Why charity is not a virtue, even if it is a good thing.

I was ruminating about the concept of charity as a primary virtue. And, while I am a strong advocate of charity and have urged my fellow classical liberals and libertarians to be more charitable themselves, I have to agree with Ayn Rand that charity is not a major issue of virtue. I do think compassion and charity are part of the good life, that is, they make your life better and make you a happier person. In that sense, however, charity is rather selfish in the Randian sense of the word.

However, I think people will find the way that I came to my conclusion as bit unusual. And that is what I wanted to share with you.

First, I think that the major virtues are open to everyone. No matter who you are, you can be virtuous in your own life. Virtue does not depend on your level of intelligence, your occupation, social standing, material wealth, or any of these side issues. If you live as rationally as possible, if you consciously make every effort to respect the rights of others, if you try to avoid inflicting needless pain on others, and take responsibility for your own life and decisions, then I would say you are virtuous. In this sense we can all be equally virtuous.

A great mind is not a virtue. It is beneficial but not a virtue. Some great minds have been put to very evil purposes. And some very simple, in the intellectual sense, people live virtuous lives. If we were to make intelligence a virtue it would exclude them. And, to a large degree, intelligence is not something you possess due to your own efforts. You may choose to avoid thinking but you can't choose to have an IQ of 75 or 150. The virtue is not found in the intelligence itself but in the purposes to which intelligence is put. Similarly great mental achievements are not themselves a virtue. They are beneficial to humanity but discovering something of great value does not automatically make the discoverer virtuous.

A beautiful singing voice is a great talent, but it is not a virtue. At least I hope not, given my complete inability to hold a tune.

Virtues are not talents or abilities, but they are part of what you do with your talent and abilities.

Wealth is quite similar to these talents. It is unequally distributed in the world. And, unlike these other talents, wealth is something that one can create. Some people have great wealth, others have moderate wealth and yet others are impoverished and verging on starvation, if not actually starving.

To a large extent charity is something that individuals can indulge in with their surpluses. Steve Forbes and Peter Thiel, both very nice men in my opinion, have the ability to be extremely charitable. Josephine, who worked for me cleaning my house in Africa, was poor, elderly and lacked any substantial material surplus. When violence forced me to leave I gave her months worth of income in the hope of sustaining her as long as possible. What I gave her was charity. What Thiel and Forbes donate to worthy causes is charity. But Josephine's ability to be charitable was small if not non-existent.

We often think of charity as what we to do help people, like Josephine, who are impoverished. And that is charity. But if that is a virtue as well, then it is a virtue which is denied to the recipients of charity. Josephine, who had so little and no surplus, couldn't give to others less well-off than herself. Thus she would be denied the ability to be virtuous.

Virtues, I believe, are universals. They are something that we all can practice. Josephine might be poor but can take responsibility for her own life—and she did. She worked hard to keep her head above water. She may be on a very different level than Mr. Forbes or Mr. Thiel, but she can be equally as virtuous as they.

If virtues are moral values, and charity is a virtue, than it would be a moral requirement to be charitable. If one were not charitable it would mean one is immoral. The poor find it impossible to practice charity much of the time, if not all of the time. This would mean that they are immoral because they are poor. I can't accept that conclusion. If intelligence were a virtue then a lack of intelligence would be immoral, but I can't see those born with limited brain functions being immoral simply because they lack a capacity. Virtues are not dependent on capacity. But charity is intimately linked to capacity.

A morality that makes charity a central moral value implies that those who lack a surplus, with which to be charitable, are inherently immoral. And that is rather odd since so many promote charity as a virtue because they wish to help the poor. But, under that moral code, their help bestows the label "moral" on themselves, while simultaneously labeling the object of their charity as immoral.

Charity I engage in does not make me more moral. Neither does the inability of others to be charitable make them immoral.

