Peter Singer, in his How Are We to Live, approvingly quotes Aquinas to the effect that a starving man is justified in stealing bread. Singer glosses Aquinas's words as follows:
Property, in other words, has limits. ... There is no just title to retain surplus wealth when others are in dire need. Those in danger of starvation, or those who are coming to their aid, are entitled to take from those with surplus wealth.
I read How Are We to Live? carefully and mostly with
enjoyment, but when I reached this passage I had to stop and wonder: How can a mind of Singer's evident sharpness not see how this collectivist principle—that one in need can take, but the one in possession has no corresponding right to withhold—points directly to the destruction of all wealth and most civil order? To me it is clear that it leads directly to ethical issues that have no decent answer under any system, for example:
- Who, previous to the taking, is to adjudicate the quantity of “need” versus the degree of “surplus”? Who will say, you are needy, go ahead, but take no more than this, because only that much is "surplus"?
If you are willing to breach the right of property on no more than the assertion by the taker that his need is "dire," how can you still deny the owner’s assertion that the taken goods were not "surplus" but needed, or that they were intended for the aid of some other?
Since the owner and the taker are inevitably to be in disagreement about this—since both “need” and “surplus” are inevitably visible only in the eye of the beholder—who is to recompense the owner for his loss, if the taker is shown to not be in dire need, after all? Or if is shown that he took beyond the amount that would relieve his "dire" need, or took beyond the amount that is called (by someone) surplus?
The ability to take is extended to those who say they intend to "come to the aid" of the needy, but who will ensure that what they take, they do in fact pass on to some needy? And, who will tell them what percentage they can keep as “legitimate” expenses?
And if the owner chooses to defend his property with force, who is to step in and stay his hand at the moment of violence, saying, wait, this is a person in "dire" need? Or after the fact, who will rule on the corpse saying, this was not a needy person, so the death was not murder, or this one was truly needy, and the owner was wrong to stop him and now shall hang?
Again, if two takers come at once, or a hundred, how are they to settle who is neediest among them, to take first? What if the first, or first few, succeed in taking all there is; is it right then for the remaining needy ones to turn upon them and take from what they took?
The quote from Aquinas mentions “dire” need, probably assumed to be temporary; but what of the incorrigible, ever-needy one? (And you know there are such people.) Can he take, and when he has consumed (or wasted) what he took, and is again in need, how many times can he take?
If one is willing to live a life of no self-respect (and some people are), can he go on taking forever?
If one knows that he will be taking again, must he always wait until the need is “dire,” or could he take in advance of "direness," or perhaps take periodically to a regular schedule?
How many thefts produce a verdict of "incorrigible"; and who keeps the tally; and who tells the incorrigibly feckless they must now stop taking, and enforces the rule?
What if the inhabitants of one village or city block band together and decide that they as a group are direly needy, and that the inhabitants of the next village or some other block are as a group possessed of a surplus. Can the first group legitimately go and loot the second?
What is to say that a country may not decide that it is direly needy (as many countries could truly say) and that another country is in surplus (as many are, from the viewpoint of the poor nations, although not in the view of their own citizens), and why would this determination not be a proper basis for a “just war”?
These few lines of Singer’s open the pit of the full horror that Libertarians correctly detect in any “collectivist” philosophy: when you put determination of the bounds of property into any hands but the owner’s, you destroy all security that property creates. The issue is starkly this: who decides which one’s “need” is dire, with respect to which other one’s “surplus”? There are only two answers that I know of (and Singer does not show me any third option):
Open thuggery, in which the needy define themselves, and choose who will succor them based on hearsay, envy, and (inevitably) on their estimate of how well-defended the candidate succorers appear to be. This truly invites the war of all against all. Several West-African states have tested this scenario in recent years, with the role of “needy” played by young men in uniform.
State communism, in which title to all property is held by the state, no private wealth is permitted, and value is allocated according to an official's assessment of need. This inevitably leads people to game the "need" system, trying to get more, and to hide property.
Nobody, however Libertarian, claims that money and the market are perfect; the claim is only that the market always exists. The difference between systems is the choice of the currency used: the value-neutral currency of money, or the currency of influence, force, cronyism, and corruption. If you desparately want to keep your property, and if the official who comes to evaluate your “surplus” wants his cock sucked, and you want to keep what you have, you get down on your knees. (This is not an example picked at random, but comes from a specific account of life in the old USSR.)
Is there no medium between the horror of full communism and the chillyness of an Objectivist anarchy? Of course there is, and you live in one, that is, in a country with a representative government and a moderately free market. All these countries leave much wealth to private exchange, but reserve some goods and powers to a government, to be retained for the future or to be distributed (in principle) according to a benign policy.
Societies like these are in perpetual dynamic balance between the poles of collectivism and anarchy, like a pencil balanced on a fingertip. The motions that maintain the balance are the disclosures of a free press and the constraints of an educated electorate. The gravity that forever tugs the pencil off vertical is need: the need of bureaucrats to consolidate their authority and regularize their systems; and the needs of a myriad special interests, commercial or idealistic, to attain some of the benefits held by the system, using payment in the non-monetary currencies of patronage, influence, and bribery.
Despite the ills of avarice that Singer describes at length, these countries have supported generations of citizens who have been, on the whole, relatively humane, sane, and healthy. They have done this despite (or perhaps from) being in a constant state of political turmoil from the multi-way tug-of-war between citizens of conscience, bureaucrats, and special interests.
A secular ethics should speak to the needs of these countries, if for no other reason that that is where the people can be found with the education, time, and freedom to understand a new ethics. A secular ethics should support humane instincts amid the dynamic, chaotic, babel of democratic politics. A thoughtless collectivism is not a recipe for an ethical state. Singer's failure to critique it in any way casts doubt on the quality of his ethical plan, and his failure to see its dangers casts some doubt on his perceptivity and common sense.
No comments:
Post a Comment