Back in the day, the push among those who did not much like the idea of state welfare was to argue that benefits should come through the employer. This was pretty popular in a lot of Catholic worker rhetoric. It is not a stupid idea; businesses pretty much run their own miniature welfare regimes in a lot of cases, providing for illness, vacations and leisure, pensions in old age, compensation in certain circumstances of injury, etc, not to mention wages themselves. If you’re the sort who wants to see benefits like these come through the employer, you’ll probably like what Dorothy Day had to say about that here:

“We believe that social security legislation, now balled as a great victory for the poor and for the worker, is a great defeat for Christianity…It is an acceptance of Cain’s statement, on the part of the employer. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Since the employer can never be trusted to give a family wage, nor take care of the worker as he takes care of his machine when it is idle, the state must enter in and compel help on his part.”

Day’s complaint was, in part, that if states step in with their own welfare regimes, then employers are free to turn their backs on their employees, refusing them even basic benefits. This certainly doesn’t do much in terms of cohesion among employer and employee, and surrounding community, which is something I would presume you would be worried about if you were generally interested in averting widespread class antagonism. And, further, it doesn’t do much to prevail upon businesses that they do, in fact, have a moral purpose, and that like all elements of human sociality they should perform a positive function toward human flourishing. It allows them to exist in a twilight zone of false moral neutrality, wherein they sometimes weakly protest that they’re generating profit and products which is helping everyone, so we should all hush. (That’s a lie, by the way.)

But, alas, it seems the vision that would have forgone state welfare in favor of responsible behavior on behalf of employers is finally destroyed, and conservatives have killed it. A couple of prime specimens from the last few days include Matt Walsh and Olivia Nuzzi, with the former arguing against employment protections for pregnant women, and the latter arguing in favor of Uber price gouging during, among other calamities, terrorist attacks.

Exhibit A, Walsh*:

“We need to stop crying about our ‘rights’ every time something doesn’t turn out the way we wanted. We need to stop crying ‘discrimination’ every time our employer doesn’t give us the special treatment we desire. We need to stop trying to turn everything into a federal regulation. If you think employers have a moral obligation to accommodate pregnant women — fine. I agree, to a certain extent. But it can’t become a legal obligation.”

“The fact that Uber allowed surge pricing during a hostage crisis may lead you to believe that the company doesn’t care about you, and you would be correct. But Uber does not have a responsibility to care about you. Uber is not a government entity, and it is not beholden to the general carless public during an unwelcome drizzle of rain or even a time of great distress.”

When you think about how to measure whether or not the institution of private property is functioning correctly, there are two different approaches you can take.

1.) A property rights approach, in which property ownership is an intrinsic good, that is, a good unto itself, because each person (or some persons, as it usually goes) has a discrete right to property ownership. These typically come bundled with theories of property acquisition (how you turn ‘stuff in the world’ into ‘private property’) and in many cases the acquisition theory is linked with the right. One example is the Lockean labor-mixing theory, wherein you metaphysically blend yourself into stuff to turn it into property, and thereby have a right to that property; there are also lots of ‘desert theories’, whereby you work with things and then come to deserve them by nature of having worked with them, and thus have a right to that property. In this vein of theorizing, property is functioning correctly when people’s right to own appropriately acquired property is protected by various institutions.

2.) A social function approach, in which property ownership is an extrinsic good, which means that it is good only insofar as it affects goods outside itself. Another way to put it would be that property ownership is instrumental, and that it is a ‘good’ thing only when it is supporting some higher good. There are a variety of higher goods you can imagine the institution of private property to support — order is a common one, so is human flourishing. This view of property requires no affinity with any particular acquisition theory; it is concerned with what the existing institution of private property is for. In this vein of theorizing, property is functioning correctly when it is maximally serving the good it contributes to, such as human flourishing.

What you have here are two distinct sources of justification for the institution of private property. The trouble with the first is that all that is required for property transactions and the resultant circumstances to be just is for property rights — the right to acquire and own property — to be protected. Operating under this sort of theory alone, you can easily have situations of profound wealth inequality arise which must be understood as ‘just’, because property rights theories are concerned with the process of acquiring and owning property, not the correct use of property.

That would be bad enough. But the greater issue with that form of theorizing is that it makes people indifferent to the terrible circumstances that result from procedurally-just property transactions. Because property transactions are viewed as just based on whether or not individual rights to acquisition and ownership are respected (regardless of how the outcomes effect the community at large), these theories reinforce the idea that justice can be achieved in terms of individual, procedural choices. If everyone has their right to acquire and own property equally protected — that is, if everyone is guaranteed by the state that they can buy and sell and own just the same as everyone else — then justice has been served. All that is required to say that we have a just proprietary situation is that everyone has the same protection of rights. But these theories do not provide for a consideration of the flourishing of whole communities in real, material terms. In other words, heavy commitments to property rights approaches to ownership reinforce the phenomenon of the modern, ‘buffered self.’

The ‘buffered self’ is a form of identity which is closed off from other persons; you are your own sovereign, you are free, you have rights, and your dignity rests upon your invulnerability. Proprietary theories that view justice as a matter of your personal, individual rights being fulfilled play into this isolated self by remaining totally agnostic to the good of the community. They divorce the meaning of property from property itself. Instead, they commit themselves to no meanings, only procedures, and do not view justice as a matter of total community outcomes, only individual ones, and only in terms of particular discrete rights.