Update added 12/19: There are other aspects to charity that should be considered as well. For instance, the primary virtues are virtues one could practice in isolation. If you were stranded on an island you can still be virtuous. You can still take responsibility for your own life, you can still be honest, albeit with yourself, you can still engage in productive work to sustain yourself. In fact these virtues would be necessary for your survival. But with no objects of charity present you can not be charitable. You might argue that I earlier stated that one should not do harm to others or inflict needless pain upon them and that on the island there are no others. But this is a "negative" obligation, not a positive one. You refrain from harming others and on your deserted island that is quite easy to do. You are still refraining from harming others. But charity as a virtue would be a positive obligation requiring you to act on the behalf of others. With no others present you can not act on their behalf. It would be the one virtue that would be impossible to practice.

One additional point is that the primary virtues of life can be practiced in an ideal world. Imagine the utopia we all yearn for: a world where disease, poverty and hunger have been distant memories, a world where all people have the good life. In such a world you could not be charitable as there would be no objects of charity. What a strange virtue charity is. It would be the only "virtue" that requires others to be in pain before you can practice it. The ideal world is not one where everyone is charitable but one where no one is because it is a world where the need for charity has ceased.

Charity is part of living the good life. It is good for one to be charitable with certain provisos, that are too long to go into here. In a nutshell, I think it is good that you try to help others as you are able to do so. I don't think it a moral obligation, but I do think it a benefit to the giver, as well as the recipient, at least when done rationally. I live in a world that contains many things I find repugnant, things I don't want to see. And by wise charity I can help eradicate those things and create a better world, which would be a world that makes my life a happier one. That is what my charity does for me. What it does for the recipient depends entirely on their circumstances. But rational charity is, to me, a win-win situation.

Virtues are available to everyone but the ability to be charitable is not available to everyone. Virtues can be practiced anywhere at any time, charity can not. Charity would be the only "virtue" that requires others to be in need or pain before it can be practiced. It is dependent on others suffering. To claim charity as a virtue is to claim that the poor are unable to be virtuous. And that seems a rather uncharitable thing to say.

Three rules for good living.

First, my apologies for being away, but I'm back.

Today I was doing some shopping and found myself humming some of the music of Virgil Gibson, the lead singer from the original Platters. I recently became a fan, not a fam in the rabid, stalking sense, just a fan in the sense that I enjoy his music, I enjoy his style and I like the man, even if we would vehemently disagree about religion.

During my recent trip I spent a short time talking with Virgil, who had expressed something to me about how he was impressed with libertarians and basically realized that is what he has always been. He also told me about some of his charitable activities and the projects that he works with, especially with kids.

I was thinking about his charitable work today and with my own increasing emphasis on the need for charity to create a better world, one we can be proud of living in. From all of this I formulated what I consider to be the three rules for good living.

Rule #1: Never do anything to violate the life, liberty or property of another person.

This is the prime directive of libertarianism, which is an ethical system that tells me how I must treat others, at the very minimum. It is not the be all and end all of life, but it is the foundation on which all else has to be built. A good house must be built on a firm foundation. You need the foundation in order to have a good house but the foundation is NOT the house. You need more.

Rule #2: Take responsibility for yourself. It is your responsibility to pay your bills, correct your own mistakes, and sustain your own life.

The nature of our species is such that for us to live we have to have input. By input I mean we need certain resources directed to our uses. We need food, liquid, shelter, medical care and such. I like to look at life like a bank account. There are withdrawals and deposits and there is a balance. If you overdraw the account somebody has to pay.

If you overdraw your life account some else has to pay. There really is no such thing as a free lunch. We must find the resources we need someplace. We may borrow from others or we inflict the costs on others. If we do not pay the costs ourselves we are actually violating our first rule for living—–by imposing our costs on others we harm others.

