4.2.4.3  Socio-Economic Rights and the Opportunity to Flourish

(This is an archived extract from the book Patterns of Power: Edition 2)

The scope of socio-economic rights is suggested in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Appendix 1): they can include social benefit payments, working conditions, health and education – as itemised in Articles 22-26.   Collectivists believe that society should grant these as entitlements to its citizens, and that they should be publically funded.  They might use several arguments:

·      A society cannot be considered to be fair unless everybody has a reasonable chance to achieve their potential.  Amartya Sen, in The Idea of Justice, argued that a society could not be considered just unless everybody has what he called “capability” ”, describing it as "the opportunity to fulfil ends and the substantive freedom to achieve those reasoned ends" – where the term "ends" means whatever is important to the person concerned.[1]

·      People need food, shelter and health care if they are unemployed or incapacitated, either temporarily or permanently, to protect them from hardship.  Some unemployment is both inevitable and necessary for the labour market to function properly (3.3.3.1), so people cannot be presumed to be at fault because they have no job.

·      Public funding of a service can ensure complete and equal availability to everyone, irrespective of their wealth (or their parents’ wealth). 

·      It avoids the problem of people restricting the giving of charity to those whom they feel to be deserving, which might only cover those in the same ethnic group as themselves.[2]

·      Public funding gives people a meaningful mechanism to claim their rights.  It would be impractical and unfair for a needy person to randomly select a wealthy individual and try to make a claim.

·      Taxation provides a fair mechanism for sharing the cost of socio-economic rights, because the burden can be spread according to people's ability to pay and it allows for some measure of economic reciprocity (3.5.1).

·      Those who receive benefits can retain their dignity as members of a society which has conferred rights upon them, particularly when they and their families have paid tax (or National Insurance, in Britain).  This, it is argued, is preferable to the recipients being positioned as dependent on private charity – because to depend upon the arbitrary power of another person is a form of servitude;[3] this makes the recipients feel inferior and can even make them resentful.  Such feelings weaken social cohesion.

·      Private giving can lead to absurd disparities:[4]

“The British public gives more to a Devon-based donkey sanctuary than the most prominent charities trying to combat violence and abuse against women.”

·      Charities compete with each other, so some spend much of their revenue on marketing; some have high administration costs.[5]

·      Charity isn't just an economic transaction, and it involves more than two actors: it isn't only a relationship between an individual donor and a recipient.  With a publicly-funded service, everybody in that society can feel better knowing that there is a safety net to protect them from hardship.  And, if they are taxpayers, they know that they are contributing in due measure to protect other people.

Individualists don’t dispute what people need, but they argue against these needs being agreed as publically-funded socio-economic rights; they argue that individuals should be responsible for themselves where possible.  If necessary, private charity would step in.  This belief, which is widely held in America for example, can be supported by several arguments:

·      Civil society is likely to be more responsive to people’s needs than a comprehensive service provided by the State (3.5.3.2).

·      Benefit payments might lead to idleness and dependency. 

·      Public provision ‘lets people off the hook’:

‒      Mutual dependence strengthens families but reliance on the State weakens them.

‒      It can be argued that people who choose not to pay for health insurance don’t deserve to be helped.

·      Private charity is altruistic, whereas taxation is a coercive infringement of personal liberty.[6]

The choice between public funding and private charity is therefore contested: it is part of the fundamental conflict between individualists and collectivists, so negotiation is needed.  There is greater security in co-ordinated provision, and there are benefits in the wider choice and spontaneous giving which are associated with private action, so it is appropriate to have a combination of the two approaches.

© PatternsofPower.org, 2014