I am also aware that because they were quick thoughts, this particular exchange may not do justice to Chuck's arguments. But hey, it's my blog and the idea is it's a place for my thoughts. So I'm doing it anyway. I will say that except for the cleaning up I mentioned, nothing has been changed or removed.
Chuck said:
One thing, it's not "their money." The money exists because the government provides services. Some services, like welfare, are considered moral services, strictly speaking that's hogwash. Such services are provided in the community interest in order, not out of morality.So I said:
Justice and community have a place in government, they aren't moral concepts which are beyond a government's realm, they are pragmatic concepts of order. Compassion is a real problem to ask a government for, especially one which is based on rules that are enforced (note always that 'force' is the root and root meaning).
One of the biggest obstacles to getting things done in America involves the misconception that morality has anything to do with government.
it's not "their money."Which had Chuck responding:
Money is simply a medium of exchange that enables an economy to reach beyond direct barter. In itself, it has no value; rather, it represents value, value of goods or services that by being represented by the same amount of money as other goods and services are taken to have the same worth. (Which of course breaks down very quickly when social values rather than solely economic ones come into play, but taking that into account right now makes things unnecessarily arcane.)
In that sense, the money you receive in exchange for goods or labor is yours, it is the value of what you have provided, value that can be used to obtain something of equal value from others now or at some point in the future. If you lived in a barter economy and at the end of a workweek you got paid in food rather than money, would you say that food is not really yours?
The same applies even to the cases of charity and welfare. I received a "Jeopardy" desk calendar for Christmas. It was a gift. Is is not mine?
Justice and community have a place in government, they aren't moral concepts.... Compassion is a real problem to ask a government for....
I have a hard time coming up with a concept of justice that does not involve morality, that does not involve a concept of right and wrong. If it's, as you seem to imply, merely a matter of maintaining order, then isn't the most ordered society, the most restricted, regulated, controlled, repressive society the most just?
And I don't ask governments to be compassionate. I ask the people of the society (and the living, breathing people who actually make up the government, who fill its offices and carry out its functions) to be compassionate and to use the government as a means to act on that compassion.
Which brings me to my last response.
the misconception that morality has anything to do with government
I have heard that argued many times; the first time was in support of the Vietnam War on the grounds that the government had decided that was the most efficient way to advance national interests - which themselves were calculated strictly on gain/loss, or, if you will, profit/loss.
I rejected that idea then, I reject it now. You'll note that I said that I see government, at its best, as the vehicle through which a people act on their ideals. I can't conceive of ideals that don't involve morality.
People act as though they earn money in a vacuum. They don't.And that leads to my long reply, posted here, not in comments:
As soon as you show me a government of any sort that doesn't rule by force I'll buy some idea of morality in government. People may have morals, but the functioning of government doesn't.
The morality of Vietnam was whatever someone's moral set determined it to be, it was flatly stupid. That is something different. War is not moral, [but] it also doesn't have to be stupid. Iraq was stupid, Afghanistan was necessary. There's a difference. I don't pretend Afghanistan was moral.
I'm going to leave aside the question of if the Afghanistan war was "necessary" and restrict myself to the original point, which was about government. I'm also going to make this, unless you ask a question or raise an entirely new point, my last on this.
I'm trying to puzzle out exactly what you're arguing here. I gather that you are using "force" in the sense of "obtaining unwilling compliance" and regarding that as if not immoral at least amoral. (Which, I note, is itself a moral judgment, a mirror image of one version of "might makes right.")
At first I thought you were saying that government and morality never overlap because government involves the use of such "force" and therefore government cannot be moral. But that leaves you unable to apply moral standards to any society and so unavoidably leads you to a place marked not only by anarchy (which I mean in the political sense of no government, not the popular sense of destructive chaos) but an utterly atomized society because you have no way to have any general community standards of behavior, since even in an anarchic society there are still various standards enforced - I use the word deliberately - by community action of some sort. Deny any society, any culture, the right to such force and it becomes the cliché law of the jungle, everyone out for themselves. Fail to deny that right and there is no way to define force used by a society against what it views as miscreants as acceptable but that same force used by a government in that same society against those same miscreants as unacceptable. The result is that all societies, every society, the very idea of society, by definition become immoral. I don't think that's what you meant.
