Bleeding Hearts and the Undeserving Poor

By On March 10, 2011 · 25 Comments · In Libertarianism, Social Justice

Over at Econlog, Bryan Caplan responds to Jason’s query about why libertarians are so often seen as callous with another possible explanation: libertarians, he says, are “relatively unafraid to … make a distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor.”  That is, libertarians are willing to say that some poor people deserve our help and others do not.  Perhaps people should (voluntarily) help those who are poor through sheer brute luck.  But those who are poor because of laziness or other forms of moral vice are another story.  To shield such persons from the effects of their folly, as Herbert Spencer (perhaps Jason’s missing callous libertarian?) said in another context, is to ensure that the world is filled with fools.

What should us bleeding heart libertarians think about this distinction?    Is it incompatible with a libertarian commitment to social justice, as we’ve described that elsewhere on this blog?

The short answer is that it is not incompatible.   But we should recognize that there are actually two important questions to ask about the distinction.  The first is whether the distinction itself is sound.  The second is how, if at all, the distinction should be reflected in public policy.

Can we soundly distinguish between the deserving and undeserving poor?

There’s a bit of reasoning in John Rawls’ Theory of Justice that might lead us to conclude that we can not.  Whether we are rich or poor, Rawls argues, is determined by our natural abilities and our social environment.  But neither of these are under our control, and both are thus “arbitrary from a moral point of view.”  Even our willingness to work hard and take risks, he says, “is itself dependent upon happy family and social circumstances.”

But this is the kind of metaphysical speculation about determinism that no one can take seriously at the level of practice.  And this is why the mainstream of the egalitarian tradition has rejected it.  People like Ronald Dworkin, Elizabeth Anderson, Will Kymlicka, and Richard Arneson have very different views about what equality means, but they all hold that our lot in life should be in some significant way sensitive to the choices we make.  Maybe there is no one that deserves to be left to starve in the street – or maybe a decent society would not allow such persons to starve even if they did deserve it – but the nature and strength of the claim one has on others for assistance surely depends on the extent to which one has tried to take responsibility for oneself.

How (if at all) should public policy reflect this distinction?

But the mere fact that there is a valid moral distinction to be made does not entail that we want our public policies to make it.  It is, after all, difficult to discern between the deserving and the undeserving – maybe especially for governments, but for private charities too.  And any measures we take to diminish the likelihood of false positives – people getting welfare who don’t deserve it – will probably increase the likelihood of false negatives – people not getting welfare who should.  Most plausible systems of morality, I should think, will hold the latter consequence to be much more troubling than the former.

And there are other problems with implementing the distinction too.  It’s costly, for one.  And it requires nosing around in people’s private affairs.  So one can understand why someone like  Charles Murray would advocate a Universal Basic Income.  I myself have argued elsewhere that there is a reasonably strong case to be made for such a policy on classical liberal grounds.  Not, perhaps, as a first-best alternative.  But as a replacement for the current welfare state, its attractions are significant.

Tagged with: •
 
  • http://aaeblog.com Roderick T. Long

    Shouldn’t we also make a distinction between the deserving and the undeserving rich?

  • http://profile.typepad.com/6p0147e2f357f9970b Matt Zwolinski

    I should think so. The question is, just what do the boys at Bear Stearns deserve?

  • http://profile.typepad.com/jtaylor1 James Stacey Taylor

    Shouldn’t the pertinent distinction concerning the rich be between those whose wealth is productive, and those whose is not? So, one might be an undeserving wealthy person, but one’s wealth is (either through one’s own efforts or those of one’s advisors) very productive!

  • b_a

    “And any measures we take to diminish the likelihood of false positives – people getting welfare who don’t deserve it – will probably increase the likelihood of false negatives – people not getting welfare who should. Most plausible systems of morality, I should think, will hold the latter consequence to be much more troubling than the former.”

    As you yourself argue, there are costs and benefits to alternative conceivable schemes of social insurance (voluntary or tax-financed).

    Surely, the legitimacy of any such arrangement depends on the costs and benefits, as determined by technology and the level of wealth of society, and as weighed and evaluated by the citizens, and not in the “plausibility” of a moral system as evaluated by a philosopher?