This is easy to forget because the harm we inflict is often indirect. If I mug an old lady to buy something I right the harm I inflict is direct, explicit and guilt-inducing. It would be for most people, which is why only a few engage in open criminal assaults on others. This does not mean that they eschew such practices altogether, unfortunately they want the self-directed benefits of robbing others while trying to avoid the guilt-inducing aspect of the activity——they seek indirect means of inflicting harm on others and surround it with high-sounding, often altruistic, motivations.

The most efficient means of indirectly exploiting others is to hire political officials to do the work on your behalf. Frederic Bastiat put it well: "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."

You must take responsibility for yourself make sure your deposits do not exceed your withdrawals, and make sure you don't inflict harm on others. And you must make sure you don't inflict indirect harm on others as well. Don't hire state agents to steal on your behalf.

Rule #3: Try to do some good for others.

The first two rules prevent you from doing harm to others. And they require you to act in the voluntary sector in order to secure the inputs you need for life. That will mean that you must engage in trade. And if you only engage in voluntary exchange of goods and services then each such transaction will benefit others. That is one of the miracles of free exchange——it can increase total wealth with increased production.

For instance, if you sell a vegetable to a family you value the proceeds you receive higher than you value the vegetable. Similarly, they must value the vegetable higher than what they gave you. Both of you exchanged voluntarily and both of you were better off because of it.

And while market exchanges are wonderful, the reality of the world is that there are places in the world, and people who are unable to make those exchanges——often through no fault of their own.

I have seen enough of the world to know that there are governments and systems which create obstacles preventing people from doing well. One of the most absurd claims made against libertarians is that they believe the poor and needy are at fault for their state. That undercuts a basic principle of libertarianism——that institutional structures can inflict great harm on people.

Throughout the Third World people suffer because their governments inflict marketing boards on them, which confiscate the wealth they produce. These boards force food producers to sell to them at below-market rates. The boards, who should I say the politicians who control them, then sell the produce at market rates keeping the proceeds while ripping-off the poor. We have ethanol subsidies that push up world food prices so that the poor have trouble feeding themselves. Around the world political structures reduce the supply of medical care while encouraging greater consumption, resulting in a constant process of rising costs and frustration.

While there is no shortage of individuals who made decisions that overdrew their life-account, the world if filled with people who are victims of coercive institutional structures which make it difficult for them to achieve a decent life.

Thre is a real, pervasive, and unavoidable need for human compassion and charity to undo some of the harms inflicted by coercive institutional structures.

Libertarians preach voluntary charity as being superior to state welfare. I believe that myself. And that brings me to a very important lesson for libertarians: libertarians who want private charity must themselves practice it.

Charity is necessary to undo these harms. I would argue that coercive charity is unlikely to effectively reduce the harms inflicted by coercive structures. Coercion begets coercion, harms inflict further harms. It is a never ending cycle of pain. Mitigating the pain inflicted by institutional structures requires peaceful, voluntary actions outside those structures.

Charity, voluntarily given, is inherently libertarian. It is also, I believe, one of the most subversive means available to undermine the coercive structures that are harming our world. Anyone can talk about healing our world, but it takes individual compassion to actually do it. Even if we were to successfully change the structure of the world, to one of entirely voluntary interactions and exchanges, it would take decades, perhaps centuries, to undo the misery and harm already inflicted. Long after a utopia is implemented, if such a thing is even feasible, there will be need for human compassion and charity.

Libertarians should practice what they preach. Those who are unable to do so should just shut up.

That brings me full circle to what Virgil Gibson was saying. He basically said he was an instinctual libertarian without realizing it. He was someone who believed in not harming others, and trying to undo the harms they had suffered already through his charitable actions. For me that made clearer the intimate link between fundamental libertarian principles, such as the non-initiation of force and voluntary exchange, with that of individual compassion and charity.

And just for the fun of it, here is some of Virgil in action.

Good in a godless world.

I begin with the premise that there is no god, no supreme being, no deity. I begin with that premise because I have found no persuasive evidence to indicate such a supernatural being exist.

