Is poverty a moral failing...

[Hermit]

Poor around here ain't what they are in some places....

Yes. Poverty is relative. I don't know how that is connected with the topic. though.

[Brian Peacock]

Forty Two touched on relative poverty earlier...

...and if so, for and/of whom?

It can be, depending on one's definition of poverty and the basis upon which one rests moral judgments.

From page 1.

To start with, 'poverty' is a pretty nebulous term. One can think of it as a lack of resources (i.e. a lack of money, clothing, housing, food, etc) and one can think of it as a lack of opportunity or access to resources (to money, clothing, housing, food etc). In general terms though it clearly represents the deprivation of necessary goods, either of the personal or social kind, or both. The topic title and first post speak to the nature of that deprivation, to its cause; and to responsibility and where it lies...

By my lights, poverty isn't just or merely about income - though that's not to say that income isn't like a pretty big deal and all that.

Poverty is often viewed relatively, where in a first world country poverty means one thing, whereas in a third world country it means quite another. As someone who has traveled in the third world, I know this distinction to be true, and poverty such as one would find in Africa and South America simply does not exist in the first world.

A fair point. Sure, the relative wealth of the West makes comparing poverty with the relatively less well-off developing world relative as well, but that's not to say that poverty does not exist in the West or that Western societies do not have a proportion of people in dire need and/or deprived of necessary resources.

However, in my view the mere fact of being poor is not necessarily a moral failing. The moral failing, according to my moral compass, comes from the individual in question. A person can have moral failings; however, an event or an incident or a circumstance has no morality. To explain, I would say that poverty, like a car accident, is not necessarily a moral failing. The mere fact of being poor, or being in a car accident, does not say anything about the morality of the participants. What says something about the participants is their own mental state and their own actions.

I wouldn't disagree. How many of those who feel secure and comfortable in their current situation would avoid penury if all their debts were suddenly called in - or if they had an accident, like a car crash, which limited their ability to service those debts? IMO, none of us is very far from poverty, even those of us who are relatively well-off, or even very well-off in absolute terms.

So, a person who intentionally drives recklessly, with a view toward doing harm to people, is behaving in an immoral fashion. That's based on the premise that to do good and to refrain from harming people without justification is a moral good. This is sort of an underlying axiom - defining as "bad" actions which are intended to or recklessly likely to injure or harm another person, an animal or property. So, by my morality, a person in a car accident is immoral if he is intentionally harming others. Other persons in the accident who were minding their own business are not morally culpable.

Likewise, a poor person could be immoral if he is behaving immorally. If he is acting such that he harms others through lethargy, laziness, or ill-intent. Like, if he has a family to support, and through sloth and such just descends into poverty. However, a person who becomes poor despite reasonable efforts and good intent, is not morally culpable.

So, "poverty" itself could be a morality issue, but it would be the person and his actions which determine his moral culpability.

Yes - though I'd note that without further qualification this does appear to imply that choosing to be poor or remain poor becomes an immoral act, as if work itself is a route to moral improvement and that a pay cheque represents a moral good.

However (!), here I think we have to distinguish between individual circumstances and a moral assessment of the individual and the more general, but no less explicit, moral judgement of 'the poor' as a nominal group. What I'm interested in here are the attitudes and assumptions about the moral status of poverty and the poor and how they inform wider social and political views about what could and couldn't, should and shouldn't do about addressing issues around poverty.

For example, the attitude that the poor could pay their way if they really wanted to and that social safety nets merely encourage the impoverished towards indolence.

If one is of the view that the poor primarily find themselves in a state of impoverishment by their own hand or due to some innate lack of character, resolve or fortitude, that they are shirkers not workers, or skivers not strivers, or that the poor comprise a dependency- or handout-culture, etc, then assistance programs soon begin to look like a reward for freeloaders who can't be bothered to make their own way in life - getting free money for sitting on your arse all day watching telly, or whatever. Once that judgement is made then one can easily see how other views might follow...