  • http://profile.typepad.com/6p0147e2f357f9970b Matt Zwolinski

    b_a: Seems like a false dichotomy to me. Of course, I think the costs and benefits of alternative policies are relevant. But I don’t know how we’re supposed to begin determining what counts as a “cost” or a “benefit,” or the way in which they should be weighed against each other, without thinking about morality. My claim in the passage you quoted, however, was that false negatives seem more troublesome than false positives on almost *any* system of morality that people advocate nowadays. So we don’t have to adjudicate between them to recognize this point. (What I mean by this, however, is that a certain number of false negatives is more troubling than the same number of false positives. I’m certainly willing to grant that a system with a very large number of false positives might be more troubling than a system with a small number of false negatives.)

  • Mike Valdman

    I’m not sure the distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor makes sense. You say that skepticism about this distinction is based on the kind of metaphysical speculation no one can take seriously at the level of practice. I’m not sure that is right, but if it were I’d be inclined to say that the alternative view would be based on the kind of metaphysical speculation no one can take seriously at the level of theory! And I think we can preserve the idea that people’s life prospects should be sensitive to their choices without endorsing the idea that their prospects should be desert-sensitive. After all, there are sound utilitarian reasons for maintaining a link between life prospects and choice.

  • http://profile.typepad.com/6p0147e2f357f9970b Matt Zwolinski

    Mike: I’m curious to hear more! Does the distinction seem problematic to you for some sort of hard deterministic reasons? Or something else?

  • http://profile.typepad.com/theotherchuckd TheOtherChuckD

    Whether the poor are deserving or undeserving matters only if you treat the safety net as some sort of charity and not a hard-nosed attempt to maximize overall wealth and stability.

    Does the guy who can’t hold down a job because he’s strung out on herion all the time “deserve” your help? Since nobody stuck a needle into his arm without his permission, the natural reaction would be to say no.

    But when he’s ripping the copper wiring out of construction sites to sell for pennies on the dollar and the cost of even the night watchman state incarcerating him for it is very high, perhaps it might make some sense to cough up a few bucks for rehab.

    When he’s spending money on drugs instead of food for his daughter, he is reducing the girl’s potential for intelligence and lifelong health through malnutrition and neglect. Perhaps subsidized school lunches and child protective services make sense.

    Conversely, money can be spent on the most deserving and heartwrenching poor people in a way that makes everyone worse off. Imagine a program designed to get promising students out of bad schools and bad neighborhoods by buying them houses in rich suburbs. As soon as that first property tax bill comes, the family is back in the ghetto and the house sits empty.

    The more the discussion hinges on who deserves what, the more you slip into larger issues of what is “earned” and “unearned” and the more likely you are to have all capital and all individuals evaluatd by the public policy morality police.

  • Mark LeBar

    Matt, in what way have you not just made a case for distributed decision-making about deserving and undeserving poor? That is, for allowing those who will contribute to their relief to make their own (and heterogeneous) decisions about where the help is deserved and where it is not? Of course, that’s likely not compatible with trying to establish top-down institutions for welfare as social justice views require.

  • http://profile.typepad.com/danielshapiro Daniel Shapiro

    Matt, a few comments:

    1. The success of welfare reform in the United States in reducing the number of people on welfare rolls and improving the lot of many of those former recipients, particularly single mothers (for empirical evidence, see my book chapter 6, section 4.3)would suggest that placing some kinds of conditions upon receiving aid can be done effectively. [Caveat--my data stopped at 2006] It may have been a crude way of tracking the deserving/undeserving distinction, but tying welfare to the willingess of able-bodied adults to work is not a bad proxy.
    2. Having said that, I would second Mark Le Bar’s point. There’s a lot of empirical evidence from private charities and mutual aid societies prior to the rise of the welfare state did make distinctions between the deserving and undeserving recipients. The literature on mutual aid societies is particularly interesting since it suggest when poor people get together and provide organizations for providing services that today are done by the state, they insist upon the deserving/undeserving distinction. See David Beito’s work on this. http://www.amazon.com/Mutual-Aid-Welfare-State-Fraternal/dp/0807848417?tag=bleedheartlib-20

    I plan to post on this.

  • conchis

    “But this is the kind of metaphysical speculation about determinism that no one can take seriously at the level of practice.”

    The seems like more assertion than argument. There are obvious practical reasons to want to make individuals’ outcomes sensitive to their choices (e.g. the need to set appropriate incentives). But that’s not the same thing at all as an argument that individuals who make poor choices deserve their lot.