What does that leave? Apparently it leaves us in a godless world, one with natural, not supernatural explanations. That would mean that existence is impersonal, without care, concern, or any emotion.

A lecture I was listening to today, about debates between skeptics and believers, throughout the ages put it this way: Maybe there are just some people doomed to go their whole life without being happy. And the universe just doesn’t care.

But does that mean we live in a universe devoid of caring, concern, love or similar things? It does not. My very first thought was this means that we are obligated to provide these things.

Prayer is useless when action is needed. If there are people in the world who hunger we can’t appeal to a god, we must find a way to feed them. If there are people who are oppressed and mistreated, then we must work for justice.

But just as my thoughts went in that direction I realized I was engaging in another fiction, one not dissimilar to the assumption of a deity. We can’t do anything. There is no us. There is just me, at least in my case. In your case there is just you. There are only millions of “I’s.”

There is no collective brain, no one body shared by the many. If action is taken then someONE takes it. SomeONE wills it. SomeONE encourages others, who cooperate but each of them chooses to act as another ONE. Working in harmony does not negate the fact that individuals, not collectives, choose to act.

Nor am I saying that some sort of collective action is impossible. Politics is the attempt to make non-consenting collective action possible. True, some degree of collective political action can achieve a smattering of the objectives that those who coordinate it wish to achieve. But, it is too easily corrupted. As I have long argued the concentration of power, which is what politics is, works to the benefit of the powerful, not the powerless. When we cease to act as individuals we corrupt the very good we are attempting to do.

The system of coercive coordination is inherently counterproductive and riddled with perverse incentives. Not even the best of intentions can save the process. The problem is systemic in nature. Having the right desires will not change the system. It is not a matter of changing personnel, it is a matter of changing methodologies from that of coercion to that of cooperation.

State action is not cooperation, but the opposite of cooperation. The slave didn’t cooperate with his master; he obeyed him. A woman doesn’t cooperate with a rapist, she submits to a greater force. Cooperation, that is non-coercive coordination, exists only because individuals consent to act together.

Not only is the god concept a fiction of a similar kind to the collectivistic concept; they also share another trait in common. Both are attempts to evade responsibility. If action must be taken then I must take it. If injustice is to end then I must work to end it. I can’t pass this responsibility off to a deity or to the collective “we.”

A godless world does not mean a loveless world, it means that what love exists in the world must come from each of us as individuals. It is not possible for me to love everyone, but I can love where it is possible. It is not possible for me to develop the whole world and create universal prosperity. But it is possible for me to help one small part of the world to develop economically and to help make that portion of the world a better place. I can’t heal the sick, but I can help make healing possible. I can’t end all injustice, but I can fight it where I see it. I can’t be all-things to all-people, but I can be something to someone.

True, when famine sends children to bed hungry, or worse, the universe doesn’t care.

But I do.

When that great collective action, known as war, rips families apart, rains devastation on vast numbers of people, and sends young men to premature and senseless deaths, the universe does not care.

But I do.

When bullies beat someone for being black, gay, Jewish, or just different, the universe doesn’t care.

But I do.

When organized bullies of moral majoritarians do the same to those they hate, through the political process, the universe does not care.

But I do.

And because I do, I must act. I can’t pass that off to a god who isn’t there, or the collective “we.” I must make the choice to take action.

I can hope that everyone will act the same way, but I must act as if no one will. I can’t choose for others, I can only choose for myself. And I choose to act.

What choice do you make?

Libertarian funds evolution exhibit.

I am pleased to see that a permanent Hall of Human Origins is being funded at the Smithsonian by a private contribution from libertarian David Koch. Koch, who was the vice presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party in 1980, when the Libertarian Party was actually still libertarian, gave $30 million to fund the project. Almost $21 million will go into the David Koch Hall of Human Origins, another $5 million will endow a research chair on evolution at the Smithsonian and the rest will go to education efforts.

