Philisophical Musings on the "Good Life" and the problem of "Dirty Hands"

I did not watch the Inauguration of the new American President, although it seemed that's what many others were doing yesterday, in my facebook community, in the world of blog, in the online news sources I religiously read. I'm not quite sure what Obama said, and, to be truthful, although I'm still ecstatic that a black man was elected, a historic event, to be sure, and one that brings hope to many of the dispossessed, marginalized, colonized people of the world, I'm getting to feel a little jaded about the man himself. Not that he's not marvelous. Just that I wish he was a little bit more liberal, a little bit more of a social democrat. I read a blog the other day, citing a news article saying Obama supported Prop 8 in Cali. Yuck. Don't be a hater, is all I gotta say.

And then this morning I read one of my favorite blogs, Living the Frugal Life. The author, Kate, did watch the inauguration. And she had the following criticisms. She disagreed that we need to choose between safety and "our ideals" which she interpreted to mean freedom. In her counter-argument, she quotes Benjamin Franklin: "any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and loose both." She further disagrees that we do not need to apologise for our "way of life" and argues that the [North] American way of life is both excessive and hideously impoverished. Good arguments, Kate!!

Kate's post reminds me of my last assignment in my Philosophy class this semester, titled Ethics & Public Policy. We were discussing the problem of Dirty Hands. This is when a government (or a person) must make a choice between what is right (in a utilitarian sense) and what is moral. Thus, an example would be a political leader who must choose to condemn a person to torture in the hopes that said person will reveal the location of a bomb that will likely kill hundreds or even thousands of people. The utilitarian argument is that the right thing to do is to save the hundreds of people, and torture the individual who may or may not have knowledge of the location of the bomb. Thus, by ordering the torture of said individual, the politician now has Dirty Hands.

The assignment was to describe the problem of Dirty Hands, using Pinochet, the Chilean military dictator, as an example. However, now I see examples everywhere. My man and I are watching the Jessica Alba TV series, Dark Angel. Every episode I have seen so far could be an example of Dirty Hands! This is because the utilitarian arguments that resolve the problem of Dirty Hands do so by declaring that it just isn't a problem. By doing what is right for the majority, the moral dilemma disappears. But how can this be, in the era of international human rights? I argue that this just isn't so.

We always have a choice to do what is moral. Thus, in my torture/bomb example, I say it is perfectly acceptable to take the moral high ground, and refuse to torture one individual person, even if it could possibly save thousands. Consider this: what if the individual really knows nothing about the bomb? Then, the ends do not justify the means. They only do so if the individual has knowledge of the location of the bomb, and if the bomb can be defused in time to prevent harm to anyone. My problem with utilitarian arguments is that they use people as means. I protest. I say this is both immoral and unjust. I say this becomes the tyranny of the majority, and it's what justifies ethnic cleansing, genocide, holocaust. I say we have to retain our moral values, or we are lost.

But back to Kate's post. Choosing between safety and freedom looks like a problem of Dirty Hands to me. Politicians decide it is okay to take away people's liberty so as to ensure their safety? Okay, it sounds familiar. That is what I do with my child nearly every day. But he is a child, and he is (currently) incapable of assuring his own safety. But that is because he is a child, and I fully expect him to progress, in developmental terms, to a point where I no longer need to be responsible for his safety. I'm hoping that comes in the teen years, when he progresses to formal operational thought. However, I don't think it works to treat nations as children. Thus, paternalistic attitudes towards Third World countries, or to one's own population, are just plain insulting. As Franklin said, if we give up liberty, we don't deserve it. And, if we knowingly take liberty from others, we threaten our own.

Families and Poverty in Canada, some brief thoughts

One of my classes this semester is Sociology of Families. It's an upper level course, and has an extra credit (4 instead of the average 3). Thus, there is a LOT of reading. Our participation mark is worth 25% of our final grade, and includes weekly homework assignments. This week, we are reading about families and poverty.

This is an issue near and dear to my own heart - I am poor. I'm not poor in an absolute sense, I have a home and food in my fridge. But I do not make ends meet on a monthly basis, and without my credit card, I might not be able to put gas in my car or feed my son cheese and meat.

Luckily for me, I live in Canada, and not the United States. Thus, I have basic medical. My son also has his basic dental and ophthalmologic care covered by the government (but not mine, I'm expected to pay out of pocket). As well, I'm eligible for numerous redistributive social payments, from lower income taxes for low income families (I get it all back, not that it's much, but I'm sure Americans don't have the same benefits, so I'm lucky in comparison) to social benefits like the Canada Child Tax Benefit and the National Child Benefit Supplement, which, combined, gives me a cheque for about $250 a month. This definetly helps pay the rent. I've also recently recieved a one time tax free payment of $250 to help me "deal with higher energy costs" I was eligible for this because of the above mentioned benefit programs.

Despite these efforts by the Canadian and provincial governments to help out people such as me, the working poor (okay, I'm not working right now, but I was, up until mid-July, when I quit after giving 13 months notice, to focus on my education. Now I'm living on student loans, another government financed program), not much is shifting, demographically. Women and immigrants (especially "visible minorities") are still struggling, even after a sustained period of economic growth and job creation (1994 - 2004). The evidence suggests that it was upper income Canadians who benefitted from that economic growth, and the gap between the highest and lowest quintile is growing.

Single mothers are hit especially hard. Lone parent families comprise about one in five families with children. Yet among families classified by Stats Canada as income poor, over half are single parent families. So, it is children who are increasingly living in poverty, with all the associated negative outcomes. This is despite a 1989 unanimous resolution by the House of Commons to end child poverty by the year 2000. Hey, folks, that was 8 years ago! Child poverty hasn't changed in 25 years!

So, it seems to me that we, as Canadians, are willing to pay lip service to the plight of women and children in our patriarchal world, but when push comes to shove, and it's time to reduce deficits, we're gonna cut social benefits to women and children (UI becomeing EI, and reducing eligibility from 70% of applicants to only 30%). What is my government saying to me? Sounds like, "go get married woman, find a man to take care of you and your kid."

Yikes. The second wave of feminism began in the 70's.

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.