  • John V

    While I am not against a safety net provided by the state, I have come to find credible the idea that people in true need who have fallen on genuine bad luck would be more willing to seek through alternate means of help. Quite an irony when we look at the idea of the OP.

    Several reasons:

    These poor folks are usually not lazy people and likely come from good families who probably have a better probability of being able to provide some assistance.

    I also think they’d be more likely to seek help from a church or other private charity because they know it’s temporary. By that, I mean that they will not plan to use those private resources to avoid helping themselves while state programs are impersonal and can leave people able to collect assistance without damaging their pride.

    I dunno. Just a thought.

    I say this because this past christmas, I donated to a church initiative that helped get christmas presents for needy parents. Being a relatively un-religious person who doesn’t attend church, I was actually unaware of the size and scope of church charities. I saw people I knew there. I felt awful. One was one of my employees whose husband on disability and without paychecks for several weeks because of a fight with the insurance company over some matter. I had no idea. And I also know that they weren’t seeking public assistance. It’s just the kind of people they are. But anyway, while speaking to the coordinator, I asked about what they do all year out of curiosity. I was genuinely surprised at the amount and variety of help and the generosity of the parishiners who made it happen with donations on top of what the church spent.

  • MadRocketScientist

    “And it requires nosing around in people’s private affairs.”

    Why is this a bad thing? I mean, if you are asking society for a hand-up/hand-out, why doesn’t society have a right to be certain it’s getting something for it’s investment?

  • http://www.liveloud.net Doug

    I think the extent to which social justice can be achieved and still remain social and just depends on the extent to which people are free to meet the needs of those who are in need. If people are fed, clothed, and otherwise cared for, is it not more socially just that this outcome is achieved through voluntary means rather than coercive?

  • M

    “Deserving poor” could mean a number of different things which it’s important to disentangle. One might believe that people should be free to make reassures between leisure time, compensating differentials of one’s occupation, and goods/services, and that sense certain “lazy” people (those who prefer to “consume” more leisure) should be comparatively “poor” (have less material goods) while being a relatively extreme egalitarian. A stronger claim is that there’s nothing unjust about certain people having preventably much worse lives than others overall.

    I think the extent to which social justice can be achieved and still remain social and just depends on the extent to which people are free to meet the needs of those who are in need. If people are fed, clothed, and otherwise cared for, is it not more socially just that this outcome is achieved through voluntary means rather than coercive?

    As with any normative question, this is an area where intuitions can and do differ. One could just as easily say that in the case that no one was coerced into helping the poor, society chose to leave their fate to the whims of those with means rather than upholding their dignity through the law. (To get into the frame of mind of someone who thinks coercive redistribution is a good thing, imagine a society where it was agreed that violent assault would meet with no censure. Even if in the unlikely case they experienced no violent assault, we might think there was something distasteful about their attitude.)

  • http://www.psychopolitik.com b-psycho

    MadRocketScientist: That’s a completely understandable sentiment, & I don’t have a problem with people holding it. It seems though that when put into practice, there’s a gradual deterioration until the point becomes not the aid but the control aspect.

  • http://profile.typepad.com/6p0147e2f357f9970b Matt Zwolinski

    Chuck: that makes good sense to me. We have good moral reasons to care about things other than deservingness in distributing aid. And we have good reason not to want institutions to try to base distributions on their assessment of deservingness – this, it now strikes me, is very similar to Hayek’s argument in Constitution of Liberty regarding why it’s a good thing that stuff in the market is not distributed according to (perceived) merit.

    Mark: I think the case for distributed decision making of that sort is pretty overwhelming. The questions are whether there should be some overarching institution that does not base its distributions on that distinction, and whether it should be administered by the state. As it stands, I don’t have a strong argument against a small state-administered safety net to catch those who “slip through the cracks” of private philanthropy. Such an institution might even be morally mandatory.

