local) misfortune of someone who is (globally) more fortunate than yourself.
A complete taxonomy of the duty of charity would require additional qualifications and distinctions beyond those of this and the previous two notes. Because the aim of this essay is not to explicate but rather to cast doubt on the notion of a duty of charity, I abstain from such labors.
4 Whether (i) each right has as its shadow a duty resting on some individual or set of individuals to satisfy that right, and (ii) all duties derive from the rights of some individuals), are discussed in the philosophical literature under the rubric of the correlativity of rights and duties. Note that these are two logically independent theses; (i) may obtain even though (ii) does not. (The reverse is also logically possible, but I am unaware of its advocacy in the literature.) In Section IV. I examine the claim that duties of charity are imperfect duties, duties for which correlativity does not obtain.
5 Reference to intention is necessary because one who inadvertently or accidentally advantages another has not thereby performed a charitable act. If the remains of the pizza I toss into my garbage pail are subsequently scavenged by a hungry family, I have not performed the charitable act of feeding them, let alone acted charitably toward them. This is true, I believe, even if I am aware when I toss out the pizza that there is a very high likelihood that it will be discovered and eaten.
6 Arguing similarly, kant declares: “[L]ove as an inclination cannot be commanded. But benefience from duty, when no inclination impels it and even when it is opposed by a natural and unconquerable aversion, is practical love, not pathological [!] love; it resides in the will and not in the propensities of feeling, in principles of action and not in tender sympathy; and it alone can be commanded” (Kant, Immanuel, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, 400, trans. Beck, Lewis White [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959], p. 16).Google Scholar
7 Sidgwick comments: “I agree that it cannot be a strict duty to feel an emotion so far as it is not directly within the power of the will to produce it at any given time. Still… it seems to me that this emotional element is included in our common notion of Charity or Philanthropy, regarded as a Virtue: and I think it paradoxical to deny that it raises the mere beneficent disposition of the will to a higher degree of excellence, and renders its effect better” (Sidgwick, Henry, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. [1907; reprint, New York: Dover, 1966], p. 239).Google Scholar
8 Aristotle writes in Nicomachcan Ethics, trans. Irwin, Terence (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), 1114a20–23Google Scholar: “It was originally open to the person who is [now] unjust or intemperate not to acquire this character; hence he has it willingly, though once he has acquired it ne can no longer get rid of it.”
9 Hobbes, Thomas, leviathan [1651], ed. Oakeshott, Michael (New York: Macmillan, 1962). Part 1, ch. 13.Google Scholar
10 It is the absence of such an internal balance that we overhear the Apostle lamenting in Romans 7:15 when he confesses: “That which I would I do not, while that which I would not I do.”
11 The price-of-admission view is embraced with characteristic bluntness by Hobbes and, disclaimers and qualifications aside, is adopted by most of the tradition of modern moral philosophy.
12 A more extended statement is offered in Lomasky, Loren, Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, especially ch. 3, “Projects and the Nature of Ethics.”
13 The paradigmatic relation in which natural equals stand is, for classical philosophy, friendship, and Aristotle explicitly observes that, while friendship of a sort can obtain between persons who differ markedly in their stations and virtues, true friendship is feasible only between equals.
14 “In the realm of ends everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity…. Thus morality and humanity, so far as it is capable of morality, alone have dignity” (Kant, , Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, 434–35, p. 53).Google Scholar For Kant, humans are equal most fundamentally as beings who are capable of being motivated to moral action.
15 Mill, John Stuart, Utilitarianism, ed. Piest, Oskar (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), p. 61.Google Scholar Mill goes on to remark: “In the more precise language of philosophic jurists, duties of perfect obligation are those duties in virtue of which a correlative right resides in some person or persons; duties of imperfect obligation are those moral obligations which do not give birth to any right.”
16 It can be argued that charity becomes admirable only to the extent that it is supererogatory, above and beyond the call of duty. There is a baseline, the objection continues, below which charity is merely the fulfillment of duty and is to be approved no more than other dutiful acts. Charitable performances above the baseline are, however, meritorious.
There is, no doubt, some truth to the suggestion. We will not be inclined to esteem the person who only occasionally chooses to aid others. However, this reflection only marginally buttresses the imperfect-duty model. We lack the ability to ascertain where the hypothesized baseline lies; and if we could do so, we would then have to find some analytical category other than imperfect duty for charitable acts that fall above it. The attempt to assimilate charity within the jurisprudential understanding will have been de facto abandoned.