Views like, the assisted poor actually have it too easy and because of a lack of some proper component of hardship or adversity they also lack a proper incentive to betterment. To remedy this requires some form of moral correction to be applied, something to incentivise the feckless up off their arses, away from their tellies, and out in to the so-called 'real world of work' and responsibility. The simplest form this kind of moral correction can take is to reduce or remove financial assistance - in effect, increasing the level of deprivation--making the poor poorer than they would have been otherwise--is not just seen as a legitimate means of incentivising the poor towards independence, but it is also cited as building character by encouraging self-reliance.

Where society is uncomfortable with basically doing nothing to assist those in the direst need, or perhaps where it is at least willing to acknowledge that some people are poor despite their best intentions and efforts not to be, then strict conditionalities might be applied to assistance programs to, say, place a time limit or financial cap on qualifying for assistance programs, or to require people to undertake mandatory training, to apply for n-number of vacant positions, or to look for work out-of-area, to undertake mandatory but unpaid work to qualify for basic assistance, and/or to be sternly sanctioned or penalised if-and-when people fail to meet such conditions. These types of conditionalities are the basis of the UK's unemployment and welfare system btw.

Now in all that, the assumption is that employment, even low-rate-low-hours, low-paid, or no-paid work, is better all round than unemployment - and as far as this goes it may seem both morally just and politically justifiable. But it also assumes that the threat of even greater levels of penury is a legitimate incentive to those who are, by definition, already in hardship. The question is: do these kinds of measure actually work and/or do they represent a kind of moral remedy for an assumed or perceived moral failing?

I invite all to consider the following...

Half a million sanctions in welfare crackdown
Ministers have handed out half a million sanctions to jobseekers who have missed appointments or refused to work, official figures show.
Nov 2013

Benefit payments have been suspended 580,000 times to people who have failed to do enough to find work, turned down job offers or not turned up to JobCentre appointments since new rules were introduced in October last year.

The number of people being sanctioned under the new regime has risen by around ten per cent compared to last year.

Ministers said the figures showed the Government is ending a “something for nothing culture.” enefit payments have been suspended 580,000 times to people who have failed to do enough to find work, turned down job offers or not turned up to JobCentre appointments since new rules were introduced in October last year.

The number of people being sanctioned under the new regime has risen by around ten per cent compared to last year [2012].

Ministers said the figures showed the Government is ending a “something for nothing culture.”

continue >>

No evidence welfare sanctions work, says National Audit Office
Government has failed to measure whether sanctions represent value for money, while application varies widely, find auditors
Nov 2016

Sanctions on welfare payments which have allegedly caused thousands of claimants to fall into hardship and depression are being handed out without evidence that they actually work, Whitehall’s official spending watchdog has found.

The Department for Work and Pensions is also failing to monitor thousands of people whose benefits are being cut or withheld while many are being pushed outside the benefits system, said the National Audit Office.

Auditors concluded there has been a failure to measure whether the government is saving money while the application of the sanctions regime varies across the country and from job centre to job centre.

continues >>

N.B. Interestingly, the Daily Telegraph chose not to highlight the apparent cost-benefit failure of the sanctions system mentioned in the recent National Audit Office report, instead focusing on the number of particular sanctions and relating that in terms of One in four Jobseeker's Allowance claimants caught abusing benefits system as watchdog reveals chaos. Here we see that the apparent moral laxity of claimants is presented to the fore rather than exploring whether or not the system is actually achieving its aims.

[Forty Two]

Yes - though I'd note that without further qualification this does appear to imply that choosing to be poor or remain poor becomes an immoral act, as if work itself is a route to moral improvement and that a pay cheque represents a moral good.

I would suggest that a paycheck or cheque is neither moral nor immoral. However, the act of negligently causing oneself to lose a paycheck can be, if one has others depending on one, or if one as a result takes handouts or subsidies in lieu of it.

Being poor or choosing to be poor would, in my view, only be an immoral act if it hurts others, or causes the person choosing to be poor to become a burden on others.