    Danny: Glad to hear you chime in, since you know a lot more about this kind of thing than I. Regarding your first point, though – and I ask this question from a position of ignorance – I wonder how capable we are of judging welfare reform’s success by looking at the measures you cite. Those numbers indicate that welfare reform has succeeded in getting people off welfare who maybe don’t belong there. But do we have any way of telling whether it’s doing this at the cost of keeping many people off welfare who do belong there (i.e. the deserving poor)? That, as I recall, was one of Robert Goodin’s major concerns in his book with Schmidtz (written shortly after the enactment of welfare reform) As for point #2, I agree wholeheartedly, though see my response to Mark, above.

    conchis: Yup, that’s exactly what it was! I do think there’s a good argument to be made in support of the claim, but I thought it would be a bit much in a blog post. I do think, though, that all but the most hardened of hard determinists are going to make use of considerations of desert in their practical judgments. Saying “they deserve it” is maybe a bit rough, for modern sensibilities. But how about, “it’s their fault”?

    John: Interesting story. From the numbers I’ve seen, though, it seems that most of the people who partake of state-provided assistance (even prior to welfare reform) stay on for a relatively short period of time, suggesting a temporary, luck-related cause rather than some more chronic condition. But Danny probably knows more about this than I?

    MRS: It might be justifiable, but it’s something I consider a moral cost. To the extent that deserving people have to go through demeaning scrutiny in order to receive assistance, just so we can weed out the undeserving, that’s something to regret – even if it’s something we ultimately conclude we have to put up with.

  • pedrovedro

    Let’s remember some history. Prior to the Great Depression, there was a much less comprehensive social safety net and it was mostly provided by private charities (except when it came to veterans) so that it was relatively easier to distinguish deserving from underserving poor. The various charities had their own definitions of deserving.

    Then, the Great Depression occurred. Private charities’ capabilities were overwhelmed almost immediately. Donations to support those charities dropped precipitously just when the charities were needed most, as did the the values of financial assets in foundations and endowments. And no one would lend to charities so that they could meet the great need in the moment and then raise the donations after recovery.

    People in need often couldn’t depend on support from family or friends either, because such a large proportion of the population was unemployed.

    Americans reacted with revulsion to this state of affairs, and quickly created unemployment insurance, social security, aid to families with dependent children, and maternal and child welfare. The designers of these programs realized that, in a situation like the Great Depression, private charity was inadequate. In particular, some entity had to borrow money to alleviate widespread poverty, and the only entity able to do so in such a situation was the federal government.

    It seems to me that, when discussing government assistance programs for the poor, right-libertarians try very hard to forget this history. Am I wrong?

  • conchis

    Matt: fair enough! My point was really just that thinking choices should shape outcomes !=> drawing a distinction between deserving and undeserving poor. Ergo the fact that everyone thinks choices should shape outcomes does not mean that everyone thinks desert is the reason why.

    FWIW, I don’t think desert per se should influence outcomes, and this doesn’t have much to do with determinism one way or the other. It’s just part of a fairly basic prioritarianism.

  • http://profile.typepad.com/drswaraj DrSwaraj

    Really enjoying your work Matt. I’ve never seen these issue taken up systematically like this. Thanks for what y’all are doing.

  • xephyr

    The libertarian (as opposed to BHL) question is not whether they are underserving poor, but whether some third party decides for me who is deserving.

    That is, if I make the two choices — whether my money goes somewhere and to whom that money goes — then my libertarian principles are intact. However, if another party makes that decision for me, then my principles are violated.

    Thus, the determination of deserving or undeserving is personal. I don’t see how that can be institutionalized, majority, plurality, nor consensus, without violating core values, ethics or morals of some “contributor.”

  • http://vanillapolitics.wordpress.com/ vanillapolitics

    I really like the philosophical quandry you take on in this post. It is such a difficult position, as a libertarian, to mantain that you have a soul, but allow for this vast grey area of defining where to draw the line. I highly recommend a great book, http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Night-Liz-Murray/dp/1846058708?tag=bleedheartlib-20, Liz Murray’s memoir from homeless to Harvard. It definitely contradicts John Rawls comments you made ” Even our willingness to work hard and take risks is itself dependent upon happy family and social circumstances.” I wrote a post about it back in december, http://vanillapolitics.wordpress.com/2010/12/14/breaking-night-and-welfare-reform/ . It still haunts me what some children go through, but yet regardless of the money put in, our system as it stands now, ultimately fails a decent percentage.

  • Pingback: Property, Liberty, and the Deserving Poor | Bleeding Heart Libertarians

  • Pingback: Property, Liberty, and the Deserving Poor | Ellen Wolchek

  • Pingback: David Friedman on Social Justice and Utilitarianism | Bleeding Heart Libertarians