Why Should America Care?

Jan Narveson


1. The Question(s)

The title of this discussion suggests a debate on American foreign policy, but that isn't really the main point here. America is involved because it is wealthy, as are many other countries; moreover, it is only wealthy Americans (which, by world standards, is almost all of them) who are practically addressed, and not only them: it is anyone of large means. And who is it that we are to care about? Again, presumably it is the poor: in the "third world" especially -- but again, there can be relevant persons of concern in our own country as well. What we want to know is whether the very well off have some kind of moral requirement to do something for the badly off, and if so, what and why.

To begin with, poverty is plainly a relative matter. Some of the badly off are worse off than others. We may usefully divide the relevant levels, for present purposes, into three:

1. Extensive starvation, immanently threatening the lives of lots of people.

2. A lot of people being very poor: little and not very good housing, food less than ideal - not "starving", but underfed; little or no education, unsanitary and insufficient housing, and especially, assaulted by disease, such as those that kill humans as they are being born, and young children not yet even in grade school, if there are any schools for them to go to.

3. Lots of people being less well off than us in the contemporary "first world" countries such as America, Canada, a lot of Western Europe, and the oil-rich Arabian countries.


Those who think we have duties of the general kind we are discussing here can be ordered against this list. We can again distinguish three views, correlated with the three kinds of cases distinguished above.

1. The minimal view of this kind is that we have a duty to relieve starvation, anyway, if nothing else - so we cater to case (1). On this view, we have a duty to keep people alive, anyway.

2. A more complex idea is the "welfarist" view, as we may call it, which says that we need to help the folks in scenario (2): bring them from a situation that is too low, unacceptably low, up to some level which, though still much less than what we enjoy, is at any rate "decently" low.

3. Finally, there is the Egalitarian view, according to which we owe it to all those people who are considerably less wealthy than we are that we do something to make them about as wealthy as us. A major question bedeviling proponents of this view is - how much do we do? On the face of it, we apparently should be spending on others to the point where more expenditure would make us even poorer than they. When this view is advanced at a global level, in today's world, this obviously would be a great deal indeed.

Which, if any, of these views is right? When I was a lot younger - thirty to forty years ago or so - I thought it obvious that we wealthy folks have a serious duty to help feed starving people, at least, even in the remoter corners of the world. And when you think that, it is hard to draw a line below medical assistance as well, especially when it is necessary to save lives. But I don't think this any more, and part of the following will be devoted to explaining why.

Another extremely important thing to do here is to sort out types of moral modalities for these matters. Our usual assumption among professional philosophers is that we are talking about "duty" or "obligation" in a quite "strong" sense of that term, which I will discuss shortly. But that is not the only modality there is in moral matters, and I do want to make it clear that I agree, entirely, that it would certainly be a nice thing to help out those people if we can. I regard that as a decidedly nontrivial point, and will explain that as well.

Before proceeding to the matters pointed to in the preceding paragraph, I must make one more important point here: that this is a practical as well as a theoretical issue, and insofar as it is practical, we do have to be very, very attentive to the actual possibilities, and actual consequences, of what we try to do along the lines of helping the needy. Most importantly, it is very easy to make life actually worse for the very people we're trying to help if we don't know what we're doing. And, unfortunately, most of us don't, and on that count alone probably shouldn't be trying. It is quite possible that what most of us can do best for those people is, in brief, nothing. However, there are plenty of people who can do something, and among them probably a good many who should. I'll explain that too, toward the end of this brief treatment.


2. Moral Requirements and Moral Recommendations

Now it's time to define some terms. My view, as I say, is that we do not have a duty to do any of that stuff for those people - not even to save their lives if they are starving. This goes way against the grain of most of my colleagues today, and possibly against some of yours, too. But to put it that way also requires careful clarification, for what I say is probably rather misleading to many readers. My thesis here is that we don't have a "duty," strictly speaking; nevertheless, helping the needy is morally commendable, desirable, and quite possibly admirable. Let's address these two things in order then: (1) duty, and (2) the morally commendable.

