Part of the social contract is that those who have, have an obligation to care about and take care of those who do not; and those who do not, have an obligation not to abuse that care.
Each party has an “entitlement” and a “duty” created by this obligation. The haves have a duty of care and an entitlement that this care will not be abused. The have nots have an entitlement to that care, and a duty not to abuse it.
The exact conditions of this contract - how much care, what constitutes abuse, etc. - are worked out in the political arena.
But a contract has to be freely entered into to be valid. Most people freely enter into the social contract not out of altruism or fear, but because they see themselves at some risk of becoming “have nots” and therefore in need of help. Those who think they’ll never need help, and those who think they’ll always need help, mess things up.
No, I do believe in charity. However, the people who claim that we don’t owe the less fortunate anything are operating from a completely amoral perspective at best. There’s not much point in appealing to the ethics or compassion of someone who would let millions starve to death.
So, you think Dickensian England was the height of civilization? They tried your solution then. Charity never will cover everyone, never has, never will. I think that each person, just by being a person, deserves someplace to sleep and enough food to not starve, and a chance to do better, which is a far cry from equality of outcomes. If you don’t, and conservatives seem not to believe this in general, then we get to the simple fact that many people won’t consent to die in silence, but will steal from those who have.
The social contract is shrink-wrapped - we enter into it by living in society. You are excused from it if you go live in the woods by yourself, or move to Somalia, otherwise you are a willing signatory.
I LOVE it! One very rarely sees the concept of ‘duty’ in the public discourse these days, especially as a natural counterpart to ‘entitlement’. Why do so many people these days seem to lack a sense of duty?
Because the idea of “duty” got perverted. Thanks to some regrettable military misadventures, duty came to mean reflexive obedience, overriding ethics, morals, or conscience.
If you can convince us reflexive obedience would be a good remedy for entitlement, take as much space below as you like…
Har de har har har! I’m still trying to figure out the story of Isaac in response to Cecil’s “Is there a God?” Basically Abraham behaves out of sheer religious faith with reflexive obedience to the command to slaughter Isaac. This is against logos, as Abraham had no other children and Isaac was supposed to beget the tribes of Israel. It is against ethos, as clearly there are serious moral issues involved with sacrificing one’s child on an altar. And it is against pathos, since ethical reasoning aside, the whole story just makes people sad if they really get the image of Abraham whacking Isaac with an ax.
So! Abraham is willing to cast aside our three dialectic methods in favor of faith. But as Rembrant represents here, God sends His angel to physically intervene with Abraham’s actions, over-riding his faith.
So, this Bible story throws the dialectic methods and faith on the dustbin as tools for the determination of truth. None of them provides The Answer, which is (in the context of the story I beg you to understand) God’s will, about to be crossed by the ignorance of His best actors. One could ask if Abraham succeeded in tempting God into acting to restrain him.
Well anyway I am not now prepared to explain exactly how the cosmological argument implies a necessary property of non-duality in either the universe, a god, or both, so I could of course be wrong. But I do state that individuals who experience non-duality and see for themselves would take duty as a matter-of-course, really a trivial point that might rarely be mentioned.
The entitled probably know who they are [set 1]. Here on planet Earth, the law defines categories and people falling within them receive benefits [set 2]. I think a lot of arguments are manufactured on the Right over the technical difference between the truly entitled and Man’s best efforts to formally address the issue.
I’d say quit shaming entitlement, as it isn’t necessarily immoral nor illogical, and through a mass-media innocent persons are sure to take the shaming message the wrong way.
Encourage more respect for duty. Lots of successful people are major positive influences, and this isn’t always (and really shouldn’t be always) recognized.
No, Der Trihs believes in a social contract as a moral obligation.
Let me flip it. There is no “real,” morally absolute, social obligation to provide for one’s fellow man. The Social Darwinist and the Classical Liberal may justifiably say that such a policy is unnatural & possibly unsustainable. But at the same time, there is no “real,” morally absolute, obligation for natural man to follow any law of property or propriety.
Der Trihs is right: Without any commitment of society to their well-being, men are not to be expected to feel a vested interest in society.
Rev. Malthus was probably also right: There are hard limits to the number of human beings we can support on this earth at any one time.
Ergo:
A1. So long as the dispossessed are few enough that they can be disposed of quietly, the rulers of society can imprison or kill them while enjoying broad popular support, and this is pragmatic.
A2. Meanwhile, it is utterly moral and right from the point of view of those dispossessed persons to fight for their own existence against other humans who are, after all, dispossessing them for the sake of their own existence; even to the point of mass murder.
B1. But should the population grow too quickly and the natural resource base become degraded, we may find a significant portion of the population is unsupportable. The authorities will find it more difficult to dispose of 25%+ of the population.
B2. And that 25%+ are just as much human beings as the traditional authorities, and have as much right to steal and kill for their existence as the authorities do to concoct theories of property to shut them out of the commons or to imprison them as “troublemakers.”
