Is it immoral to retain wealth in a world of extreme poverty and suffering?

Great Debates
1

There’s an article written years ago where the author argues that even if you obtained wealth in a moral way, that wouldn’t necessarily make it moral to retain it. He uses an analogy of someone obtaining an EpiPen that they don’t need and encountering a child having a severe allergic reaction. Very few people would say you wouldn’t be morally obligated to use the EpiPen and save the child’s life. It costs you nothing in a meaningful sense but it would cost the child everything if you refuse to help them. The argument is that the moral obligation is even greater if you have more money than you could possibly need to have a good life (millions and billions of dollars), even if the person (or people) in need in question isn’t physically in front of you.

He acknowledges that he isn’t asking people to make themselves paupers in the name of charity. Ideally, the state should properly take care of its citizens and eliminate the need for private citizens to give charity at all but as long as they don’t and the world is filled with such extreme poverty and unnecessary death, wealthy people are morally obligated to give money away to save and better countless lives.

Do you agree with the argument?

Why or why not?

2

I have observed that few people who achieve great wealth have any concerns about morality.

So your question is slightly a non-starter.

3

If we alter the economic system so the poor (other than disabled) receive wages sufficient to make them not in poverty, then both problems solve themselves without need to resort to the questionably practical notion of massive charity from the wealthy.

To clarify, my assumption is the disabled will always need to be supported by government funds raised by taxes since industry won’t be able to employ them and/or they aren’t physically or mentally capable of work. Same for the elderly and children lacking parents.

But the total number of those folks worldwide are a rounding error on the number of poor folks who’re poor because their wages don’t offer them any alternative.

4

I just read the article… its conclusion is:

The central point, however, is this: it is not justifiable to retain vast wealth. This is because that wealth has the potential to help people who are suffering, and by not helping them you are letting them suffer. It does not make a difference whether you earned the vast wealth. The point is that you have it. And whether or not we should raise the tax rates, or cap CEO pay, or rearrange the economic system, we should all be able to acknowledge, before we discuss anything else, that it is immoral to be rich. That much is clear.

I like their approach in thinking about the difference between earning wealth and retaining wealth, and agree that most ethical discussions get caught in the weeds around the former, while glossing over any questions about the latter.

Without getting myself bogged down in details, I generally agree with the position of the author. However, I have a few significant nits to pick.

As long as we are living in a society that rewards accumulation of wealth and is inherently dangerous for those who don’t, the threshold for “immoral wealth control” is quite high. The author says:

You can live very comfortably on $100,000 or so and have luxury and indulgence, so anything beyond is almost indisputably indefensible.

Which is just kind of… not true. Or it is true, but only when you squint in one particular way and not another. It’s also not clear if they’re talking about “having wealth valued at $100k” or “earning $100k/yr” which really muddies their argument. What about assets that fluctuate in value? Let’s say I have a home that increased in value $400k over the last five years (not uncommon in my area). How ought I address that immoral accumulation of hundreds of thousands of dollars of wealth? If I’ve been giving up my wealth, but then run into an emergency (health, environmental) or simply an economic shift that requires me to spend an additional $10k a year on insurance premiums that I can’t afford, do I sell my house and move my family into a rental? Is that my moral obligation?

In a social/economic structure that does not protect people from catastrophic loss when faced with an emergency (medical, environmental), it’s hard to point to someone who has saved a few hundred thousand, or a million or two to live off of for their last 20-30 years of life and call that immoral.

The scope of comparison is undefined. Is the amount of wealth that qualifies as immoral relative to the wealth of the globe? Of one’s nation? One’s state? I think we live in a time in which we have been robbed of the ability to be ethically consistent or morally true with regards to wealth distribution. Economic engagement across wealth divides (ie, buying my shirt that was made in a factory in Vietnam for pennies) has put us all in a position where we rely on our wealth to extract resources from the less wealthy. Our system demands this of us.

Basically, I think they’re on the right track, but they have a very un-examined concept of what it means to be rich outside of the top 5-10%. I also think the idea of personal moral responsibility (you are acting in an immoral way) needs to be tempered to some degree with the idea of systemic/societal moral responsibility (it is immoral to allow you to act in a certain way). When the degree of immorality depends on things outside of individual control (the stock market crashes, and I am instantly more moral because I am hording less wealth) I think it’s asking too much of humans to uphold strict moral codes. The boundaries of what is moral should be set far enough and clear enough that it is easy for people to understand, and easy to adhere to. If it’s too hard to understand or too hard to implement, that’s a societal problem to solve, not a personal moral failure.

tl;dr - the more inequal wealth distribution is within a system, the more amoral the system is (I believe, and the author believes). What that means with regards to individual behavior in that system is much more murky.

5

His argument is generalized to the point of meaninglessness. If the state “properly” takes care of its citizens, the wealthy would be taxed proportionally to enable it to do so, minimizing the amount that charity would need to fill in.