(1) When we talk about "duty" we can be referring to somewhat different things. What they all have in common is a sense of "requiredness", of what we MUST do. But what accounts for this sense? There is a brief, dead-end-kids answer that is important: what accounts for it is what people will do to you if you don't. That is to say, it's the category of what we may call reinforcement, of how we may get people to do the things so called, that defines this category. Specifically, what they will do, if they think this is a duty, is to make life worse for the person who fails to do it. Now, there are at least four ways of importance here:

1) They'll cuss you out, or ignore you on the street, and certainly not invite you to their parties. Roughly, this is to withdraw or reduce various benefits to the person who fails to live up to his duties.

2) They'll take some of your money, or other things of value. Without asking. This isn't just a withdrawal of benefits, but a real imposition, a decrement in what you thought you had a right to.

3) Worst of all, they'll put you in jail or string you up. This is worse than (2), because it not only deprives you of what you have made, but also of your ability to make it., at least while the punishment lasts.

4) A very different kind of moral dimension is entered when nobody else will do that, but you will do it to yourself - "they" turns out to be YOU. In extreme cases, one can't bear to live with oneself. People have committed suicide over such things.

One can argue that this last is the basic one with morals. The very idea of morals, we may reasonably suggest, is self-imposition of moral rules. Or you can argue that the first is. But whatever we say about that, case (3) is of special interest and importance. For unlike any of the others, case 3 involves a real invasion of your life, by persons outside your control. If they put you in jail, that's the end of most of what you wanted to do in life, until you get out again; and if they execute you, then that's the end of everything you wanted to do in life. Hairy stuff.

Alternative (2) is also pretty hairy, depending on what they take and how much. Your money, and more generally your possessions, are a large part of what you've worked for, and taking it away is going to be painful. What really matters, though, is that this is what you have - or so I think, anyway - a right to; and yet, they'll take it without your permission. Confiscation of your income or property means that you no longer have control over your own work. Indeed, that's what all of the (2) and (3) things have in common: loss of your control over you. If it is true that such things may be justly expropriated for the purpose of helping the third-world needy, then that's very important indeed.

Now, the word 'duty' covers a lot of ground, but, it's often used to refer to what is to be enforced. As long as it is not enforced, the question whether you should do your duty is one you get to decide. When it is enforced, it's taken out of your hands. So the most practically important of our questions is: do we get to take the decision whether to help people out, out of your hands, or don't we?

My general view, and I suspect yours, is that we don't. Should we help our neighbor when in need? Yes. But should we go to your house with a gun and force you to help him? No. Do we get to dip into your bank account, without asking, in order to help him? No. And if we don't, then I don't see why the government should either.

There are special cases, and they are of enormous theoretical importance here. For example, if the reason my neighbor is in need is that I have just burned his house down, then of course I owe him a lot; I owe him compensation - a new house and then some. But the situation of people in the third world is hardly ever anything like that. By and large, the third-world poor are not so as a result of their relations with us - though it very often is very much a function of the sort of governments they have been saddled with.

People who think we have a duty to the needy need to explain why. And they have to explain it in a non-question-begging way. You do have to be careful for semantical traps in this regard. We will hear it said that the 3rd world people's being poorer than we are is our fault -- and why? - Because we are richer! Yet, obviously, A can be richer than B without ever having come into any kind of contact with B. All you have to do is make more money, or more of whatever your wealth consist in. The person who says that doing so is enough to show that you've gotten it at the expense of the other fellow is trying to trick you. He's making it seem as though the only way for A to get richer than B is for A to steal it from B. Obviously it doesn't follow, and it's not true. The case where A makes his money by stealing it from B does happen, but it's very unusual, and of course obviously wrong.

Once upon a time, back in the days when people took Marxism seriously, there was a school of people who seem to have thought that capitalist countries had to make their living by "conquering foreign markets." Among dumb social theories, this one deserves some kind of very special prize. If you're going to make your living stealing stuff, I don't recommend choosing as your victims people who don't have anything to steal!

