Ethical Subjectivism: Part 7

Situations (continued)
 

Social Security and other benefits are considered as entitlements in the context of the Welfare State. An entitlement is a claim on the distribution of goods and services which in recent years has been confused with a right. I think the progression from claim to right is the result of habituation. When people get used to living a certain way, they resist changing what is customary and usual. In addition, entitlements such as Social Security are supported by the sense of investment; i.e., people are taxed during their working lives, and promised certain payments in return for their taxes, so they feel owed. The basis of that feeling of being owed is contractual: "I paid my dues, so I have a right to the reward." That contractual right is not a claim based on just being there, or on some value associated with being a member of society; rather, it is a matter of law. The law is generated by social processes (viz., politics), so represents a social choice. On my view, the law is also a specific (circumstantial) implementation of social norms.
 

The Welfare State is not an accident, but it is not a requisite feature of society. The Welfare State was created to correct the instability of Capitalism. It is only possible because the Industrial Revolution created surplus goods and services. If there is no surplus, there can be no distributive entitlement unless the Principle of Equality is denied. Prior to the modern era, certain classes (e.g., aristocrats, priests) were entitled to distribution without regard to the needs of the rest of the population. The disparity between the luxurious life afforded the nobility, and the near famine conditions prevailing among the lower classes, was a major motive of the 1789 French Revolution. The same disparity was successfully used by Lenin to bring the Bolsheviks to power in 1917. Today, societies that have a large division between the well-being of the upper classes and the poverty of lower classes are considered Third World. (In this respect, the United States is a Third World country.) The modern conventional wisdom is that Third World countries are poor because of that division. Social stratification and the lack of social mobility discourage innovation and tend to depress economic activity, because those not benefitted are disinclined to work more than absolutely required. Serfdom and slavery lock society into, at best, the status quo, or, more usually, into a downward spiral. A major reason for success of the First World since the Enlightenment, and even greater success since the mid-Victorian era, is the unlocking of the energy of ordinary people, motivated by their aspirations to better lives.

The fundamental ethical principle which justifies distributing income and wealth more widely, potentially universally, is the Principle of Equality. This principle turns out to make good economic sense in the form of certain Keynesian ideas. Distribution of social income to the lower classes increases demand, because, as Lord Keynes noted, the poor spend whatever they get. As Henry Ford famously said, workers have to be paid enough to buy the products they make. Distribution of income to the lower classes - the majority of society - was the key to ending the Great Depression. The reason World War II is credited with ending the Great Depression is not, as Conservatives insist, that the war reduced the labor supply and created artifical demands. In fact, the supply of labor increased as women were recruited to replace men drafted into the Army. Worker's wages were significantly increased, creating a market for consumer goods which exploded after the war ended. The economic recovery was mostly due to the spending of money printed in great quantities by the government. The government also created methods of recycling the money not spent into war bonds and other savings, thus building a pool which would fund the post-war boom. Prior to World War II, most wars were followed by a depression when the pressure of war-time demand collapsed. I recall that people expected a return of the depression after the war. The main reason that did not happen in the United States after World War II were the Keynesian economic policies then in force.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, ruling Conservatives have explicitly denied the Principle of Equality in many areas of public policy; e..g., with respect to race relations (e.g., Affirmative Action) and economics. The clear-cut result of their ultra-Capitalist (Libertarian) economic stance has been the falling share of income and wealth of the lower half of the population. The wages and purchasing power of average workers and their households decreased during the Reagan-Bush Administrations, increased during the Clinton Administration while economic moderates were in charge, and immediately starting dropping again when Conservatives returned to power in 2001. Social mobility has also declined since 1980, reflecting the increasing poverty of the lower half of the population. According to so-called Supply Side Economics, increasing the benefits paid to the owners and managers of the means of production will "trickle down" to the rest of society. In fact, application of that Conservative idea has benefitted the rich and wealthy by increasing their share of total income and wealth every year relative to the rest of society; that is all it accomplished.