We face an era of profound population crisis. Logic dictates that I should support the side that is bloodthirsty enough to take the future. Political considerations suggest I should be more oblique about it in normal discourse, but in a Great Debate I may as well be blunt. The side that successfully articulates why it should eliminate and supplant its enemies is the likely victor and the probable best possible outcome.
So, no, Der Trihs is probably, sadly, wrong. The young generation probably can’t afford to seek entitlement in a peaceable redistribution, they should instead be usurping the position of those in power now, with murderous methods.
The entitlement is natural, the method of the beggar is less sustainable than the method of the conqueror. And right now the conqueror is the present ruling class, the prison-industrial complex, and the hoarders of intellectual property. If Strength is the first necessary virtue, then I must concede they are winning. But they are insecure in their present restraint.
One day it will come to bloody revolution, it can do no other.
No, the point of the story is that, if you have Faith, it will all work out. Truth isn’t even considered. The entire story exists to say good things about Abraham, in that he would do something that none of us would be willing to do. Thus he is a man of great faith and therefore a great leader of the religious movement.
To argue that God intended Abraham to make the sacrifice contradicts the plain text of the story. As it says, God was testing Abraham to see if his faith was strong enough to receive his blessing. Remember, he has already failed once by having a son with his handmaiden.
You could make the argument with Moses and his constant pleadings for his people not to be punished. There, the text does seem to say that he literally changed God’s mind. But not here.
foolsguinea, you define morality oddly. Everything you articulate is exactly why the social contract is moral. The revolution is a bad outcome, even for the rich. It is far better not to inspire such murderous methods.
And what is good for the majority of people is what’s moral.
I don’t think that feeling the world owes you the basics of life: food, clean water, shelter, and clothing is an unreasonable position. We have arranged our society and laws so that the natural gathering and procurement of these basics is impossible in most habitable regions. Someone who does not wish to participate within society does not have an option to go and lead a natural life in a park somewhere. We have enforced restrictions on land, water, plant and animal gathering, fires and building structures. All of which are designed, in part, to prevent people from pursuing individualistic, (or familial group/ nano-tribal) lives and encourage them to live collectively which has a far greater benefit for all.
That does not mean that I, or they believe that they are entitled to nice meals three times a day, lovely apartments with a view, fancy coffee drinks, stylish clothes, etc… It means that they have recognized that there really is no “opt-out” other than death or modern homelessness and they believe that we should be doing a lot better. It means that we recognize every other person as a human being with thoughts, feelings, and a desire to live like our own.
The word contract shouldn’t be used for something you didn’t enter freely. Once you’re mature enough to understand what it is, you already have a stake in it. Moving away doesn’t strike me as a just course of action. When a billionaire moves to Bermuda to get out of paying taxes, that strikes me as quitting when you’re ahead.
What is really being debated in this thread isn’t whether you should help people who need it. Trivially, everyone agrees with that. The debate is whether “society” should have a right to collectively decide who needs help and who must offer it, and if so, who decides, who pays, who receives, and how much under what conditions. That is a much more complicated question.
It is a deeply ambiguous story if you learn it in the fundamentalist way, I grant you. But that’s the way most people in White Christian Northern European/American cultures learned it - without your added dimension of debate or deeper understanding.
I absolutely agree, only I would say it has been taken wrongly - so widely and for so long that it has compromised society’s moral code.
Again, though, the mass media and traditional Christian teaching will lead too many to interpret duty as something that is abovelogos, pathos, and ethos - qualities all too few know about to begin with, and that a literal reading of the Bible probably could not explain to them.
Because positive and negative reciprocation is necessary for society to function. In psychological studies where people are able to enjoy rewards w/o putting in any work or risk other people lose interest in cooperating since the system breaks down.
On the other hand I do think entitlement makes the world better. If people in the middle east didn’t think they were entitled to live in representative governments they wouldn’t be rioting right now. If people didn’t think the elderly were entitled to having dignity and security then we wouldn’t have health care and pensions for them.
I know conservatives cannot help their knee jerking with the above statements, but do you totally deny the concept of a contract? If I put in 2 good weeks at work, am I not entitled to a paycheck at the agreed upon rate? If I dutifully pay my medical insurance premiums, am I not entitled to medical care? If I work under a certain pension agreement until retirement, am I not entitled to collect it?
On the other hand, I guess the reasoning could be applied to overpaid bankers… let’s just go confiscate all their stuff to pay off the public debt, and if they complain, we just tell them they should shut up because they have their life, their liberty, and they’re free to go pursue some more happiness if they want.
However I don’t see the system working better with nothing but negatives. If someone were to run a psychological study where no matter what they did a guy kept hitting the participants with a stick, the probable end result would be a bunch of experimental psychologists getting beaten to a pulp. People have no reason to go along with the system if doing so only leads to suffering and death.
And your argument also assumes that there’s no room for anything between “give them everything they want” and “let them starve”. Living in poverty is a negative experience even if you aren’t starving to death.
