LETTER: The real goal of liberal morality

Monday, September 19, 2011

Elaina Plott declared last week that conservatism’s “most defining feature” is a substantive morality that liberalism, by contrast, is said to lack (“A conservative manifesto,” Sept. 16). For example, “conservatives believe that moral decisions, such as charitable giving, are best made by private citizens. Consider: if your chunk of tax dollars goes to fund governmental housing in inner-city projects, are you being morally charitable, or are you simply following the law?”

What Plott fails to understand is that liberal morality as such is not and has never been about making one feel moral. What matters is that we, as a society, guarantee the right to a certain standard of living to all of our fellow citizens. Nobody cares if you’ve managed to exercise your moral capacity by giving freely rather than simply “following the law,” just so that morality is truly “meaningful” for you. (Plott here simply ignores the possibility that you might recognize your moral duty to society and give your “chunk of tax dollars” unbegrudgingly in service of the common need.) And even if they grumble as they write their check, liberals never forget that what really matters is that the needy receive the housing, food and health care necessary to meet a minimal standard of living. This is why, as a free, democratic society we might require that everybody pay taxes according to their ability.

The goal is not fairness of giving. The goal is fairness of living. Liberals are not being irrational in their dismissal of libertarian economic principles concerned with the deadweight losses of taxation; their rejection is, in fact, a moral one.

Tony Ferraro

Sept. 18

The writer is a senior in Davenport College.

Comments

RexMottram08

Spare me. The Great Society has done nothing but destroy the black family.

Dependency is worse than poverty.

gzuckier

” The Great Society has done nothing but destroy the black family.”

I know; they were doing so well under slavery and racism, and those darned liberals derailed it.

RexMottram08

The Great Society defeated slavery and racism?!?!

Chronology FAIL

River_Tam

> And even if they grumble as they write their check, liberals never forget that what really matters is that the needy receive the housing, food and health care necessary to meet a minimal standard of living.

65% of poor households in America have cable TV, at least one DVD player – a device that wasn’t even in existence 15 years ago – and more than one TV. Remember the scene in Back to the Future? Multiple TVs used to be unheard of – now they’re commonplace. A full 50% have a coffee maker, the same amount that have a cell phone (which NO one had until the mid ’90s). Virtually all poor households (97%+) have a refrigerator, television, stove, and oven. The average poor American has more living space than the average European. Professor James Q Wilson reminds us: “The poorest Americans today live a better life than all but the richest persons a hundred years ago.”

Actual material hardship is restricted to far fewer people than liberals seek to help with their attempts at wealth redistribution. I come from a family that qualifies as poor by any standard – liberal or conservative – but my parents didn’t seek governmental assistance to make ends meet. They understood that the American dream is not about envying what your neighbor has, or defining-up poverty, but creating your own happiness.

I don’t know Mr. Ferraro, but let me assume three things.

**First**, that he comes from relative privilege. That’s not a knock against him in and of itself, of course, but it drips from every condescending word he writes about moral obligations to the poor and liberals who take on the White Man’s Burden with only minimal grumbling.

**Second**, that he is majoring in some branch of the humanities, or maybe EPE. The pablum that he writes about *”Nobody cares if you’ve managed to exercise your moral capacity by giving freely rather than simply “following the law,” just so that morality is truly “meaningful” for you.”* is typical of the unthinking nonsense turned out by Yale’s philosophy classes these days. Since, unlike Mr. Ferraro, I read before I write, I can say with relative confidence that Ms. Plott (to whom Ferraro was ostensibly responding) was not arguing that moral *feeling* was important, but merely the well-tread argument that acts are really only moral if they are uncoerced and originate from moral duty. That’s a standard part of Kantian ethics (among others). Hint to Mr. Ferraro – unless you’re a pure consequentialist, the origin of an action is meaningful – and if you’re a pure consequentialist, you’re just delusional.