Why should we concerned about the people's welfare? If all that we are required to do is that which is sufficient, what is wrong with helping the rich at the expense of the poor? If the Supply Side and similar theories were correct, if the poor were really helped by helping the rich, we would have to accept those policies, provided they brought about their results in a reasonable time and manner. But, the reason for my choosing this example is that is not what happens when those policies are applied. Supply Side, Trickle Down or whatever other names are applied to unfettered Capitalism just don't describe a system that works. What happens is an endless cycle of boom and bust which ultimately benefits no one. At least in the United States, very few of those made wealthy in a boom survive the next bust, while far more are impoverished. The Roaring Twenties, for example, is a notorious example of high living following the post-World War I Depression of 1919-1921. That high living did not involve most of the population. Most of its participants were urbanites who, at that time, were a minority. The Roaring Twenties destroyed rural life, and left little for the unskilled newcomer to the cities to do. When the whole thing collapsed in 1929-1933, it left most people demoralized and impoverished. At the depth of the Great Depression in 1933, at least 25%, and maybe as many as 33%, were unemployed. FDR did not run for President intending to create the New Deal, but the New Deal was what had to be done. Capitalism had to be regulated in order to save it.

The reason we need to be concerned about the people's welfare is not very high-minded: society cannot function without the caring and activities that fix the problems of ordinary people. Not caring was passably sufficient in the Nineteenth Century, when workers experienced several devastating depressions which employers used to oppressed them all the more. But even the deep depression of the mid-1890s - the supposed Gilded Age - did not destroy the fabric of society or threaten revolution. By the Roaring Twenties, things were changing rapidly oin account of electricty, the car and modern marketing methods. It was in that period that social, political and economic institutions became so intertwined that the largest corporations became "too big to fail."  What the Twentieth Century brought was an instrumental reason for caring.

In our kind of society, the welfare of the rich is inextricable from the welfare of the poor, even if the revanchists now in power in Washington do not understand that. Unless the car manufacturers manage to delude people about their product, sales are not made and even influential, wealthy corporate managers are dismissed. While the rich and wealthy can dispense with the masses for a while, just as it took some time for the Titanic to sink, they cannot do without ordinary people for very long. Someone has to run the water and sewage plant, pick up the garbage and, far more significantly, grow and distribute the food. Growing food is no longer a Johhny Appleseed operation. Agriculture requires major inputs from the chemical industry and, lately, the electronics industry as well. I think it obvious that ours is a intensely technological society in which the various industries are highly interconnected, thus interdependent. One of the reasons I am advocating normative networks is just that our society itself is the same sort of network. The whole thing hangs together, or each will hang separately, to paraphrase a famous patriot, Benjamin Franklin. What that means, ethically, is that each of us has an instrumental reason to care for all the others in our society; i.e., in order to use others for our own ends, we must care about others' ends.

I have often cited Kant's Categorical Imperative in its formulation as treating each person as an end in itself. The last conclusion shows that, de facto, the social network turns the immoral use of another into regard for that other. There is no ethical necesity in that situation, nor is this a shadow of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand. Caring about others is perhaps an accident of the sort of society we have become, whether or not intentionally. In the totally abusive and selfish Capitalist society Malthus envisionned as the logical consequence of Adam Smith's theories, people (or, maybe, just the working class) are disposable. Whatever the extent of Malthusian misery, Malthus was probably right about the population cycle given his good understanding of the economic mechanisms of his day. At that time, the English were busy solving the problems of enclosure and overpopulation by exporting people to Australia and other penal colonies, when they did not hang the thieves for stealing bread. Even before Malthus, the British exported large numbers of troublesome Scotts-Irish (Celtic) people to colonial plantations in the American South as indentured servants. Enclosing English farm lands and plantations were the merciless beginning of modern large-scale agriculture, which forced people into urban centers. Rural farmers or peasants, without industrial skills, flooded the factory employment lines, setting everyone against everyone else in a truly Darwinian struggle for survival. The very same thing is happening today under the rubrics "outsourcing" and "globalization." For whatever reason, the more decent values of today's society have evolved. Perhaps the horrors of Victorian exploitation, the degradation of colonized peoples, a few truly bloody World Wars, nuclear weapons and the massacres in places like Ireland, Bosnia, Rwanda and the Middle East have convinced more of us that we really do need to care about others as we care about ourselves. Not everyone has come to that conclusion, or the appropriate feelings and actions that should attend it - witness Iraq and those who sponsor that gory Conquest - but, despite that, caring for others has become a force in our world. It's obvious that, except for an accident of History, there go I ...