I don't mention this because I think Professor Temkin is a Marxist. He's not. I am, however, trying to zero in on the question of Why? The question of this debate was, Why should America care? Temkin and I both understand this to be, especially, the question whether there is some kind of moral duty to cater to the needy. Anyone who thinks we have a duty to do something needs, I think, to explain why. In my view, we have a duty not to harm people; more precisely, not to make them worse off. If I steal from you or damage you in some way, then I may be forced to make compensation. If I kill you, I may be severely punished. We are all responsible, as moral beings, for what we do to others. If what we do makes them worse off, then we are obligated to fix it up, if possible. But what if we haven't done anything of the sort? If someone else, across town or on the other side of the world, is in bad shape, through no fault of ours - nor, for that matter, through any fault of his own - then what would make it my duty to try to improve things for him?

Some will answer this question by saying, "it wasn't their fault" - as if that were enough. But it isn't. We are all different in all sorts of ways, have all sorts of different assets, native and acquired, many of which turn out, in various circumstances, to be such as to enable their possessors to become quite differentially wealthy, or happy, or whatever. Theorists who don't like this should take their complaints to god, if they believe in one; or if they don't, fine, but don't take them to me. The well-off who earned their way up by their abilities have no more reason to crow than the badly off to complain. We all go about our business, and do the best we can with whatever we have.

But there is something we can say when our fellows propose to come with pistols or lashes and force us into lines. When it comes to duties, there is a general outlook on morals that seems to me extremely strong, and quite possibly definitive. This is the "Social Contract" outlook. It says that morality is, roughly, a set of principles on which all rational people would agree, for the regulation of relations among them. It's easy, I think, to see why we would all agree to refrain from harming, damaging, killing, sickening, or in general worsening things for others. After all, they can do that to us, too. We all benefit from general refraining from inflicting damage on others. But we do not, by contrast, all benefit from general do-gooding to each other. What we do for the third-world poor, or most poor, seems to be pretty much one-way benefit: we do something nice for them, they do nothing for us. That is putting it rather crassly, of course, and in a moment I will point out that this is often not so, in certain special ways. However, in general it seems to be so. And requiring A to give a one-way benefit to B is not a rule that A and B can be expected to rationally agree on.


(1a) Mutual Aid

Now, I do want to distinguish a very special category that might be classed as a "duty," though not one that can be strongly enforced, with threats of jail and the taxman. Rather, this is a duty that can be weakly enforced, for example by regarding those who fail in it as rotters, so-and-so, crummy, and other epithets of that general type. In short, we deserve some blame for not doing these. The duty in question is what I shall call by a commonly used name in philosophy - mutual aid. It is a relation, especially, to those near to us. Suppose that at very little cost, I can do you a great help. You are stranded in your suddenly failed auto in the middle of nowhere, and need a ride to the nearest garage, and I'm coming by, in no great hurry. I ought to give you that ride. Or you are a stranger in town and want to know where the nearest restaurant is. I certainly ought to tell you if I know. Or there's a terrible calamity, such as the one in Guatemala where the side of a volcano slides down over many villages after torrential rains. It can happen to anyone, and if you are the neighbor of one of those unfortunates, you ought to pitch in and help if you can. Those of us farther away might well be moved to help, too. Working out the niceties of mutual aid if a very interesting and rather tricky matter, but I want to emphasize the word 'mutual': what makes it any sort of duty is that we're all in more or less the same boat, and the cost is usually pretty low, and the benefits great to those aided, and we might ourselves be victims of the same sort of thing, needy in the same very general sense. This will not get us Temkin's general sense of obligation to the world's poor people. It will get us a general sense of civic responsibility to those around us, with whom we live and who can make life so much better - or worse - for each other.

(2) This brings us to the other category of morals - moral commendation, admiration, praise. We may think of this as morality via the carrot rather than the stick. The 'carrot' is reward, positive reinforcement.

Moral reward, however, is special. You can get a reward for being a good basketball player or a first-class gardener, or a fine poet, or whatever; but those are all specialty contexts. We aren't all interested in gardening, basketball playing, poetry, and so on. But we are all interested in (at least) our own ultimate well-being, or more generally, our good. And there is a reason why we should all be favorably disposed toward people who do good for others without thought of reward - why we should single them out for special praise or even admiration. The reason is that any of us can benefit from such behavior. And so long as we are not actually forced or required to do it, then we can't lose anything by this either. It costs me virtually nothing to say "thanks," or to say of someone who has saved someone's life at great risk to his own that he's a hero. Another such classification is "saint": not in the specifically religious sense, but in the sense, simply, of someone who is very uncommonly devoted to the good of others, without any expectation of specific payment to himself or (as in the case of Mother Theresa) herself. Those are special categories of morals, but important ones.

