Deontological Welfare

 Earlier this week, the City of San Francisco made headlines nationwide by enacting a series of right-leaning ballot measures. The incongruity made for good copy in newsrooms far removed from the Bay Area: here was the country's most liberal city enacting measures that rolled back welfare protections. A friend of mine who was in a position to actually vote on these measures insisted, however, that some at least of the real policy issues at stake were more complicated than the simplistic headlines would suggest. 

He called me up earlier in the week, while considering these measures, and asked for my opinion on the drug screening one. The measure, in his telling, was designed to identify welfare recipients at risk of substance abuse disorder, and direct them to public services. He felt genuinely torn about whether or not this was a good idea. "What's the confusion?" I asked. "It's some sort of conservative anti-welfare thing. Evil. Bad. Vote no. I don't see the dilemma." 

He asked me how I could justify this unreflective knee-jerk opposition. How, he asked, did I know that the policy wouldn't "work"? How did I know it wouldn't yield positive results, by directing more people to substance abuse counseling? He insisted that the measure would not necessarily deprive a single low-income person of their cash benefits from the city. All it would do is require them to fill out a questionnaire and—if they were flagged as being at risk of drug abuse or alcohol addiction, attend some meetings. "That's all they have to do," he said—"just attend!"

I had to admit that I didn't actually know whether the policy would "work" or not. I had no sound empirical or consequentialist reasons to doubt its wisdom. Maybe it would actually reduce the incidence of drug abuse and addiction in the city. "Besides," my friend argued (and I'm collapsing our larger conversation into a few sentences here for the sake of simplicity), "we already criminalize drug possession. If you're worried about this measure being punitive or coercive—it's actually much less punitive or coercive than our current default approach to drug use. This way, we're actually finding and diverting people to services before they are subject to the more coercive approach."

He had a point here too; still, though, it was just obvious to me that I would never vote for such a ballot measure, were one to come before me. It was icky. As a friend of my friend pointed out in turn, it tied together drug use and welfare use into some kind of stigmatizing discursive knot. It was Republican-y. In short, it couldn't be good. But did I have any better reason for my viewpoint than that? 

Maybe, like so many of us, I am just intellectually lazy. I don't have the time or inclination to digest empirical studies of every local policy initiative that comes before me (let alone those concerning cities where I've never lived). So, I default to certain moral heuristics. Or to a sense of tribal identification. I'm "not the sort of person" who backs restrictions on welfare. Simple as that. 

But, in reflecting upon it further, there seemed to me something more rationally defensible behind my reflexive opposition than that. 

It wasn't, to be sure, that I had a greater understanding of the empirical evidence. My friend and I, when we read some of the available arguments against the policy, both shared a feeling that they were over-confident in their rejection of the possibility that the policy would "work" on empirical grounds. Another friend of his from the area, for instance, argued at length that the policy was not supported by the available data. Neither of us felt such certainty was warranted. 

Now, there are certainly some strong empirical arguments against such welfare restrictions. His friend pointed to the experience of peer nations, indicating that public benefits should generally be made as universal as possible: any changes should be toward broadening, not restricting access to them, therefore, both to increase popular support for the policies and to avoid creating a stigmatized underclass. I've made such arguments myself. 

Still, I know in my heart these arguments are not the real reason I would vote "no" on such a ballot measure. I'm not so confident in empirical studies as that. I've quoted before Swift's dictum—and I stand by it—that there are fads and fashions in the empirical sciences, as much as in the humanistic disciplines, and that one is scarcely more entitled in one as in the other to treat a currently ascendent position as the ultimate truth. Empirical studies in the social sciences are hardly immune to the zeitgeist, that is to say—and the things "the studies" all indicate today could be entirely reversed ten years from now. 

Was the real reason for my opinion, then, just a moral heuristic after all? I thought about it some more, and decided not. 

I reminded my friend that, even if I had worked in my previous job as a "policy analyst," we had to keep in mind that I was a "policy analyst" for a human rights organization. And the whole thing with human rights is that they are deontological. They are binding regardless of circumstances or consequences. And so—one seldom has to worry, in that line of work, about whether "the data" or "the studies" support a particular position. 

My friend suggested that this just meant I should therefore keep my nose out of certain kinds of policy issues. Like this ballot measure. The question as to which cash welfare programs were more effective, and how they should be structured to maximize the common good, was a quintessentially consequentialist and empirical one. If my preferred moral approach had no particular bearing on it, that was fine—but I should simply keep out of it, in that case. I should just refrain from expressing an opinion, rather than attempting to wield deontological tools in a task for which they were fundamentally ill-suited. 

I was not content with this, however. Because it seemed to me that there was something deontologically wrong with this particular ballot measure too, even if I could not put my finger on it. 

As the conversation developed, my friend and I both eventually spotted the deontological flaw. In tandem, that is to say, we came to the same realization: the policy was bad, regardless of what the empirical studies might show. (In the end, by the way, my friend didn't vote for it, having come to this conviction, or at least accepted that it planted enough of a seed of reasonable doubt to refrain from backing the measure.)

I started to think of it this way: the fundamental problem was that the policy failed to respect people's moral equality. It compromised their autonomy, by assuming that they were not fit to make their own decisions. It said, in effect: "okay, you can have this welfare check; but you have to prove to us that you deserve it. You have to jump through our hoops." 

Instead of being a public benefit, a universal moral entitlement that no one should ever fall below a threshold of bare subsistence, then, this turned welfare into a form of charity—and the worst kind of "charity" at that—the kind where, as a character in the Grapes of Wrath puts it: they "make you crawl" for it. 