On the other hand, property theories that view property as an instrument for the communal good militate against this ‘buffered identity’ by contextualizing individual actions and procedures (such as property transactions) in the impact on the community at large. It’s pretty hard in set-ups like these to think to yourself, ‘doesn’t matter if I wind up with 500 million times the wealth of everyone else in my county due to this transaction, because I did it fair and square, and it’s my right.’ Instead you think, ‘so long as there are a lot of people without much who aren’t able to live good lives because I’ve got all this money to myself, I’m not actually entitled to all of it.’

These are stark explanations of the two different mindsets, but the point is this: the liberal property rights theories you hear in political discourse these days are not only bad because of what they produce materially (see: inequality), but also because of the ideology they factor so seamlessly into: namely, the idea that justice is merely a matter of individual procedural rights and protections, and that we have no need to factor the flourishing of our communities into the question of justice.

Short post today: I’m trying to get better at these.

It’s fair to say that modern welfare ‘evolved’, in some ways, from the charitable projects maintained by the Church in the middle ages. How that evolution took place is a matter of argument. There are a lot of grand sweeping narratives about the changes in poor relief from the middle ages to the early modern to the modern period, with the Protestant Reformation, increasingly centralized states, and so forth being cited as contributing engines. These are matters of historical argument.

Regardless of the big engines of change in the matter of poor relief, one of the interesting ways it can be tracked is through changes in the language of charity. This has interesting implications for our current debates about the purview of welfare versus the purview of charity. On the subject of languages of charity, Miri Rubin writes:

“Although the language of medieval Christian charity always required a degree of help to ‘others’, a different and alternative idiom, an idiom of kinship, spiced with some of the traditional images of charity and love, came to articulate new choices. This development can be correlated to similar manifestations of the nature of co-operation in the structures of late medieval town government, in the preponderance of faction within it, and in the more tentative attitudes toward public office by those who would have constituted the natural office-holding elite in earlier times…These shifts in the language of charity, in which the dispositions toward giving were enshrined, were thoroughgoing and dramatic. The symbolic articulation of the charitable act was being wrested from its earlier institutional forms which were relatively open and inclusive; these older forms were being redesigned to ensure greater exclusivity and discrimination in allocation of relief funds, and altogether new types of relief were created in substantially altered social contexts.”

In other words, the way charity was explained — consider “we must help the poor and the stranger” versus “I must help my brother and neighbor” — correlated with broad institutional changes in how charity was rendered. Instead of hospitals serving as communal locations for a variety of services (a hostel-like capacity, a retirement-home-like capacity, a modern-hospital-like capacity, etc.) they gradually changed into sites for the working of private charity. Specifically, they lost their space for poor and sick people, and became primarily places for the keeping of elderly well-to-do people living on privately provided pensions. Rather than a community reaching out to ‘the other’, they became places where individuals reached out to people they had kinship with. And the language around charity either changed with the society, or pressed such changes along — or a little of both.

But human needs actually hadn’t changed all that much. Part of Rubin’s point is to demonstrate that the language we use to describe charity — who gets it, why, who gives it, why, what the goals are, when/where it should be done — can create certain charitable institutions and dispense with others, while the actual human needs remain more or less static. And this is directly applicable to how we think about charity and welfare now.

Think about the language we use for ‘welfare’ versus ‘public goods.’ Welfare is: the EITC, food stamps (SNAP), TANF, medicaid, etc. On the other hand, social security, veterans’ services, public schools, and so forth are typically not imagined to be welfare programs. Complicating matters, nearly all of these things — food assistance, schooling, care for the elderly, etc — were once thought of as matters of charity.

So what language do we use to stabilize our categories? ‘Earned’, ‘worked for’, ‘deserving’, ‘investment.’ For the social services that people we respect use, like social security and veterans’ services, we tend to cite service and/or work as evidence that the funds being spent on them are truly deserved. On the other hand, we tend to try to enforce work (even where some work already exists!) to make recipients of other kinds of benefits into ‘deserving’ figures. And, indeed, the caricatures of welfare recipients intended to impugn them (in order to slash welfare) always focus on their slovenliness and ingratitude, further marks against their lack of desert.

There are other languages of welfare (multiple different strains can co-exist) that inform how we view the justness or injustice of social programs. My purpose here is only to demonstrate how much work the language does in stabilizing categories that are actually unstable. There are surely ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ people making use of all manner of programs, welfare or not; the idea that any set of persons is categorically lazy or undeserving is totally ridiculous on its own merits, such as they are. But the language of desert is so firmly attached to how we separate out these various programs that it bleeds into how we imagine the recipients. It becomes unclear whether SNAP is welfare because undeserving people get it while public school is good because all children deserve a good education; or whether undeserving people get SNAP because it’s welfare, while deserving kids get public school because every kid deserves a good education.

So don’t let language mess with your head. We can and should think way outside the current boxes on matters of welfare and charity, but language tends to be one of those boxes that is easy to forget if you’re not exactly paying attention to it. Worse, it can perpetuate ‘truths’ very easily by pretending to be descriptive when it is really prescriptive. This is something I think about a lot, and I hope you found this as interesting as I do.