However (!), here I think we have to distinguish between individual circumstances and a moral assessment of the individual and the more general, but no less explicit, moral judgement of 'the poor' as a nominal group. What I'm interested in here are the attitudes and assumptions about the moral status of poverty and the poor and how they inform wider social and political views about what could and couldn't, should and shouldn't do about addressing issues around poverty.

Well, it would not be appropriate to take a view of individual poor people and extrapolate that or induce a conclusion as to poor people in general. That kind of inductive reasoning does not follow. Some people may hold moral judgments about "the poor," but I find those moral judgments to be illogical under my definition of morality - my premises. If, however, someone's morality holds that it is a "good" to be unpoor, then their moral code would conclude poor people in general to be immoral.

In my view, the only moral judgments that can properly be made are on an individual basis. Nobody is moral by association. Using a pop culture example, if you look at the James J. Braddock character in the movie Cinderella Man, he was dirt poor. He almost lost his kids because due to the depression he was breaking his body and spirit to support them, but the money and paying employment just was not there. Was he "immoral?" No, because he did everything he reasonably could do to handle the situation. He went on the dole, but when he recouped his money due to boxing, he went back to the welfare office and paid it all back. That's eminently moral, despite being poor.

For example, the attitude that the poor could pay their way if they really wanted to and that social safety nets merely encourage the impoverished towards indolence.

Well, we can't really say anything in terms of "the poor" being able to do X, Y or Z. The group known as the poor is an undefined set, and is not an organization that functions as a unit. They as a group are not a moral actor. Each individual poor person is a moral actor.

There are certainly some poor individuals who could, if they really wanted to, pay their way. Others not. One cannot generalize individual behaviors and states of mind.

Whether a social safety net encourages indolence is not related to whether poor people are immoral. An argument for why a social safety net encourages indolence depends on the safety net in question. If, for example, welfare was $40,000 per year right now, all else being equal, and one lost their welfare if one got any job, then one would be "encouraged" to avoid any employment not paying significantly more than $40,000 per year. That's just common sense. A person can make $40k sitting home, or one can make $40k commuting to work every day and putting in 40+ hours per week. What's the rational thing to do? However, safety nets can be built in ways that do minimize this kind of incentive.

If one is of the view that the poor primarily find themselves in a state of impoverishment by their own hand or due to some innate lack of character, resolve or fortitude, that they are shirkers not workers, or skivers not strivers, or that the poor comprise a dependency- or handout-culture, etc, then assistance programs soon begin to look like a reward for freeloaders who can't be bothered to make their own way in life - getting free money for sitting on your arse all day watching telly, or whatever. Once that judgement is made then one can easily see how other views might follow...

Sure, but that all depends on what one's moral values are. If one holds to moral values of thrift, hard work, honesty, and such, then one can see moral virtue in a man being poor. Take another example from pop culture - the movie The Legend of Bagger Vance with Wil Smith and Matt Damon. The main character as a small boy is embarrassed by his father, who went bankrupt and became a street sweeper in the depression. The small boy is later informed that his father refused to go bankrupt to avoid screwing the people that he owed money to, and he worked his ass off to pay off all those people, despite himself losing everything, and he went to work as a street sweeper to earn an honest dollar. He was told to be proud of his father, who was an honorable man.

Morality is individual.

In my view, people who view "the poor" as collectively immoral are themselves immoral, because they are imposing moral guilt by association.

Views like, the assisted poor actually have it too easy and because of a lack of some proper component of hardship or adversity they also lack a proper incentive to betterment. To remedy this requires some form of moral correction to be applied, something to incentivise the feckless up off their arses, away from their tellies, and out in to the so-called 'real world of work' and responsibility.

This, to me, again can only be judged individually. If there is a person who is indolent and gaming the system to live off the sweat of other people's brows, then that person is morally culpable. However, that cannot be extended to say that all person who are poor are equally morally culpable, because there are going to be other individuals in other situations.

The notion of grouping people into identity groups, in this case, the poor, is pernicious.

