Ecurb wrote: ↑January 22nd, 2022, 1:58 pm
GE Morton wrote: ↑January 22nd, 2022, 1:31 pm
Sorry, Belindi, but if that "hope raising" requires forcibly taking something from Alfie, then it IS depriving Alfie, by definition. Alfie has no duty to raise anyone's hopes or expectations.
That's the crux of all these arguments, isn't it. Does Alfie have a duty to help other people?
Yes he does --- some people, in some circumstances.
1) If Alfie has no duty to support his children (or other relatives) then GE's point is reasonable. However most of us (and probably GE as well) think Alfie has a duty to support his children. He also has a duty to support his aging parents. He has a duty to support his wife.
Yes, he does have those duties. In the case of the children, because he brought them into the world and hence is responsible for their current helpless condition. In the case of the wife, because he has made a promise to her, entered into a contract with her. In the case of the parents, because they supported him for many years, and hence he has a duty of reciprocity. He would also have a duty to help someone he has injured. In all those cases, his duties derive from
something he has done, from some act of his own.
Then (I suggest) he has a duty to support everyone else.
I've given you the basis for the above duties. Perhaps you can do the same for this one (it clearly is not derivable from the duties above). As it stands it is
ad hoc.
2) As the citizen of a democratic country, Alfie has a duty to follow the laws of the land.
Only when those laws are morally defensible, in a "democratic" or any other country. Popularity and majority support doesn't lend the slightest moral credibility to any law.
3) Since GE loves to cite the "liberal tradition", I'll cite an older and more important moral tradition, one that enjoins us to "love our neighbors as ourselves." This has been the foundation of Western morality for 2000 years, and it was honored by most of the traditional liberals GE admires. If that's the case, we have a duty to help our neighbors, out of love, just as we have a duty to feed, clothe and care for ourselves.
That is the real "crux." The Christian tradition to which you refer certainly is older; indeed, it is archaic. The ethic it embodies is an atavism, a futile effort to preserve the unity, familiarity, and intimacy of the kinship-based tribal societies which humans (like all other primates) inhabited for the first 200,000 or so years of our history on Earth. But human societies have undergone a radical transformation over the last 10,000 years; they are no longer "brotherhoods" or "big happy families," every member of which has a personal relationship with every other member. Instead, modern societies are
societies of strangers --- people who don't know most of the other members, who share no common ancestry or culture or interests with them, and who differ from one another in countless ways. Without those personal relationships there is no basis for love, and so they don't "love their neighbors," and never will; indeed, they probably despise more of them than they love. That admonition is a relic of a bygone social form, and in modern societies is whistling in the dark. The best you can hope for in societies of strangers is
tolerance --- love is a dead letter.