Koch has been generous to numerous causes. He gave $100 million to renovate a theater at Lincoln Center, was a major funder of the PBS science series Nova, gave $20 million to the American Museum of Natural History and funded a $68 million center for math, science and technology at Deerfield Academy. He gave $100 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to fund the David Koch Institute for Intergrative Cancer Research, $20 million to John's Hopkins University, $30 million to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and numerous other health related charities. Koch sits on the board of the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation. In addition is a board member of 11 boards for hospitals or research institutions.

Bravo. It's all good stuff.

Vince Miller update

A couple of days ago I blogged on the health situation of Vince Miller and urged individuals to contribute to help cover his medical expenses. I am pleased that so far we have managed to raise a few thousand dollars. That is the good news. But as so often is the case there is bad news as well.

Vince has not been able to shake the pneumonia and the hospital is trying to find the cause of his specific strain and cure it. Today a specialist saw Vince and they took used a camera to look inside his lungs. The specialist was concerned enough to have Vince moved to the Intensive Care Unit and put on a breathing machine. At this time Vince is sedated and will remain so while in ICU.

If they are able to knock this bug out they said he will remain in ICU for one to five days before going back to a regular ward.

This means that the financial situation described previously has become substantially worse. Vince has already charged $5,000 in care to his credit card. And ICU is not inexpensive. Costs will skyrocket and should be assumed to be substantial at this point. Anyone who can help is encouraged to do so. And do remember that even small donations add up.

There are two ways you can donate. One is call 1 800 326 0996 and make a credit card donation via the International Society for Individual Liberty, which Vince founded. Or you can go on line at this url. Scroll down to the section that says "general donation" and click there. Donations made through the site, at this time, will be assumed to be for Vince's expenses.

Not that things are substantially more serious Vince's family in Canada has been notified. His closest relatives are a niece and a nephew. We hope they will be able to obtain more information from the hospital than we have been able to get as non-family. We will try to keep you informed. Do something good today and make a contribution to someone who needs some help.

A chance to do something good.

Here is your chance to do something good.

Vince Miller, the founder and president of the International Society for Individual Liberty has been hospitalized with pneumonia. He was very weak when taken in and his oxygen levels were so low, due to his lungs being congested with fluid, that he was at high risk of heart failure.

Vince has been a tireless worker in the trenches to further social and economic freedom. He has done so with little desire for recognition or reward.

Vince, who will be 70 in a few months, was not able to get insurance due to his age. So the hospital bills will come out of his meager pocket.

Hospital care has been excellent and the hospital has not hassled him regarding payments in any way. But some of his friends would like to take up a collection to help with these bills. Because his condition was so serious he is still in the hospital and has been since last Thursday. We know the quality of care that he has received doesn’t come cheap. So far we don’t have a figure from the hospital but we anticipate it will be substantial.

I’m asking my readers to consider helping out with this hospital bill. You can do so two different ways. One is that you can call Jim Elwood at 1 800 326 0996 and tell him you’d like to make a donation to Vince’s expenses. ISIL can process a credit card donation directly on your behalf. As a charity donations through ISIL do qualify for tax credits. Or you can go to the ISIL website and make an on-line donation. Just be sure to go down to the button that says “general donation” otherwise the funds are earmarked for other purposes and can’t be used.

A large number of my readers are, like myself, advocates of private charity. Here is a good opportunity to put your money where your mouth is. Those who also advocate state charity can just pretend they got a tax increase and donate as well. The advantage for them is that this donation, unlike their tax proceeds, won’t get siphoned off for waging war, funding the war on drugs, paying to strip people of their civil liberties, etc. The donation is 100% guaranteed to pay for the actual medical care required by someone in need.

We know the cost will be in the thousands. We just don’t know how many thousands. Even small donations add up quickly and I doubt any reader here actually couldn’t make at least a $25 donation. Clearly substantial donations will be needed to pay for this medical care but any donation is greatly appreciated. Thanks, please do what you know is right.