Do the wealthy have more obligations to their home states or to the states with the greatest need?If the state fails, then the causes of its doing so need to be examined. Are we talking about wealthy states or poor states, democratic states or dictatorships, healthy states or states decimated by pandemics or natural disasters? Should the wealthy give money to the causes or the effects?

The wealthy already donate hundreds of billions to charitable organizations, including the mitigation/elimination of hunger and disease. Does this require merely more money to become “moral”? What is the definition of moral in such an equation?

And who gets to make that definition? How is it to be disseminated? Who enforces it? Isn’t there sufficient social media comment right now to signify discontent?

As an abstract ideal, the wealthy giving away wealth has been a basic principle in all societies in which such wealth discrepancies appeared for the whole of civilization. Yet the poor have always existed and bitterly accused the wealthy of neglect. What does this writer want to change?

ETA

How old is this argument? $100,000?

6

I think people should be more generous and I donate a reasonable chunk of income (plus volunteer) but I don’t think this line of argument tends to convince many people because

  1. As other posters have noted, one person’s extreme wealth is another’s keeping head above water. The more you earn the more expensive your lifestyle tends to be and the more wealthy people you tend to meet – so people with very high earnings might still see themselves as just getting by.
  2. When we look at the super-rich many of them can point to donations they’ve made of millions of dollars to this or that. Of course it may be proportionally little, and done for a tax deduction, but they can mostly go to bed feeling they are one of the good guys.
  3. Salary and wealth are two different things. It’s possible to be very wealthy and yet not be able to cut big cheques; it’s pretty common for the tech billionaires for example. If you’re the CEO of a unicorn, the bank will happily fund your $30 million home, but they won’t give you money to give to charity.

None of the above is intended to handwave inequality or imply that the uber rich are swell guys, just why it falls on deaf ears. I think the solutions are more on the side of progressive taxation and a good social safety net.

7

There might be some validity in that argument if the millionaire/billionaire stuffed cash in a mattress. But most of their money is in investments, which means it is being lent out to other people (and thus helping them). Some of it is used to purchase tangible things like mansions, yachts, etc., but that means most of that money goes to laborers, engineers, architects, etc. Finally, they’re probably paying a hefty tax bill, and the government spends a lot of money providing subsidies for the poor.

8

And there is one big problem- getting the aid and money to people who will use it judiciously- by eating food, not buying drugs.

We discovered this in Sudan, etc where the food was there but for many reasons- armed militias, vast territory, etc etc the food often didnt get to where it was needed.

Good point. No one actually has a Scrooge McDuck money vault. The money is invested.

9

That article is very close to Peter Singer’s 1971 essay: Famine, Affluence, and Morality (wiki article). I do think Singer was more focused on excess wealth and that any excess wealth should be given to charity and if you did not you were an immoral person.

His example was saving a drowning child. The choice being doing so would get your clothes muddy and they would need to be replaced. If you didn’t save the child, you were an asshole. So why does putting distance between you and a “drowning child” matter.

I think there is something to it. Or to at least be somewhat conscious that you actually have a choice you could be making when you spend on X instead of donating to charity.

10

Those kinds of examples are really bad. You see an immediate and obvious benefit, whereas for example- giving money to a beggar or a food bank shows no such obvious and immediate benefit.

11

Exactly. Singer acknowledges that. And still says you should do it.

It did work on me. I went from not donating mostly out of ignorance or something. To doing a yearly donation to get that Singer fuck out of my mind. Baby steps.

The problem with me donating in person these days is I never carry cash anymore.

12

There’s several aspects to consider.

  1. If everybody in the world had the same amount of money everybody would have $5.
  2. You can lambast Disney and Gates all you want but they employ thousands of people.
  3. Would people like Gates be able to do what they do without millions of dollars?

Of course there are thousands of millionaire who have never lifted a finger

Should a CEO really get 100 times the money that an average employee does? Probably not.

13

There are a lot of assumptions here, some of which might be true, but are unsupported.

Is it a given that investing money is the same as “helping” other people? And if so, is it a given that those people need help?

Is it a given that most money spent on tangible things “goes to” laborers? Is it a given that participating in the economy is a moral good?

Is it a given that the wealthy pay hefty taxes?

Is it given that the government spends lots of money “subsidizing” the poor?

Failing to directly address the difference between liquidity and wealth is a flaw in the article in the OP, but the position that “it’s not real money that they can spend” is a bit of a red herring. I would say that a reasonable conclusion if one takes the position in that article would be that they should sell those investments.

But again, this is why I think the idea is not fully formed. It’s very easy to say “it is immoral to own a company,” but without a viable and reasonable alternative structure, it’s a lot of hot air. (Which is why, to me, high tax rates for the wealthy and robust government services for both the needy and not-so-needy seems like the best approach to wealth inequality and a more moral society. It still allows for the wealthy to accumulate wealth and power, but tempers it).

14

Read the article, this particular writer lost me when he had a problem with Brad Pitt donating homes to Katrina victims. Why did the author have a problem? The architectural style of the houses. Sheesh. Endless people who donate nothing is not enough, let’s also go after the people who do donate and quibble with it. Didn’t really need that part to make the point.

