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.