I.O.U. Before I Know You: The Nature of Debt, Public Welfare, and Morality - Theodore Radyanyi

Throughout the course of a normal human life, we require a nearly unthinkable amount of support to become an independent person. Being fed, nurtured, educated, employed, loved – all of these things rely on our relationships with others, a relationship of give and take. Yet many individuals around the world live as recluses or nomads, benefitting from the ways in which societies (governments and individuals both) contribute to the well-being of the commons without giving anything in return, through their labour or through taxation. The question I seek to examine is: what debts do we take on during our existence, primarily in the context of welfare? Do we owe it to general society and the economy at large to participate in its give-and-take?

To owe is to be morally compelled to do something for another. When I say I owe you five dollars for lunch, there is no legal framework, mandate, or physical force causing me to give you those five dollars. I owe it to you, as I borrowed it from you. It is my moral duty to return what I have borrowed: this is called the debt. In this article, we will examine debt in the moral sense, not the legal sense. Debt is the consequence of the moral stance that we should return what we borrow, i.e., a debt unpaid is a debt owed.

There are two senses in which someone can have a debt. The first of which I have already mentioned, is the contractual debt. I engage, in a consensual and uncoerced manner, in a sort of contract with you – I will take something from you now, and I take upon myself the moral obligation to return it. The strength of this moral compulsion is the foundation of contractual debt. The stronger the compulsion, the more reliable my repayment to you will be. The second sort of debt is what I call a societal debt. This is a debt that you have no choice but to bear the burden of. It is a moral expectation, or a duty, that you fulfil these debts. For example, one is expected to take care of one’s parents in their old age rather than abandon them, or even the moral compulsion to call the ambulance for someone who appears injured. We owe it to others to repay our societal debt, not because we have chosen to take on this debt, but because collectively, the lives of individuals in a society are better overall when we owe them certain modes of conduct. I will primarily examine contractual debts, as societal debts usually exist as dogmas.

Firstly, let us consider the birth of a person. Individuals do not have any agency in whether they are born or not. They are simply born. Individuals can only take on a contractual debt for something they, consensually and uncoerced, chose to borrow. Because of this, the matter of one’s life is not in contractual debt. This extends further: we take it that individuals before a certain age have limited agency in their actions. Until a person can, in a consensual and uncoerced manner, choose anything in their lives, they cannot contractually accumulate debt in this manner. The food we are fed as babies, the shelter we are protected in, the welfare our family might benefit from, are all such things that, morally speaking, we cannot accumulate a contractual debt from. This dependency means we cannot even analyse the question of whether a baby might eventually owe their parents the money they spent on childcare. Importantly, this has a consequence on debt transferring to next of kin. When a parent dies, and they possess a contractual debt, it is immoral to pursue the debt by the next of kin if they did not agree to insure the parent’s defaulting of the debt.

More interestingly, once individuals come of age and possess agency, the choices they make about what to borrow suddenly become morally important. Governments provide welfare for citizens. Different countries provide different types of public welfare, be it free or subsidized health services, education, housing, etc. Do individuals accumulate debt for this type of benefit? I posit not. It is the case that individuals do not choose what state they are born into, or what other citizenships they are eligible for. This lack of agency means that, when a welfare program is ubiquitous (i.e., all citizens receive the same benefit from it, whether they claim it or not), individuals cannot accumulate a debt from receiving it. When a welfare program is not ubiquitous (e.g., unemployment/disability benefits, or other such additional benefits one must claim), I still posit that it is morally dubious to say one accumulates a debt from receiving this welfare. Let us take it to be the case that individuals do take on some contractual debt when registering for a type of welfare which is reserved for a special class of individuals. When this is the case, we would say that individuals owe this benefit back to society (we can conceptualize it as a “borrowing” of the public good), or must earn said benefit. To repay a debt after benefitting from welfare, individuals must provide some value to the public good – either engaging in labour or using their capital will satisfy the exchange. Most individuals only possess labour – we cannot expect those on benefits to be capital owners. This means individuals are morally obliged to work for their benefits, a fate avoidable by accumulating capital, or wealth. The conclusion we reach is that those who rely on benefits are morally obliged to work and those who possess wealth are not morally obliged to work. Compare this with the reality of labour markets: those without capital/wealth must engage in wage labour to live, and those with capital/wealth have the ability to avoid labour by collecting rents. Those with capital and wealth appear morally unburdened, and the wage labourer is inherently at higher risk of an inability to satisfy their moral debts. This moral conclusion entrenches the reality of labour markets as a moral structure: that those without capital and wealth are morally worse off than those with capital and wealth. To work is to avoid immorality if you are poor, yet one can avoid labour without immorality if you possess wealth or capital. I take this conclusion to be morally repugnant and invite the reader to examine their own moral notions of morality and labour and their compatibility with this conclusion. To take this conclusion as morally repugnant is to reject the notion that one should accumulate a contractual debt by claiming benefits.