What led to a more humane society compared to what previously passed as civil behavior? The moral answer is the development of certain social norms such as the prohibitions of murder, rape, torture, brutality, slavery and serfdom. Each of these and other prohibitions of major crimes (as we now see them) has a long developmental history. In very ancient times, murder probably went unpunished most of the time. There were probably some cases in which the victim's familials or tribe were able to take revenge, but, even as late as the Middle Ages, feudal lords could abuse their serfs without  fear of retribution. As late as the American Civil War, Southern Plantation owners could kill, mutilate, rape or otherwise terrorize slaves, and commit other crimes, for which the victims had no legal recourse. Under the property theory of slavery, the owner had the right to do whatever he pleased with his property. That property theory is the ultimate denial of the Kantian injunction, as human beings are thereby treated solely as means and never as ends in themselves.

What the change in attitudes and laws - altogether, social norms - about slavery shows is that ethical and moral development is still underway. It is not merely something to be demonstrated in the present compared to the remote past;  rather, there are many recent developments. Social Security is the result of some of them. In most advanced countries, abandoning the weak, sick, disabled and old is frowned upon and punished. In the bosom of their families, the disadvantaged have been cared for since time immemorial. In rural human societies, as well as among bees and ants, for example, members of society are moved to less demanding tasks as they age. There is a general taboo among social animals against killing off those who are not fully functional. I do not mean to speculate why that is so, but it seems Henry Higgins' complaint, 'I got used to her face,' has something to do with it. Of course, until recently very few human beings lived long enough to make euthanasia a problem. Those who wrote the United States' Constitution were very mature men by the standards of their time, but only a few of them were over 45. Most of us use to die before reaching 45 years of age. Those who suffered injury, disability or another other dysfunction died before the rest. So, on the whole, nature took care of the problem, leaving little room for moral judgements.

A century ago, those escaping nature's hatchet were often put into desperate and torturous conditions such as mental hospitals, orphanages and work houses where they were out of sight. Perhaps not to pass harsh judgement on our ancestors, it was not so long ago that we did not know how to deal with the mental and physical disabilities some people suffered. The victims were "put away" because the people of their time did not know what to do with them. Victims dragged everyone else down, so abandonment came down to survival in the lifeboat situation. Having to cast out those unable to survive in society reinforced a belief in the Law of the Jungle as justification and relief of guilt for what was done.
 

Our present aversion to killing off dependent members of society may be a remorseful reaction to what used to happen all the time. Very few people are willing to commit suicide, so that leaves it up to others when  disease, disablity and age strike. Perhaps even fewer feel inclined to do harm to their family and friends. Here a social norm intervenes: what you do to others is what can be done to you, or 'what goes around, comes around.' This norm is vaguely related to the Hindu-Buddhist notion of Karma, so I'll call it Karmic Justice. This is an old heuristic, known in ancient times, and often quoted as 'live by the sword, die by the sword.' There are a lot of mechanisms by which Karmic Justice works; e.g., personal revenge, social retribution and natural forces. Even if it is a myth, even if it does not really work, a majority of human beings probably believe in some form of Karmic Justice. For that matter, probably the vast majority of people believe in some form of Justice, the notion that there is a balancing of good and evil. The majority probably believe that good comes out on top in the end. Perhaps these beliefs are related to the generic feeling each of us has about ourselves, that we are "good people." It is always that other guy who is bad or a devil. Very few of the worst amongst us really believe they are bad. If they've done wrong, it was a mistake or just the circumstances: they had to do it. No matter what people do, almost everyone has a very deep seated belief in one's innocence. People who admit wrong-doing or evil character are considered flawed, and along with those who act wickedly in order to get punished ("death by cop"), are considered crazy. So, it is very difficult to find people who admit guilt or any lack of innocence. That being the case, we normally have no volunteers for liquidation, based on the ethical principle that only the guilty should be punished.

