Something I’ve been thinking about:

To what degree are our moral obligations to provide help and assistance to strangers reduced because those strangers are likely to be morally bad people?

Consider a hypothetical. You have a sandwich you don’t need. There are two starving people you could feed. One is a moral saint and the other is a rotten scoundrel. Seems like you should feed the saint rather than the scoundrel. (As a saint myself, I can tell you that’s what the saint would say.)

So far this just shows that you should prefer one to the other. But what if we change the situation a bit? You have $2200. You can use it either to buy yourself an awesome new Mesa TC100, which you’ll enjoy a great deal, or to feed Bob for two months. Bob is a rotten, vile person. Imagine he’s a child molester, rapist, or whatnot. Seems like you have good enough reason to ignore Bob’s plight. It’s not merely that you should feed starving kids over Bob, but rather you are morally permitted to spend the money on toys you don’t need rather than saving Bob’s life. Or, if you want, imagine it’s the choice between buying toys you don’t need for yourself versus helping to alleviate Bob’s suffering, if not literally saving him from dying.

Perhaps you disagree with this point. I have no further argument if you disagree, though I find your disagreement unreasonable. (Perhaps if I added enough wrongdoing to Bob’s list of sins, you’d agree?)

If you agree with this point, what if we change the situation a bit more. Imagine Bob has never done anything evil, but only because he hasn’t had the chance. If he could get away with it, he would murder his neighbors, molest their kids, steal from the hungry, install himself as dictator, and whatnot. He is disposed to do great evil, but hasn’t done so only by pure moral luck. He’s never been in a situation where he could perform these evils free of punishment. He has no intention of improving his moral character.

Again, seems to me that if you knew this about Bob, your duties of assistance toward him would be quite weak. Maybe you should help him reform if he asks for it (which by hypothesis he won’t), but you don’t owe him a sandwich to keep him alive if he’s not trying to change. Bob is an evil person, though he has not yet done anything evil. We owe evil people less. You are free to, say, spend the money on toys for yourself rather than keep him alive through your charity. Indeed, you probably are obligated to refrain from helping keep Bob alive.

Perhaps you disagree with this point too. I have no further argument to convince you if you disagree, though again I find disagreement unreasonable. I have difficulty imagining why someone would think otherwise. (Someone might cite Kant, but A) Kant doesn’t agree with you, and B) Kant’s moral theory is bad anyway.)

Let’s say you’re on board. Then you agree, in some way, that our obligations to provide assistance to others depends in part on their character, on what they are disposed to do. How you interpret that might be different from how I do. You could imagine a graph with obligations to help as the y-axis and moral character as the x-axis, and then a variety of curves. Perhaps y is a linear function of x. Perhaps y rises with x but then plateaus. Perhaps y shows diminishing returns.

Now apply this to typical people. We have good evidence from most people are morally very bad. For instance, consider all the abundant evidence about how politics makes most people behave. Their behavior is execrable. Or consider Milgram experiments and experiments like them. (I realize Gina Perry’s work casts doubt upon the original experiment, but for reasons I won’t get into here, I am not fully convinced. Even if we take her investigation at face value, we still get the result that 1/3rd of people will murder someone else because a person in a white lab coat told them to do so.) Most people are disposed to be utter conformists and to obey evil authority. Nearly all our neighbors are disposed to be obedient concentration camp guards; they only reason they haven’t done that is because, thanks to moral luck, they haven’t been in such a situation. Further, most of people’s apparently altruistic behavior is in fact motivated by self-interest. (See Simler and Hanson’s Elephant in the Brain.) People in general have quite bad moral character, but most of them haven’t done anything particularly bad because they haven’t had the opportunity. (I take Ariely’s Honest Truth about Dishonesty to be the strongest evidence against this claim.)

This seems like a good reason to discount our estimates of what kinds of assistance we owe them.