17 It is tempting to retort: “All of them are wronged because what I owed to each was a 0.1 probability of receiving the entire amount.” The objection misfires. Suppose that my strategy for discharging imperfect duties is always to give preference, if possible, to someone whose name begins with a vowel. Given the presence of Anderson, Jones had no chance of receiving my largesse, yet I have complied with my duty. “Jones can complain that the vowel selection-strategy itself constitutes unfair treatment of him.” That is true only if what is owed Jones (and each of the other nine) is an equal chance of getting the money, as with a fairly conducted lottery. That is to say, however, that the duty owed is not an imperfect one at all, but rather a perfect duty to each that he enjoy an ex ante 0.1 probability of receiving the amount (coupled with the perfect duty ex post to pay the winner ten dollars).
18 Within the class of virtues that pertain to human beings as such, Aristotle recognizes two distinct subclasses, moral virtues and intellectual virtues. Just as the man who is temperate or magnanimous displays a characteristic human virtue, so too does the skilled solver of scientific problems.
19 If an activity is judged to be unworthy in its own right, we will not admire mastery of it. Carlos the Jackal is notably more talented as an assassin than is John W. Hinckley, Jr., but we do not hold him up as a model for emulation. But one who thinks differently about the propriety of assassination-who is, say, engaged in the business of training junior hit men-may quite reasonably within that context assign The life and Times of Carlos as required reading for his students.
20 See Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 28–35.Google Scholar
21 If circumstances render respect for rights exceptionally difficult or are such as would lead many people to give short shrift to rights, then gratitude becomes appropriate. We praise the person who makes an effort to return the cash-filled wallet found on the sidewalk because we recognize that most other finders would have pocketed the money. Here complaince with rights merges with moral excellence, and it becomes appropriate to import responses at home with the latter into the former.
22 I attempt to do so in Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community.
23 The term “basic rights” is meant to pick out roughly the class of rights that have sometimes been denoted “moral rights” or “human rights.” They are to be distinguished from (i) special rights, such as those established by a contract between two parties or that might obtain between individuals enjoying a special relationship such as parent and child; and (ii) rights created by particular enactments of a government or another collectivity capable of originating rights. I prefer the term “basic rights” because it is less question-begging than the alternatives: “moral rights” may suggest that special rights are something other than moral, while “human rights” implies that all and only human beings are the beneficiaries of rights claims while, for example, animals are not and incurably comatose people are.
24 Lomasky, , Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community, p. 83.Google Scholar
25 An important recent investigation of the conditions of stability for a liberal order in which people profoundly differ with regard to their basic religious and ethical conceptions is Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).Google Scholar Although I believe that Rawls's account is hobbled by excess attachment to the jurisprudential paradigm, I cannot pursue that argument here.
26 Hobbes, no enthusiast for heroes, observes: “When a man is destitute of food, or other thing necessary for his life, and cannot preserve himself any other way, but by some fact against the law; as if in a great famine he take food by force, or stealth, which he cannot obtain for money nor charity; or in defence of his life, snatch away another man's sword; he is totally excused…” (Hobbes, , Leviathan, Part 2, ch. 27, p. 223).Google Scholar
27 Two recent arguments to essentially the same conclusion are Buchanan, Allen, “Justice and Charity,” Ethics, vol. 97 (1987), pp. 558–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Waldron, Jeremy, “Welfare and the Images of Charity,” Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 36 (1986), pp. 463–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
28 Locke, , First TreatiseGoogle Scholar, Book 1, ch. 4. Where Locke speaks of charitable relief, Hobbes explicitly turns to politically authorized welfare measures: “And whereas many men, by accident inevitable, become unable to maintain themselves by their labour; they ought not to be left to the charity of private persons; but to be provided for, as far forth as the necessities of nature require, by the laws of the commonwealth. For as it is uncharitableness in any man, to neglect the impotent; so it is in the sovereign of a commonwealth, to expose them to the hazard of such uncertain charity” (Hobbes, , Leviathan, Part 2, ch. 30, p. 255).Google Scholar (I do not hereby mean to be seen as taking sides in the scholarly debate over whether Hobbes is or is not to be considered a proto-liberal.)
29 I offer a more extended discussion of rights at the margin in “Rights without Stilts,” Harward Journal of Law and Public Policy, vol. 12 (Summer 1989), pp. 775–812.Google Scholar
30 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 62.Google Scholar
31 Affirmative action policies do raise such questions insofar as they aim at restructuring the network of social opportunities.
32 Although these blights are spread in copious abundance by, respectively, tobacco companies and the public schools, in the spirit of this essay I shall charitably assume that furtherance of these evils is not their primary intention.
33 That is why Gauthier, David's Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)Google Scholar is, at the very least, mistitled.