Since we are not willing to volunteeer for euthanasia, and we are not willing to liquidate others, we have only two choices concerning the helpless: aid or abandon them. (I have discussed this problem before under the acronym KAP; viz., Kill, Abandon or Pay.) Until the Great Depression, the solution was abandonment. The present Conservative government advocates reinstatement of abandonment (so-called "Social Security reform"), but most people oppose shutting down or privatizing social welfare programs. The reason for widespread opposition to abandonment is obvious enough to those in the lower portion of the economic spectrum: they would be abandoned. Even the middle and upper middle classes fear abandonment, so out of self-interest, plain and simple, the great majority are opposed to reductions in Social Security and some other welfare programs. On the other hand, the majority have been willing to sacrifice those less fortunate citizens who are unemployed, homeless or otherwise unable to help themselves, where abandonment is the result of a condition the majority do not believe will befall them. For instance, the middle class employee who is tenured and vested with benefits may not feel common cause with those whose jobs have been outsourced. But that attitude changes quickly enough, as happened in recent years, when formerly secure middle class jobs start to disappear in the maw of globalization. I think this shows people are motivated by self-interest and self-preservation, especially when acting on those motives reduces personal risk. Those self-centered motives encourage people to sacrifice others as a means of saving one's hide.

On the other hand, very few people are ready, willing and able to kill to achieve their purposes, whatever they may be. There is resistance to drastic measures because here is a fear of retribution or Karmic Justice, although that fear may not be justified by available evidence. In other words, people fear Karmic Justice even in the absence of any known punishment for wicked deeds. This is based on the simple idea that, if it could be done to them, it could be done to me. That idea is an application of the Principle of Equality together with the identification of oneself as a member of the proposed victim's class. Thus, the restraint on wicked acts is the fear of them being done to oneself; i.e., projection of what might be intended for others onto oneself. This does not require knowledge of what the other fellow feels or thinks, but does require virtual knowledge of an Other based on what one knows about oneself; i.e., restraint requires a belief in an Other modelled on oneself. (I think this sort of reasoning was what Kant had in mind in proposing the legislative model of the Categorical Imperative.)

Thus, the popularity of the Welfare State, particularly as represented in Social Security, is not based on any ethical principles or moral concerns other than self-interest or fear or Karmic Justice. People do not want to be killed or abandoned. They do want to be paid.

The present popularity of at least some welfare programs does not explain how they came about. History seems to show they came about out of necessity, or as intelligent pre-emption. Bismark was the early leader in implementing national welfare systems. His motive seems to have been pre-emption; i.e., by assuring the populace their basic needs would be met throughout life, Bismark bought labor acquiescence to management demands. Taking welfare off the political agenda enabled the German State to attend to other matters, such as becoming a European Great Power and acquiring a colonial Empire. Unfortunately, Bismark's adept handling of the State did not prevent the later incompenent, pompous Kaiser Wilhem from entering a disastrous war. Fifty years later, Bismark's success in unifying and pacifying Germany under Prussian leadership became Hitler's inspiration in creating the Thousand Year Reich. There were secondary consequences to buying the nation's loyalty with the security of welfare programs: Germans became used to following their orders.

