Delphic Maxim 135: Share the load of the unfortunate
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes a day.
135. Share the load of the unfortunate
Today’s maxim is going to be a little shorter than usual, for a range of reasons (hangover a large part of it, but also I have been frantically writing other things and my attention feels completely fragmented at the moment). It’s also, conveniently, one that involves those basic traits of respect and care for those around us that underpins a whole lot of the other maxims.
I think one of the communal ethical challenges that we face as a society is in deciding where the balance of responsibility lies for looking after people who are less fortunate. In earlier maxims, I mentioned the role of social reproduction in perpetuating inequality and disadvantage. This is the process where someone is basically born into poverty (and possibly not even poverty, but born into a less-privileged environment from which it is harder to break out). It seems to me self-evident that we should all look out for each other — and that supporting the people who need the most support is a rational way to conduct ourselves.
But in some cases, or more accurately for some people, this idea is pretty foreign. It gets howled down as a bleeding heart policy of the ‘social justice warriors’. This is despite a pretty chunky amount of literature that traces the damaging effects of inequality on society. There was a landmark publication from Wilkinson and Pickett back in 2010 called The Spirit Level, which showed that inequality isn’t just harmful when there is poverty, but that relative inequality is damaging for a society as well! It doesn’t matter if the poor are necessarily getting richer or more well off (though obviously that would be preferred), but the fact that inequality widens is damaging to a society as well.
Anyway, I don’t think the responsibility for ‘sharing the load’ should fall on philanthropists and generous individuals. Charity is a lovely moral state, but it depends on generosity rather than the moral imperative that exists for a society — a community of people living together for mutual benefit — to take care of ‘the unfortunate’. (It’s actually a really unfortunate turn of phrase, to be honest. Who are ‘the unfortunate’? How degrading is that phraseology!)
I tend to err on the side of big government (understatement), so I would prefer for a solid tax system with sensible and clear distribution of government services so that charities don’t need to fill a gaping whole in our social safety net. It’s absurd that the services that take care of homeless people in Sydney and on the Central Coast are dependent on grants and gifts, when really that is a vital service that should have consistent and adequate public funding. It is ridiculous that we haven’t increased the value of unemployment welfare payments from the Government (Newstart) in decades — even as Australia has become more and more expensive to live in. These systems are supposed to help people who fall into the traps of our economy and social structure, and instead they seem to operate as a part of the trap themselves.
Alright, I’ve said enough for today, like I said I am rushing and hungover. The lesson from this maxim is of course to take care of other people, but also to broaden our understanding of care so that it extends across the breadth of experiences in our society. There’s nothing wrong with the government lifting people out of poverty — that’s actually what it’s there for. So it really should be allowed to get on with it (and our leaders should have the sense and moral righteousness to stop dropping the ball).
