Laziness has Nothing to do with Poverty

My inspiration for my last post was MomGrind's Blog Action Day post, which generated lots of interesting discussion in the comments. I added my two cents worth, was responded to (cool, or what?!), replied to the responses, and then got the following reply from MomGrind (the quote is from my reply):

“What I’d really like to argue is that poverty is not at all related to laziness.” I agree. I assume that a very small portion of poverty cases can be explained by laziness or by lack of drive, and those are the people who would indeed exploit a welfare system. But my assumption is that the vast majority of cases have nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with bad luck, lack of opportunity and other factors that have been mentioned here.

I don't want to leave a further comment, but I have a response to that, so I'm posting it here, on my private blog that no one's ever looked at, because no one knows about it!

I would argue that zero cases of poverty are related to laziness. I believe that the instances of welfare abuse, which has been chalked up to laziness, is actually the result of learned helplessness.

I was, again, reading away in my ethics textbook (Rachels, 2007, p. 97-98, see last post for full reference), this time about Utilitarianism (the founding ethical principle of democracy), when I came across the description of a psychological experiment from the 50's, apparently before animal rights and ethics committees @universities.

This was @Harvard. The experiment had 40 dogs in a "shuttlebox," a device consisting of two compartments separated by a barrier, initially set at the height of the dog's backs. The floor delivered electric shocks. At first, the dogs could escape the shocks by jumping over the barrier. Then they shocked the dogs on the other side as they landed. The dogs learned to anticipate the shocks, yet jumped over anyways. Then they blocked the passage between compartments with glass so the dogs couldn't escape the shocks at all. After 10 or 12 days the dogs ceased to resist the shocks. This was in an experiment to study "learned helplessness," a topic the psychologists thought important for the mentally ill (ibid).

If we extend the concept of learned helplessness to people experiencing poverty, who have had "bad luck, lack of opportunity and other factors that have been mentioned," it can be seen how people can stop resisting their circumstances, and essentially give up, thus being perceived as "lazy."

some brief thoughts on poverty, morality, and responsibility...

Yesterday was Blog Action Day, where bloggers wrote about poverty. I'm a little slow on the draw, but here's my two cents worth...

I just read the following in my textbook for my Philosophy class Morality and Politics: "A 60 year old man shot his letter carrier seven times because he was $90,000 in debt and thought that being in federal prison would be better than being homeless" (Rachels, 2007, p. 82). This is in an argument disproving the theory of Ethical Egoism.

The example is one in a series of harmful, unethical things people have done for their own benefit. Other examples include a nurse raping unconscious patients, a paramedic injecting emergency patients with sterile water, so as to sell the morphine, and parents feeding a baby acid so they could fake a lawsuit against a formula company.

I can see how these other examples fail to be moral, and of course I can see how it is immoral to shoot someone to save yourself from possible homelessness, but I cannot place all the responsibility for the immoral act upon the 60 year old man's shoulders. Should not society itself bear some of the responsibility for producing such anxieties? That is, are we not all collectively responsible for such a tragedy? Where was the social safety net for this individual?

It's high time we remember the lessons of the Depression and start looking out for every member of our society as a moral responsibility. By looking out for one another, I mean providing people with agency, not giving people charity. I mean giving them the tools to make a better life for themselves.

I'd like to live in a Canada that had already met the millennium goal of eradicating child poverty.


References
Rachels, J. (2007). The Elements of Moral Philosophy. 5th ed. by Stuart Rachels. New York: McGraw Hill.