The United States was one of the last Eurocentric powers to adopt Social Security, and it has consistently trailed Europe in the provision of welfare benefits. While most First World countries nationalized health care around a half-century ago, the United States has yet to achieve that level of service to its citizens. The United States is clearly one of the most Capitalist countries in the world, probably because of a common belief in rugged individualism, the philosophy of Frontiersmen. The persistence of that worldview, more than a century after the Wild West disappeared, may be due to the Founder Effect. (Founders set the boundary conditions within which succeeding generations  operate, until major events change the boundaries. The Founder Effect is another way of looking at social and cultural inertia.) The United States has only adopted welfare and other enlightened measures under the greatest duress, such as the Great Depression and the Civil Rights Movement. This stance, resistance to change, marks the United States as a very conservative country.
 

While some Western countries took an enlightened view about providing people with welfare benefits, and others did nothing until forced to act, there are more fundamental reasons for the adoption of welfare measures. Those reason arise out of the workings of technological societies which also have certain norms of humane treatment. The Welfare State was not possible until after the Industrial Revolution made sufficient headway in improving the standard of living. The Roman State provided welfare to certain of its free citizens in the form of bread and circuses, but those provisions depended on the abuse and slavery of huge numbers of non-citizens. In ancient Rome, the benefits of citizenship were paid by even greater harm to non-citizens because there was no means of production except human labor. Essentially the same social and economic dynamics prevailed in the American South until the Civil war ended slavery. With the end of the plantation system, the South entered a long period of decline marked by ignorance, poverty, disease, disability and premature death. Neither the South nor Rome were in a position to sustain any form of Welfare State. In fact, to this day, despite the resurgence of the South during the last 30 years, the South still suffers from most of its old problems, and provides the least benefits to its citizens of any U.S. region. The Welfare State requires a high level of economic performance to fund it.

Welfare programs are conditonal upon economic performance. Not just any kind of performance will do: the economic system must consistently produce distributable surpluses. Consistency amounts to the elimination of booms and busts. It is required because the cost of busts is often greater than the profits of booms. This last assymetry is easily observed in the demolition and removal of old buildings, which takes only a few weeks, whereas the original construction takes ten times longer (months or years). In the same vein, it takes many years to grow fruit-bearing trees to maturity, but they are cut down in a few minutes. All of that is encompassed in the Entropy heuristic: all things tend to disorder, or it takes energy to create order. There must be surpluses, which means that less human labor is required to produce all human needs than the total number of consumers. Welfare benefits assume that those receiving them are not out there picking oranges or hoeing the weeds, so those who work must be able to feed, clothe, house, etc those who do not. The surpluses must be distributable; i.e., there has to be a method of storing and transporting what is produced for use by others not located at the production site. Until the invention of refrigerator freight cars, the wastage of produce and packaged meat made trade at long distance costly or impractical. Until the late Nineteeth Century, the vast majority of goods and services were produced and marketed locally or, sometimes, regionally. That was changed at first by the building of shipping canals in Europe and the United States,  and later more radically by the building of the railroads. During the Twentieth Century, cars, trucks, freeways and airplanes, as well as supertankers and containerized freight, were introduced, which, together, make the world's natural resources, produced goods and human services available any time, anywhere for everyone. First World countries became capable of providing welfare benefits during the last century or two, not before.

The important point about entitlements is that they are a conditional grant of distributional claims by society to its members. The grant is dependent on the availability of resources and upon continued social consensus. As recent years have shown in the United States, considerable rollbacks of entitlements can happen after decades of propaganda reframes the common view of welfare. (Thus, Clinton's "welfare reform" in 1995.) The Social Security Act was passed in 1935 during the Great Depression, not as an application of Keynesian theories or ethical princples or out of compassion, but because the government was faced with rebellion and economic chaos which encouraged an attitude of 'do something, anything.' (Thus, FDR saved America for Capitalism.) Ethical principles are involved in entitlement legislation and politics because social norms prohibit murder and discourage abandonment, leaving some form of assistance as the only alternative. The ethical principle involved in coming to that conclusion, that entitlements result from a process of exhaustive exclusion, is Good Enough.