**Third**, that Mr. Ferraro lives much better than the average American – both at Yale and at home – and thus he really doesn’t *mean* it when he says he seeks “fairness of living”. True fairness of living might drag Mr. Ferraro down to the level of the poor unfortunate souls he has the burdensome (but totally worth it!) legal and moral obligation to feed.
Feriales

Working backwards: here are my replies to River’s comment.

Fairness of living does not presuppose equality of living. For some it might mean fairness of opportunity. For others, equal availability of a minimum standard. For others still, the opposite, the imposition of a ceiling wealth or power which cannot be surpassed (anti-trust laws, etc.)

While Mr. Ferraro’s major, and especially the nature of the course Ms. Plott instructs, may inform the language with which he chooses to make his argument, it is almost wholly irrelevant to his opinion. One can easily find majors in physics, in classics, in biology, in philosophy, in chinese, etc., who agree with him. This doesn’t necessarily make him correct, but it does suggest that his academic background is not to be treated as the subject of ad hominem attacks. The argument against him due to his perhaps privileged background is just as trivial, and for essentially the same reasons.

As for the “body” of that post, one should not take the fact that technology and social progress have made a standard of living better than pre-WWI Europe common in America as an indicator that everything is fine and those who say otherwise are either stricken with “white guilt” or looking for an undeserved handout. Nor should we equate the cultural differences between American and European conceptions of private space with evidence that the “average poor American” (which means?) lives better than the European. And the fact that America’s material culture, propagated by the wealthy, the powerful, and the influential, have made commonplace “luxury” items like coffee makers, televisions, and cell phones should not distract from the frightening reality that it is the very same culture that deceives Americans, rich and poor alike, to spend on items like those more happily than on food, health care, emergency savings, etc.

To Mr. Ferraro: thank you for this refreshingly succinct and well-crafted letter. I sincerely hope I am not the only one who shares your sentiments.

River_Tam

> For some it might mean fairness of opportunity. For others, equal availability of a minimum standard.

This is exactly my point. To liberals and conservatives, fairness means different things. But Mr. Ferraro defines conservatives out of the picture as being uninterested in “fairness”. My comments about Mr. Ferraro’s background were not intended to insult but rather to note that his condescension towards the provincial classes seeps through in every word of his letter.

As for your other concern – the weird liberal belief that someone has somehow deceived us to spend money on things we enjoy rather than things we need – my point is simply that people can make their own decisions. If poverty is really caused by our “culture” (surprisingly, to liberals, American culture is the only bad culture – all others are merely different points of view) of excessive spending, then the solution is most certainly *not* redistribution of wealth like Mr. Ferraro advocates, but rather economic policies that encourage consumer saving and prudent financial planning rather than reckless spending with the implicit guarantee of help for those too irresponsible to prioritize properly.

If the average American is an ant, gathering food for the harvest, people who own multiple TVs and smart phones while living paycheck-to-paycheck are the grasshoppers who know that even if the ants don’t want to share their crop at the end of the year, they’ll be forced to by the government.

Frankly, this is not a problem restricted to the materially poor. I know plenty of my classmates (including some friends) who are living semi-employed, paycheck to paycheck in Brooklyn or Manhattan because they decided that they really couldn’t bear to rent a place that cost less than $1200/month.

It’s idiocy, and the solution is NOT redistribution. Subsidize something, and you get more of it.

Feriales

No, unless you were expressing yourself remarkably poorly, your point regarding “fairness” was the author doesn’t really want to pay for fairness, whatever his definition of it is, because it would reduce his standard of living to theirs. Unless he thinks fairness is economic equality, and he might, though he gave no indication in his article that he does, this is hyperbolic. Even if he does believe this, well, he does really want to pay for that kind of fairness.

Now, if poverty is exacerbated by excessive spending (as it certainly has other causes which need addressing), and you want to encourage less spending and more saving as a result, I’d support you. What might these policies look like? Should we should place tight restrictions on advertising and place punitive taxes on luxuries? I’d support that, but I have my doubts that you would.