The alternative is that you're saying that because government inevitably involves (immoral) force, moral questions about government actions become meaningless and must be left aside and only issues such as effectiveness at pursuing interests and "pragmatic concepts of order" can be addressed. As I said, that is an argument I have heard before.
But the fact is, even in the cases you cite about Iraq and Afghanistan, there are judgments of right and wrong, good and bad, judgments about one type of person - American - being more valuable, more worthy of protection, than another type of person - Afghan. The very act of going to war makes a moral judgment about the relative value of lives and societies.
The only escape from this is simply to define the question out of existence by saying that perceived self-interest, either individually or nationally, has nothing to do with morality. But that's just a verbal dodge, an example of what I call "hand-waving," responding to a question by waving it off rather than answering it. Of course self-interest is related to morality. It is a morality, it is an ethical standard in that it affects what actions can and can't be justified. And no, you can't say "it's not based on ethics, it's based on logic" because under it all is still the foundation of "this is the way it should be, this is what is right, what is proper," a foundation not based on logic but on conviction. (Which, it is true, is no different from any other ethical standard, all of which can be stripped down to some point where "this is right because it just is." Indeed, a lot of what was in the post that started this was a re-write of what I believe "just is" right. But that only serves to confirm my point.)
Consider that some years ago, I had someone suggest - not entirely jokingly - that people on welfare be killed. And I mean, after all, why not? They cost the rest of us money via taxes not only in the form of public support but also in the costs of providing basic public services (police, fire, and the like) for which they don't pay or at least don't pay their share. The subsidies they receive distort the true market value of commodities such as housing. If we tried to resolve that by simply ending public aid entirely, we'd risk creating a large number of people who in their desperation would turn to crime, which certainly would threaten the self-interest of the rest of us and the order of society as a whole. Thus, making it a capital offense to be on welfare would be not only advance both the self-interest of everyone else and society's interest in order, it would be an efficient way to do it.
So why don't we do it? Because it's wrong. Why do we offer whatever (inadequate) level of help we do to those in need even if we see no immediate benefit to ourselves from doing so? Because it's right. Self-interest, standing alone, would drive a different course of action, one that, no matter how you may wish to deny it, makes a judgment, a moral judgment, about the value - the inherent, unrelated-to-calculations-of-self-interest value - of those human lives. There are places self-interest can't reach and times when by producing an obviously immoral result it becomes an immoral practice.
You may accuse me of arguing by extremes and to some extent I am, but as you are arguing by absolutes, I don't feel embarrassed.
The bottom line here is that government, as I said at the very beginning, is a mechanism. It's a tool. In and of itself, it is no more moral or immoral than a hammer and like a hammer, what matters is how it is used. Using a hammer to make a cabinet is good. Using a hammer to commit murder is bad. Using a hammer to painlessly kill a pig for slaughter is either good or bad depending on if you're a vegetarian or not. I don't expect governments to "be" moral any more than I expect them, as I said earlier, to "be" compassionate - or any more than I expect a hammer to "be" moral. What I want is for the people in and out of government to be moral - and compassionate - and to use the government as a means to act on the ideals related to those morals - and that compassion. Referring to a desire for "moral" or "compassionate" government is merely shorthand for that that.
(I'll note here since I assume it would prove necessary at some point that we're talking about the concept of government; this in no way means that I would necessarily approve of or agree with either the moral code involved or the actions taken as a result.)
So do governments involve force? Yes, they do. But unless it is agreed that
- only government involves force, or
- the use of force at any level from the individual up is inherently and invariably immoral and unacceptable, or
- placing different values on the lives of different people based on where they live or how much money they have is not a moral judgment, or
- not only is government free from moral judgment but even the effects of its actions are likewise exempt,
every one of which I would reject as either patently false or failing the challenge of logic or both, there is no basis to say that moral questions can't be addressed to government actions. Governments may not "be" moral but they can by virtue of how they are used act morally or immorally (or, I suppose if you want to be more precise, can be used for moral or immoral ends) and so morality does indeed have something to do with government.
Again, I intend to make this my last on this exchange unless I'm asked a question or an entirely new point (one that's not merely an expansion on a previous one) is raised. Still, I do hope others (including Chuck) will feel free to comment here about the ideas involved.
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