The foregoing analysis of welfare benefits began with the question, what justifies activism aimed at  changing social norms? In the case of welfare benefits, we have just seen that the root principle in operation is Good Enough. That is also the princple which justifies demands for change, when things are not Good Enough. Good Enough is a slippery slope, a sliding scale, so each claim for change has to be supported by evidence and arguments showing why the status quo is not Good Enough. In fact, agitation for change is exactly what happens when people do not concur with the way things are. That agitation must be proportional to the extent of dislocation required to bring about a new status quo, otherwise nothing changes. Authoritarian societies of every kind suppress criticism and proposals of change for two reasons: (1) in principle, every change must be authorized and (2) any proposal for change undermines the existing order, hence the authority. (This is why, at work, every new idea has to appear to have come from the boss.) In daily, local operations, almost all societies are authoritarian, even supposed democracies. The very few societies that are not authoritarian usually have few members, are widely dispersed, aren't technological and don't last long. Hunter-gatherer cultures fall into this last category from time to time, when social leadership results from personal affection or loyalty, not brutal enforcement. (Contrary to Rousseu, savages are not noble.) Societies, then, almost always resist change, which means reformers have a long, uphill struggle.

The difficulty of change is a measure of social inertia, which, in turn, reflects the interconnectedness of individual behavior. Normative networks explain why change is usually slow to come, because such networks are glued together. If change does occur at a critical point, the entire society will unravel, just like a wool sweater when certain threads are pulled out. Changing one thing is not just changing one thing; it is changing everything connected to that thing. There is a vast difference between a society based on apartheid and one that integrates all those within its reach. There are concepts, habits and rituals that must change. Even more importantly, individual feelings (emotions or dispositions) must change. The racist or sexist person is not likely to undergo a change of attitude, although social pressures, such as the law, might change some aspects of interpersonal behavior. The abolition of racism, sexism and other forms of intolerance requires changing deeply imbedded culture, which probably can only happen over many generations. (I define culture as a complex of belief, habits and rituals.) It is just as hard to change one's culture as it is to lose weight, because both ends require permanent changes of lifestyle.

The changed person is not at all the same person as before, and does not interact with society in the same way. When individuals are changed, society will change, rather like a rearrangement of the fibers in a knit cloth. In enough individuals are changed in a short time, society is revolutionized. That is what happened in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s. Even though there has been some back sliding, the San Francisco Bay Area culture is still distinct from that obtaining in Southern California, and entirely separate and apart from general American culture. In Northern California outside the San Francisco Bay Area, culture shock is an everyday reality, as neighborhoods and towns are split into adherents and rejectionists of the San Francisco culture. This split is not only reflected in voting patterns, but almost every other aspect of life; i.e., lifestyle. In the district of the City in which I live, it easy to pick out who's a Liberal and who's a Conservative by looking at their houses, cars, clothes and hair style. There are hard feelings between the cultures which could become violent, but are avoided by restricting contact to well established forms, such as buying and selling (but even that can become contentious).

Another justification of change arises from the Principle of Fairness, which is an ally of the Principle of Equality. Fairness is the demand to be treated in an acceptable manner compared to others; i.e., fairness is not an absolute principle. What fairness excludes as a basis of judgement and action are prejudicial considerations, whether with respect to standards or in process. Fairness of process is an application of the principle that demands the same or similar procedures by applied in similar cases. Fairness of judgement is an application of the principle that demands the criteria - moral maxims - used to decide a case are relevant to the facts of the case. Fairness requires a rule of Generalization: what applies in some cases can be extended to a class of cases. It also requires a rule of Precedents: what applies in a class of cases applies to this case. All of these rules and principles come under the general heading of Justice.