The simplest form this kind of moral correction can take is to reduce or remove financial assistance - in effect, increasing the level of deprivation--making the poor poorer than they would have been otherwise--is not just seen as a legitimate means of incentivising the poor towards independence, but it is also cited as building character by encouraging self-reliance.

And, it may be. Necessity is the mother of invention. If you need food, you're going to get out there and find it. However, the flip side is that some people (a) will be unable for reasons beyond their control to succeed at finding it, and (b) by the luck of happenstance or fortunes of fate not get what they need. So, the safety net ends up protecting the shiftless and the diligent alike. We need not, however, pretend that "the poor" are all of one and none of the other.

Where society is uncomfortable with basically doing nothing to assist those in the direst need, or perhaps where it is at least willing to acknowledge that some people are poor despite their best intentions and efforts not to be, then strict conditionalities might be applied to assistance programs to, say, place a time limit or financial cap on qualifying for assistance programs, or to require people to undertake mandatory training, to apply for n-number of vacant positions, or to look for work out-of-area, to undertake mandatory but unpaid work to qualify for basic assistance, and/or to be sternly sanctioned or penalised if-and-when people fail to meet such conditions. These types of conditionalities are the basis of the UK's unemployment and welfare system btw.

I'm sure there are many reasonable ways to do it. I see our culture as moving towards a minimum basic income system -- one proposed a long time ago by Freidrich Hayek and others.

Now in all that, the assumption is that employment, even low-rate-low-hours, low-paid, or no-paid work, is better all round than unemployment - and as far as this goes it may seem both morally just and politically justifiable. But it also assumes that the threat of even greater levels of penury is a legitimate incentive to those who are, by definition, already in hardship. The question is: do these kinds of measure actually work and/or do they represent a kind of moral remedy for an assumed or perceived moral failing?

It may have nothing at all to do with morality. If the welfare were doled out according to just moral desert, then we'd have to have detailed reviews of individual reasons for being poor. However, generally that's ineffecient, and the dole is doled out regardless of merit, and pretty much based on some sort of documentary demonstration of need.

I invite all to consider the following...

Half a million sanctions in welfare crackdown
Ministers have handed out half a million sanctions to jobseekers who have missed appointments or refused to work, official figures show.
Nov 2013

Benefit payments have been suspended 580,000 times to people who have failed to do enough to find work, turned down job offers or not turned up to JobCentre appointments since new rules were introduced in October last year.

The number of people being sanctioned under the new regime has risen by around ten per cent compared to last year.

Ministers said the figures showed the Government is ending a “something for nothing culture.” enefit payments have been suspended 580,000 times to people who have failed to do enough to find work, turned down job offers or not turned up to JobCentre appointments since new rules were introduced in October last year.

The number of people being sanctioned under the new regime has risen by around ten per cent compared to last year [2012].

Ministers said the figures showed the Government is ending a “something for nothing culture.”

continue >>

No evidence welfare sanctions work, says National Audit Office
Government has failed to measure whether sanctions represent value for money, while application varies widely, find auditors
Nov 2016

Sanctions on welfare payments which have allegedly caused thousands of claimants to fall into hardship and depression are being handed out without evidence that they actually work, Whitehall’s official spending watchdog has found.

The Department for Work and Pensions is also failing to monitor thousands of people whose benefits are being cut or withheld while many are being pushed outside the benefits system, said the National Audit Office.

Auditors concluded there has been a failure to measure whether the government is saving money while the application of the sanctions regime varies across the country and from job centre to job centre.

continues >>

N.B. Interestingly, the Daily Telegraph chose not to highlight the apparent cost-benefit failure of the sanctions system mentioned in the recent National Audit Office report, instead focusing on the number of particular sanctions and relating that in terms of One in four Jobseeker's Allowance claimants caught abusing benefits system as watchdog reveals chaos. Here we see that the apparent moral laxity of claimants is presented to the fore rather than exploring whether or not the system is actually achieving its aims.

From an issue of morality perspective, each individual is his own moral actor. So, it all depends what they're doing and what their mental state is.