People who get greatly into charity or who perform heroic deeds are very special people. Most of us have very strong motives against doing the kind of thing they do, and when we come across people who resist or even laugh at those motives - the extremely courageous, for instance - we are moved to admiration. This is partly just a spontaneous expression of ordinary human nature, perhaps; but as I say, there is also the basic point that in acknowledging such people and singling them out for elevated regard, there is virtually no skin off our own backs; yet a world with such people in it is to that extent a better world. Again, as in mutual aid, we could all be beneficiaries of the heroic and the saintly, though we are very unlikely to be, and it would certainly be wrong to insist that we all be like that. What we can all be like, and virtually all are like, is: ready to admire and praise those who are admirable and praiseworthy in respect of qualities that greatly benefit people at no cost to the rest of us. Those are humanly useful qualities.

Now, I think it is admirable to give a lot of your money to help the needy - at least, if you do it right, which should not be taken for granted. And it is admirable to go to Africa and set up hospitals and leper colonies and so on; or to send a boatload of urgently-needed medical supplies to victims of disaster, or of wheat to those starving due to some catastrophe. But such things are not, as I say, a duty. And I do not think that our consciences should bother us just because there are millions who are worse fed than we, or whose children die of some horrible disease before they are five, and so on. They shouldn't bother us, because (and if) it isn't our fault. Granted, there might be some special cases in which it is our fault. For example, if we support some awful regime that imposes these things on its people, then our consciences ought indeed to bother us. But those are atypical here.

Why should America care? Because we are sympathetic beings, for one thing, and while it needn't bother our consciences if others suffer, it bothers us. Again, because helping others, if done carefully, can build good relations with them in future, and that always might come in handy. Some wag has noted that it is "better to be healthy, happy, and rich than sick, miserable, and poor"; likewise, it is better to be a decent, outgoing, helpful person than a selfish, uncaring boor or a narrow-minded miser. Americans, down through the years, have acquired a pretty good reputation as generous, outgoing, amiable people. Those are good things to be, and I certainly am in favor of us continuing to do what will make us deserve that reputation.

None of which, however, justifies the imposition of taxes on everybody in order to aid the poor or minister to the needy. Not even if those taxed will otherwise spend the money on fifteen unnecessary sweaters or, to use a charming example from a philosophy text, 47 pairs of Gucci loafers. You pay your money, and you take your choice - and if you become Scrooge, or a twit, in the process, that's too bad -- too bad for you, I think - but it's your right.


3. Helping Others, Really

I have said that I see nothing wrong with, and on the contrary, a great deal right with, the general project of trying to relieve misery and enable people to live better lives. This is a project that by no means focuses exclusively on the third world, nor even, for that matter, on the poor. You could have a very wealthy friend who was nevertheless miserable, and you might be able to give that person some much-needed help - spiritual, for instance, or psychological. But let's stick to the needy, and in particular the low-income needy in the third world. What should we do for them, if we decide that we'd like to do something?

There is, I want to suggest, one best way - by far the best, dominating all the others by a very wide margin. That way will come as a surprise, or more likely a shock, to many readers. It is just plain old, crass, commerce.

Years ago we were all inclined to assume, without question, that vast numbers of people in places like India were on the verge, or maybe beyond the verge, of starvation. This turns out to have been a major error, especially in the specific way we thought it. People were starving, all right: but not people in the "third world," in the presently intended sense of that term. By far and away the major starvation of modern times turns out to have occurred in Maoist China in the early 1960's, the period of the "Great Leap Forward." Second place may be awarded to Stalinist Russia, for the systematic extermination, including by forced starvation, of the kulaks in the Ukraine and thereabouts back in the 30's. The numbers go way down after those two cases. Floods, volcanos, hurricanes, and the like caused some starvation here and there - a fair amount very early in the century, and a miniscule amount in recent times, when modern communications and transportation facilities have enabled us to deal with short-term disasters as never before. But in general, the world is not teeming with starving, helpless people. Instead, it is teeming with people who spend their days, like you and I, working away to feed themselves and their families, and if possible to do a good bit more than that. In these activities, they are quite successful. The view that the third world is a basket case screaming out or "aid" from the likes of us is, in brief, just almost entirely false insofar as basic food production is concerned.(1)