The premise is valid, though. It does assume a good social order where having less money basically only means just giving up extravagances. Sometimes excess wealth can buy you liberty and freedom and things like that.

15

“If you gave money to ten beggars and nine were lying to you, you have done a good thing” - Maimonides

Even if you accept the premise of the article, does donating money to charity even make a difference to those in need. I guess it depends on the charity, and how much you donate, but for example people have been giving charitably to organizations for generations, yet the issues these charities are there to address remain unsolved, and in most cases (probably) worse than ever. Is it better to just hand a random unhoused person a twenty every week, and then just pat myself on the back?

16

Of course it does. It just doesn’t make a difference to everyone in need.

The agency I work for serves about 30,000 people a year - mostly counseling and legal advocacy, and about 500 in emergency shelter. It makes a difference for those folks to have free services.

The need is far beyond what charitable donations can do, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t make a difference. A lot of these places are all a community has got.

And we are very much reliant on charitable donations, especially now that Trump has gutted federal funding and changed corporate tax law to de-incentivize donations.

17

Does it matter what form the wealth takes?

Suppose your wealth is all in the form of paper money or gold coins that you keep in a big vault and roll around in when you feel like it. Nobody is suffering from lack of gold (as opposed to suffering from lack of things that gold could buy), so in one sense, your possessing that gold isn’t depriving anyone else of something that they actually need. And if you gave it all away to other people who then put it in their big vaults and rolled around in it, you haven’t really made the world a better place.

On the other hand, if you gave that gold to the “right” people, could you thereby persuade them to do things or give things to suffering people that would help to relieve there suffering? But how do you figure out how to do that in a way that benefits other people the most, or even at all? It is (it seems to me) more complicated than just “retain wealth = bad, don’t retain wealth = good.”

18

Well said.

It brings to mind this Jewish saying: It is not upon you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.

For me, it means I don’t have to solve the entire problem, but just because I cannot do that, doesn’t mean I don’t have to do my small part in helping to solve the problem. I have a duty to do my little share. If we all do that, that is how problems get solved.

19

Debates are like double-entry bookkeeping. You have to include both the assets and debits for the outcome to make sense. Here the assets would be the good that donating all wealth so that people are left with $100,000 of income might do. Or perhaps $1,000,000 in today’s dollars.) What nobody is mentioning is the bad that donating all wealth so that people are left with only $100,000 of income might do.

The bad involves reducing to near nothingness everything that wealth currently produces in our society. What would the capital needed to start new businesses or expand older ones come from? Everything from a corner store to housing to major services to the industries needed to find the raw materials to build the machines that are necessary to create the tools that are used in factories to make other products require capital investment. So do the data centers needed to run AI and the computers required to organize the online stores that buy the fleets of vehicles needed to move goods from giant warehouses to businesses and consumers. The money made by investing in such capital is exactly what powers the millions of 401K and pension money that allows comfortable retirement, a trove of wealth that would need to be replaced somehow.

Capital could be top down, as in the control exerted by the governments in places like Germany and the U.S.S.R. Those created military forces of some magnitude but failed at ordinary day-to-day living. Bottom-up utopian or libertarian ventures of pooling money to create societies fail at even small scales.

Capitalism can exhibit the feat of creating wealth that conceivably can benefit all inhabitants. What people mostly complain about today is not the wealth that subsidizes the most sybaritic lifestyle for the most people in the history of the world, with literally billions of people worldwide entering the middle class for the first time and the percentage of people living in abject poverty at probably the lowest levels eve, but the fact that in recent decades wealth inequality has peaked, something it does cyclically.

There are reasons why wealth inequality was high at the beginning of the 20th century, low in the middle, and high again at the close. Some of those reasons could rightly be considered immoral by some people. (Me, for example.) But stripping people of all “wealth” to lower the inequality to near zero would produce little of the good and all of the bad. And that’s an immoral outcome.

20
  1. A significant percentage of people can’t handle and will take active measures to remove wealth from being under their control. It’s on this basis that we do things like taking money out of your wages for social security, Medicare/Medicaid, etc. There’s just no point in giving it to you, because you’re going to lose it before you need it. While paternalistic, it makes more sense to withhold goods from you and only give them back in a time and way that prevents you from wasting it on frivolous things.
  2. The most good that has ever come in the world is through technological development. We’ve massively reduced infant mortality rates, we’ve raised the average lifespan, gotten most of the lead and asbestos out of our daily environment, flipped from having too little food to too much food, etc. It’s likely that a large part of this comes down to incentivizing people to work together and cooperate under central leadership, through the vector of a self-serving, greedy motivation. Between splitting the pie better or making more pies, more pies wins. Sharing is only necessary when there isn’t enough. And where there isn’t enough (in the 21st Century), generally that isn’t an issue of people not sharing, it’s of people living under tyrannies and/or having cultures that teach tribalism and genocide.