The policy's failure to respect people's moral personhood and equality, moreover, points to a second deontological problem with it: it violates people's right to due process. After all, by tying a drug screening to a cash benefit, the program is implicitly saying that people on welfare are more likely to be addicted to drugs. And let's say for a minute that that's true—and maybe it is, who knows? (I'm not good with empirical knowledge, as I've explained). But suppose it's true—it's still not fair. 

The policy is still stereotyping people, that is to say, and the moral problem with stereotypes has nothing to do with whether or not they are "true" as a matter of probabilities or group averages. The problem with stereotypes, in other words, is not statistics. The problem is that they deprive individual members of the group in question of their right to be treated as individuals. It deprives them of their right to due process in assessing their individual case. 

Take it as a given, then, for purposes of argument, that the majority of people receiving cash benefits have a drug problem; or at least, in the alternative, that the majority of people with a drug problem are on welfare—and that there is therefore some rational statistical connection between these two policy measures. Even then—the point is—if there's still even one person on welfare who does not have a drug problem, then the policy still treats them unfairly. It forces them to take a screening based on no information about who they are individually, but solely based on a stereotype about the group to which they belong. 

The policy is therefore overinclusive, in an equal protection clause sense of the term, and thereby deprives them of due process. 

The policy does though—it has to be said—appeal to a different sense of deontological "fairness." (And no doubt many of its right-leaning proponents actually support it on this basis, rather than on any empirical studies of their own—for who among us, when the chips are down, is really a moral empiricist, I ask?) And this alternative sense of fairness goes something like this: 

"If people are going to get a hand-out from the city, they should have to earn it. It's only fair to ask them to do the bare minimum: which, in this case, just means showing up for a substance abuse meeting. How hard is that?"

The problem with this line of reasoning, though—or one of the problems with it—is that the people most able to attend the counseling appointment are probably the ones with the least dire need for basic assistance. The policy is thereby restricting cash welfare to the segment of the impoverished who are probably most likely to get their lives together on their own. 

And for some of the policy's proponents, no doubt, this is a point in its favor: something along the lines of: "God helps those who help themselves." Which, as a character puts it in Joseph McElroy's novel Cannonball, "is true[—]except about God helping." And that's the problem. 

The principle of "God helps those who help themselves" (which a different character in the novel misattributes, as many people in our society still do, to the Bible) is true in so far as it is a merely empirical statement that the rich tend to get richer and the poor to get poorer. But if the point of welfare is in part to alter this dynamic, rather than encourage it, then at some point it has to help people who cannot help themselves. 

If we are okay with some members of society simply starving or perishing, because—in our judgment—they deserve it—then this argument will not hold much water. 

But if we regard it, as I think we should, as an element of the social contract that we guarantee that every member of the community will not fall below a certain bare threshold of subsistence—if we say, that in exchange for trading in some of your freedoms by joining a political community, there are certain rights and benefits you can expect to receive in return, and this is one of them—then we shouldn't enact a policy that is most likely to exclude from assistance precisely the people who have the greatest need for it. 

The fact that this is all rooted in moral equality too—as my friend and I discovered in thinking through the deontological reasons for opposing the policy—prompts me to a further reflection: because here, in this core idea, we see the fundamental unity of modern liberalism. 

Many people—particularly of the libertarian or self-described "classical liberal" description—often accuse modern liberals of being inconsistent. How come modern liberals support people's right to individual autonomy and private choice in so many civil liberties and cultural domains, they ask—yet they also favor "big government" when it comes to the welfare state? 

The arguments above suggest why it may in fact be the libertarians who are inconsistent, rather than the welfare state liberals. For the state's obligation both to respect its citizens' private choices and to protect them from falling below a certain threshold of poverty are rooted in the same basic principle: the state's obligation to protect those who can't protect themselves. It means protecting minorities in the exercise of their choices from the retaliation of the majority who disapprove of them. And it means protecting those least able to support themselves from the abyss of sheer destitution. 

Perhaps, then—to channel Thomas Hardy—we can say that the principle of "helping those who help themselves" may be a "morality good enough for a deity"—but here on Earth, among humans, we have created the liberal state in order to achieve the opposite. The whole point of the liberal state is to help those who can't help themselves—and that implies protecting the individual and the minority from the tyranny of the majority—for the individual and the minority are always weak relative to the latter—but also means providing for the basic economic needs of the most vulnerable. 

For all the talk, moreover, about how "classical liberals" were supposedly more consistent on these points than modern welfare state liberals, I note that it was a nineteenth century liberal who prompted this reflection in me in the first place—a Whig in the classical liberal mode—namely, Lord Acton. In a simple, brief, throwaway observation in his Lectures on Modern History, he makes a point that ought to put to rest forever any confusion on the score of why modern liberals care about both individual political and civil rights and economic and social rights (such as the right of the poor to receive cash welfare): 

Progress has imposed increasing sacrifices on society, in behalf of those who can make no return[....] This growing dominion of disinterested motive, this liberality towards the weak, in social life, corresponds to that respect for the minority, in political life, which is the essence of freedom. It is an application of the same principle of self–denial, and of the higher law.

In both cases, that is to say—political rights and economic rights—the core idea is the same: the protection of the weak from the strong. The protection of those who can't help themselves from those who can.

It is modern welfare state liberalism, not libertarianism, then, that has the true conceptual unity. The heart of it all is the same: moral equality, which requires the state to undertake obligations precisely to those members who are in no position to rescue themselves. I can think of no better label for such a doctrine than Lord Acton's: "the higher law."