The fact that it is false is not the only point. It's WHY it's false that is so important here. Why it's false is, as I said, that those people out there turn out to be competent human beings, rather like us - not nitwits or cripples or spaced-out zombies, nor even callow children. And such people, ordinary people, get in there and exert themselves on their own behalf, given the chance to do so. In the Communist disasters of the 20th Century, they weren't given that chance, and of course they still aren't being given that chance in, say, Cuba and North Korea. But in almost every other place, they are being given that chance, at least more or less, and when they do, they use it, and - hey, what do you know? - they end up doing not-so-badly, or even, in many many cases, fairly well. What's scary about proposals to "help" such people is that the help is predicated on the belief that those people are really morons or children and so we have to just pour milk into them, etc. That's scary because when that view is false, as it of course is, then trying to treat people that way leads to very serious consequences, starting with making the situation worse instead of better, and on up to things like war.

On the other hand, though, if you go and build a factory in the poor country, and hire a lot of the local people to work in it, that's going to do the people there, as well as you and your customers back home, plenty of good. Employment by familiar, capitalist-type means, is beneficial to the workers, who work at a given job because the pay, etc., is more attractive than their alternatives. In poor countries, of course, that pay will be very low by our standards. No surprise there, when you think about it. In fact, far from being a surprise, that's exactly what attracts investment to that country. What attracts investment anywhere is the prospect of profit, which is a function of competitive advantage, which is a function of local resources, tastes of potential consumers, and goodness knows what - including the presence of available people to do the kind of work this investment requires, at a cost that makes it worthwhile hiring them to do it.

This matter of investment is not trivial. The wealth of any country is a function of its investment, broadly speaking: What a community "has" is what it has devoted its efforts to, and the more efficient those efforts, the more it has, and that in turn requires that a lot of its effort be devoted to improving its methods of production - which is to say, to investment. Poor communities have little or nothing to invest, in part because they wouldn't know what to do with it if they did. Salvation comes from wealthy communities, indeed: but not, in the main, from charity or conscientious contribution. Rather, it comes from wealthy places because people from those places find ways to make use of the underused talents of the impoverished community, to the benefit of customers elsewhere and therefore to the profit of the entrepreneurs who pursue the matter. Of course, once local people begin earning money, they can also buy things from the outside world, which is often more efficient than making them at home.

As noted, the investment will usually be in labor more than anything else, though on occasion outsiders may be interested in raw materials too. But what a poor community has to offer is people with an interest in working, and who will work for what we consider a low wage. But they, on the other hand, do not. "A study by the International labor Organization (1973) showed that MNC's in the third world pay wages, on average, twice as high as local businesses and offer significantly more fringe benefits: housing, schools, hospitals and health services." (2) There is an odd notion afoot in some circles that wealth consists of natural resources. But unless you count people as natural resources, this idea is dead wrong. Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and assorted other cases illustrate the point: willing and intelligent workers, equipped with productive facilities and know-how, will rectify scarcities, and then some. They will work for enterprising companies because they do better that way than otherwise. By contrast, treating a third-world country as a basket case requiring transfusions and first aid is, in addition to being presumptuous, self-defeating. Business activity creates wealth, whereas governments merely tax and redistribute it. Moreover, wealth-creation leads to more of same, and with the improvement in real income will come improved health, improved education, better housing, and so on.


Concluding Remarks

Suppose your wife comes down with some horrible disease; it'll cost $50,000 to fix things up. Ought you to spend the money, if you've got it? Yes. You could, of course, have spent the same money curing a couple of hundred people in Bangladesh of life-threatening diseases. But do you think you really have a duty to do that? I doubt it.