To put it simply, poverty-stricken Americans and better-off ones are not different species. One group does not, by its nature, deserve suffering. Misfortune, exploitation, and circumstance have dropped a branch along the path of some of our fellow ants. Instead of turning a blind eye to the ensuing panic, we can help them lift the branch and move on. In doing so, we are not subsidizing poverty; we are subsidizing a healthy colony.

River_Tam

> Now, if poverty is exacerbated by excessive spending (as it certainly has other causes which need addressing), and you want to encourage less spending and more saving as a result, I’d support you. What might these policies look like? Should we should place tight restrictions on advertising and place punitive taxes on luxuries? I’d support that, but I have my doubts that you would.

No, because I don’t think Americans who spend irresponsibly should be prohibited from doing so. I just don’t think I should be responsible for lying in their bed once they make it.

If you want some common-sense proposals for encouraging saving without infantilizing the middle class:

* introduce a national sales tax and drastically scale back the income tax (you can even scale it back more drastically at lower tax brackets to keep it a progressive tax).

* reduce inflation. inflationary pressure if fetishized today because it spurs investment. but it also (to use Ron Paul’s somewhat exploitative phrasing) steals from those who save their money.

* Focus social programs on personal-level job-recovery initiatives instead of direct welfare. Poverty is merely a symptom of joblessness, and welfare is a subsidization of poverty rather than a solution.

* Fix fix fix fix education. By that I mean, get kids to go to college. It’s really that simple. No one wants to hire someone without a degree anymore. Subsidize the hell out of it. Give extensive tax credits to families with kids in college. The unemployment rate for those with a college degree is 4%. The unemployment rate for those without is 12%.

Feriales

Yes, let’s institute a national sales tax (hello, regressive taxation) to help the poor. Great idea.

As for the introductions of social programs to aid in job recovery, assuming that your point that no one wants to hire those without degrees doesn’t render the initiative an exercise in futility, the idea shows some promise. The idea that poverty is merely a symptom of joblessness, and, more specifically, the type of joblessness that can be fixed by mere job placement, shows very little of that promise.

I will agree with you, at least, that education reform is almost always a good way to mitigate the problems of future generations. It does very little, however, for those the education system has already failed. If, in the future, an improved system of education nationwide exists such that everyone is equipped to meet a minimum standard of living, in spite of potentially hindering conditions of birth or of circumstance, I would consider the moral obligation that motivates welfare fulfilled. These conditions clearly have not been met.

-cjd

Brief Note: I, of course, speak only for myself, and have no way of knowing whether or not Mr. Ferraro would agree with me, as we’ve strayed somewhat from his argument, which appears to me, at least, to center on the objection to Ms. Plott’s declaration that conservatism, and not liberalism, is concerned with making decisions morally. He goes on to explain that, to the liberal point of view, their position on welfare is a moral one. He never even goes so far as to say he believes it is a correct moral position— merely a moral one.

annwoolliams

Hear Hear River!…golly you kids are bright!
I would like to add….
as has been raised at Education forums in New Zealand….
Fund the hell out of Early Childhood Education- 0-5yrs. Feed these children -mouth and mind. Make all Early Childhood Centres free and voluntary. This will ensure we catch the little ones who escape the health and welfare services and are often neglected by uneducated parents- even when the parents are subsidized. It is a modern equivalent of a childrens home, which is funded by the people and the kids go home at night.
oh and I LOVE this comment of yours…Feriales….
” And the fact that America’s material culture, propagated by the wealthy, the powerful, and the influential, have made commonplace “luxury” items like coffee makers, televisions, and cell phones should not distract from the frightening reality that it is the very same culture that deceives Americans, rich and poor alike, to spend on items like those more happily than on food, health care, emergency savings, etc.”
….very amusing.
Inigo_Montoya

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