[Brian Peacock]

Just to be clear, I am no fan of generalising from the particular. However, it has to be acknowledged that nominal groups are subject to broad generalisation. As I said, I'm interested in certain views and attitudes towards the nominal group 'the poor', views and attitudes to do with the moral status of poverty and the poor, and which, one has to admit, informs certain social-political arguments rooted in assumptions about the type and kind of people who comprise or typify that group.

'Morality is individual' may be an ideal approach, and ethically speaking at least it deals with the specifics of particular circumstances, but in practice morality is embedded in wider social-cultural-political concerns, concepts, values and standards. What I note is itself a gerneral trend in attitudes from a particular section of society towards another. For some people guilt by association is a legitimate political tactic, one used to shift or manipulate general perceptions and thinking about a particular group, a particular set of problems, and a particular set of remedies. The people I'm referring to here are those who seek to roll back or withdraw social assistance that aims to help and support that nominal group, 'the poor', based on a moral assessment of the group - whether you or I think that this is a rational or ethical thing to do, or not. Their views are not promoted on the basis of an individual assessment of individuals but by generalised moral arguments which are formed, refined, and communicated with a particular aim in mind.

[Sean Hayden]

That people feel free to wonder at length about what's wrong with the poor is very telling don't you think? I think the poor to a large extent have taken into their beliefs about themselves all that 'wondering'.

[laklak]

Work houses, that's the ticket.

[Svartalf]

Fuck you, but in a clean, non homo way.

[Jason]

No. It's a lifestyle decision.

[Brian Peacock]

While Forty Two went to some efforts to outline the moral conditions by which we might regard someone as morally irreproachable or culpable for their own (and perhaps their familial) state of poverty, conditions which essentially define the distinction between the 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor, others consider all state-administered assistance programs for those in dire need or hardship as an immoral imposition on all those who do not require assistance. For example...

What Is Welfare?

Welfare — the extortion of wealth from those who produce by the “humanitarians” in government, to be distributed to those who consume (but do not produce), is to render the producers slaves and the “humanitarians” thieves. Whether the thief is wearing a ski mask, or is a dressed in a pinstripe suit with the letters IRS labeled on it, does not change the nature of their actions in principle: both are looters as both are initiators of force. With one exception, the man wearing the ski mask is more honest: he is not a big enough hypocrite to tell the citizen that he is robbing him of his hard earned wealth “for his own good”, or even worse “for the good of the people.”

LINK

Such attitudes don't even argue against the idea of a valid distinction between the 'deserving' and the 'undeserving' poor, they declare the entire notion irrelevant. By these lights, the hardship or needs of any section of society are a private matter best left to philanthropic organisations, the state has no interests in or obligations to the well-being and/or welfare of citizens who do not meet the prerequisite economic mark (of not requiring assistance), and the fluctuating conditions of the economy and labour markets remains wilfully unacknowldged as having any effect on either poverty or the poor. This level of, imo, ethical impoverishment ignores the fact that historically most state-administered assistance programs were developed and implemented precisely because the supply of charitable assistance far outstripped demand during times of widespread economic depression.

[Hermit]

Seth said that too. He said so on many occasions that (no matter whether a poor person is deserving or undeserving) all help must be voluntary. Else such support is theft.

[JimC]

One pragmatic reason for states to provide a reasonable safety net is to decrease the number of desperate, disaffected people who may revolt or at least become criminals by necessity.

(this does not mean to ignore other more principled, ethical reasons)

[pErvinalia]

I don't understand Brian. Why is he waisting words on such an inane thread when he could be contributing thoughts on my blog posts, or indeed writing his own (non-inane) blog posts?

[Jason]

Brian has a blog? Oh share, do!

[pErvinalia]

No. He'd rather respond to weirdos here at the arse end of the internet.

[Jason]

It is rather like the restaurant at the end of the universe isn't it? Having experienced what the rest of the universe has to offer I hold the clientele here in special regard. Even you.