OK, suppose she's just fine, and now you contemplate those sick kids over in Africa, or for that matter on the other side of town. You could cure some or a lot of them - or you could buy that Mercedes you always wanted. Which ought you to do? I am not willing to say that if you prefer the Mercedes, you are doing something wrong, or even not doing what you ought to do. There are people who spend hours a day exercising to give themselves really good figures - or, more likely, just somewhat better figures than the so-so ones they already have. They could do a lot more good for those kids in Africa if they spent those hours making money in some way they know how, and using the results to cure a good many of those children. Very likely they could. But do they have a duty to? I don't think so, and neither, at least in practice, do you.

There is danger of giving an answer to this kind of question that is totally unreal. We will do the things that most matter to us, and Gwen Smith is, simply, more interested in her figure than in sick Africans. It may sound "inhuman", but it is the very reverse. Among those Africans you will find most of them also working away at wood carvings, or whatever, while others lay dying; certainly they aren't about to help the people in the next tribe, over the hill.

Meanwhile, over across town, a string quartet is busy working on a performance of Beethoven's String Quartet No. 12. Hundreds of fine quartets have worked on that piece over the 173 years since it was composed, and I don't suppose this ensemble is going to do it significantly better than the best of those ensembles have managed to do so far. They'll come up with another good, but not great, performance and a few people will hear it, and that will be that. Still, if I had the talent to play in a quartet that could perform that work, I'd do it, and I'd do it, knowing full well that if I had chosen to, I could have prevented a good many of somebody else's sick children from dying. I'm sorry about their dying. Sorry: but I've got other things to do; they aren't my problem.

I'm practically certain that, in practice, most of you feel that way, or if not, that you act as if you felt that way. I don't think that you should be walking around in a hair shirt because you aren't doing all you could for unfortunate others. It's admirable if you do, yes: but then, it is admirable for a capable string quartet to strain every nerve to perform Beethoven's Op. 127 just as well as they possibly can. And the way a lot of women manage to look after putting a great deal of expensive work into that project, is also admirable. The world is full of interesting things, which various of us will rate as being variously important, and so will work away at them in different degrees - and so, the world will go around.

Sometimes that world will send some trolleys hurtling down on some innocent people in the near neighborhood, and we can do something about it. If so, we should, no doubt. But that doesn't mean we should go out looking for runaway trolleys, nor that we should spend our modest fortunes on devices for securing trolleys in future. That may just be somebody else's business, or even nobody's.

We can ask, How ought the World to be? Presumably the general form of the answer is: as good as possible. But how good is that, and more importantly, how much do I have to do about it? If the world is less good than that model calls for, how much do I have to do to bring it how much closer to the model? I don't know the answer to that. But, importantly, that better world can be better in many respects. Not just better fed or more healthy, say. Which are the ones that really count? It is best if we leave that as a decision or judgment to be made by individual people, whom we leave in peace to make it.

Here are four representative people to consider in this context: Gwen Smith, ordinary housewife; Beethoven, great composer; Bill Gates, very successful capitalist; and Mother Theresa, saint. Among all these people, who's doing the most good for mankind? The answer wouldn't be easy to decide, and decision is in any case quite unnecessary. I want to say, Hooray for all of them. I don't think Beethoven did anything wrong by composing symphonies which would be enjoyed mainly by people with some leisure for pursing such things, and I don't think Gwen Smith is doing anything wrong by looking after her home and family and minding her pretty good figure; and while Bill Gates is undoubtedly doing a great deal of good for a great many people, and doing very well by doing it, so is Mother Theresa in her different and lesser, and much lesser-paid way. I think it is a mistake to say that Mother Theresa has a monopoly on virtue in this group, just as it is a mistake to say that of any of the others, too. Relieving disease and starvation is a good thing to do, but it is by no means the only good thing to do, and the world we live in would be a lot less interesting if those of us with the means to do so much were to devote ourselves mainly to the relief of suffering. A lot less interesting, and on the whole, I think, a less good world.


Footnotes

1. For the figures and original sources, see Ronald Bailey, editor, The True State of the Planet (New York: Free Press, 1995), specifically the articles by Nicholas Eberstadt (pp. 7-48) and Dennis Avery (pp. 49-82).

2. See Jack Powelson, Dialogue with Friends (Boulder, Colorado: Horizon Society, 1988) ,Ch. Four, "Multinational Corporations" pp. 57 in particular.