It is not the case that one acquires a contractual debt by collecting benefits. Governments do not expect individuals to repay every cent collected, with interest –welfare is given altruistically. Yet still, moral judgments are made of those on benefits who do not contribute to society. How can we make sense of this? The previous argument implies, for those who wish to become recluses, nomads, or for whatever reason not engage in waged labour, that there are two choices: acquire capital or forego public welfare, yet there is no contractual debt per se forcing this decision. The government, in their benefits program, foregoes the premise that “one should return what is borrowed”, as welfare is not borrowed from the public good. A way to explain the persistence of these negative moral judgments is through a societal debt rather than a contractual debt. Individuals are expected, in their existence, to contribute to the public good, even if not all individuals benefit from the public good. The reasoning for this is that the public good is a sort of insurance whose beneficiaries are all citizens. To be a recluse would mean to be insured (getting benefits) while not “paying for the insurance plan” (generating surplus value by wage labour/usage of capital, collected in the public good by taxation). We will call this free-loading. It is fair to say that we do not want to “[extend] the hand of solidarity, but … not ask for any gesture of solidarity in return” (Donaldson and Kymlicka, p. 216) with public welfare. In countries with extensive welfare (or a collectivist ideology), this explains the sentiment against freeloading. In countries with less extensive welfare (there is limited reach of insurance), there is no reason to deny someone’s reclusive behaviour, as the pool of insurance they draw from is either non-existent, unlikely to cover them, and even if it does, pays out in an insignificant (morally indefensible) way.

This argument displays the following: we take societal debt to be the only moral grounding for contribution to the public good, which is as good as a moral dogma. There is no strictly formal repayment and individuals are simply expected to contribute to the public good, justified by their mere existence. This promotes a collectivist, “citizen’s duty” approach to the public good. Is this acceptable? I suggest, this is more acceptable than the contractual debt approach to public welfare provided the welfare system provides significant enough coverage in an equitable manner (i.e., ensuring no person is more disadvantaged than another considering their needs). If the welfare system is insignificant in its coverage, the public good is insufficient as a moral dogma in terms of its contributions. To serve this moral dogma of contribution to the public good while it has minimal instrumental value (that is, the coverage and insurance it provides are highly limited in addressing inequities in terms of advantage) may achieve one moral goal but fails another which is assumed in the construction of a welfare system, namely, addressing inequitable distribution of resources and advantage.

Debt is a tricky notion. Individuals need to take so much from society through the course of their lives. To burden individuals with debt by taking or borrowing from the public good would lead to worse moral outcomes overall, and as such, I suggest such a notion should be abandoned. Even if it is a duty for individuals to contribute to the public good to support future borrowers, we must ensure that this system of public welfare provides some level of real, actual support. If we fail to provide said support, we may be morally prioritizing the public good, all while squandering it by having poor-quality redistributive institutions. As such, I suggest we abandon the notion of debt in deciding how we allocate the public good altogether, and consequently, support individuals regardless of whether they contribute to the public good. Individuals do not owe it to anyone to participate in generating value for the public good unless it is maintained as dogma, which can be challenged instrumentally. It is exactly the point of welfare to provide support and freedom for individuals, not to burden individuals with a duty to repay.

References

Donaldson, Sue, and Kymlicka, Will (2019.) Animal Labour in a Post-Work Society. In C. E.

Blattner (Ed.), Animal Labour: A New Frontier of Interspecies Justice? (pp. 207-228). Oxford University Press.