Should We Be Our Foolish Brothers’ Keepers?

By LEON R. KASS

These are critical times for philanthropic and voluntary associations. With the federal government cutting support for social services and programs, private philanthropy is being asked to take up the slack and is considering how to meet the challenge.

But should philanthropy meet this challenge? In particular, should private philanthropy adopt for itself the goals of the Great Society and other social programs that have not succeeded in the hands of the federal government?

Most of these programs, like them or not, sprang from a humane compassion for the less fortunate among us. Caring for the unfortunate has always been part of the mission of charities, especially those connected to religious organizations. Thus, the adoption by the charitable world of the government’s compassion-driven programs might seem to restore the status quo ante, before the Great Society or even the New Deal.

But times have changed, and we should think carefully before reaching this conclusion. Compassion is no longer a sufficient operating principle for philanthropic action.

This becomes clear once we ask some basic questions: whom to benefit, and how?

For which human beings should philanthropists exercise their benevolence and beneficence? In particular, should it matter if some of the proposed beneficiaries have brought their troubles on themselves? Should it matter if they are unwilling or unable to benefit from the philanthropist’s offerings?

Private philanthropy has always seen as part of its charge the care of those who are badly off through no fault of their own. But for several decades, we as a society have been increasingly asked, encouraged, and sometimes even compelled to come to the aid of those who refuse to take care of themselves — those who live dangerously, foolishly, and self-destructively, incurring great risks not only to life and limb, but also to the economic, psychic, and social well-being of those around them as well as themselves. I mean those engaged in heavy drinking, drug abuse, gangs, reckless driving, treacherous amusements, unsafe and irresponsible sexual activity, excessive gambling, excessive borrowing and spending, and refusal to make good on ordinary obligations in school or on the job.

In a free society, people will be free by and large to run these risks; the question is to what extent should everyone — or anyone — else bear the cost of the resulting harms.

There can be, of course, no simple or set rules for answering such questions. Much will depend upon the particulars. For example, we will be more inclined and expected to alleviate harm caused by foolishness or weakness of will than by vice, by a single or occasional episode of folly than by chronic foolhardiness, by bad judgment stemming from depression than from insolence, and so forth.

But, where we do not know what real help is or where assistance will be refused or squandered, it would be foolish to come to the rescue of foolishness. Moral obligation cannot mean that the remedy for someone else’s foolishness is to match or surpass it with our own. The obligation to be even our blood brother’s keeper cannot be absolute and unqualified.

Much as we may love our brother, and much as we should endeavor to care for our neighbors, we also love and care for what is good and right. Indeed, the beginning of morality is the subordination of unqualified self-love and love of one’s own to the standards of good and bad, justice and injustice. We are taught to accept responsibility for our own lives and conduct, and to expect others to do the same.

But what then about compassion? The claims of compassion might seem to oppose the claims of justice and lead us always to our foolish brother’s assistance. Yet if compassion is rightly understood, this turns out to be at best only partly true. The feeling of compassion is not indiscriminate; it considers whether the suffering is undeserved.

Modern life and modern political thought have done much to distort the normal operation of compassion, even while elevating it to political principle. Powerful visual images of suffering — horror without context — are television’s daily fare, tugging at our heartstrings, which are already stretched far beyond the capacity for normal response. The media’s exploitation of visual images of suffering corrupts compassion by demanding instant and unqualified sympathy, without knowledge or judgment.

Add to this the political hegemony of compassion as the first proof of public virtue, and we see how we have created a world in which victims are more honored than heroes. Indeed victims are lionized for their suffering — and, more to the point, despite their own culpability in coming to harm. Do more people think Magic Johnson is a fool for living dangerously than think he is a hero for going public as a victim? Sympathy and fellow feeling are, of course, precious and praiseworthy, but an indiscriminate compassion that is deaf to judgment can hardly be the basis for a morally sound philanthropy.

Yet there are other reasons, beyond the inadequate claims of our new breed of compassion, why the principles of strict responsibility and giving to each his just deserts, however suitable as a starting point, cannot be the whole story. Given the unpredictability of life, it is presumptuous to believe that one can live with perfect forethought and planning, immune to bad results.

Besides, there is frequently much virtue in risk-taking. Many of society’s greatest benefactors have gambled on their ability to make good in the absence of guarantees. Needless to say, not all failure is the result of folly or vice. In recognition of this fact, society prepares partial safety nets to catch those who fall while trying to climb.

But for even more profound reasons, the principle of strict responsibility cannot be the sole standard for assessing the misfortunes of our foolish brethren. For not everyone starts out with a full deck when it comes to living prudently. Differences in rearing and life experience and differences in intelligence create differences in each person’s ability to choose, in the choices we make, and in our capacity to stick by our better choices.

On the basis of arguments like these, one might suggest that a decent community will try not only to care for those who are worse off than others through no fault of their own, but even to bear some of the costs of helping those who are partly responsible for their own troubles. This is not so much a matter of justice or rights or even compassion; people have no right or claim to receive from life better than they deserve. It is rather a matter of the common good. We care for our fellow citizens because we are all in this together.

Acts of beneficence contribute to the common good not only by the benefits they bestow. They contribute also because they are manifestations of virtue and as such are central to the flourishing of the benefactors — and, indeed, of the whole society. Rightly understood, philanthropic deeds are not self-sacrificing but self-affirming and self-fulfilling. A society that is generous beyond what is strictly owed must be counted amonghumanity’s finest achievements. Thus, if our brothers need defense against themselves even more than against outsiders, we should be willing — in principle — to offer it, not least for our own goodness’s sake.

The present hegemony of no-fault compassion is to be blamed not so much for its implicit willingness to care but for its failure to understand what care really means. One does not really keep one’s brother by helping him in ways likely to increase his foolishness. On the contrary, help aimed at undoing the harms caused by foolishness is insufficient if it is unaccompanied by help aimed at fostering the benefit of assuming moral and personal responsibility.

Unfortunately, institutional philanthropists often enjoy nurturing dependency, for they too are needy creatures, with a great need to be needed. By labeling their beneficiaries as “victims,” and by sometimes whipping up hostility toward nonvictims and normal society, they degrade the objects of their compassion and encourage further dependence. They seem too often to forget that “the proper aim of giving,” as C. S. Lewis put it, “is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gift.”

Thus, should philanthropy sail increasingly under the flag of compassion?

Compassionate humanitarianism, the guiding light of the welfare state, is arguably the most powerful idea of modernity. Facing a world seemingly tragic for all human aspiration, our rationalist forebears set out to conquer fate and fortune on the basis of the scientific understanding of nature. They set the stage for the vast modern utopian project: by rational means, to banish all human misery and misfortune — and perhaps even death — and to remake the world according to human aspirations.

We all are the grateful beneficiaries of science and technology, including its perhaps finest fruit, modern medicine. Yet these increasing benefits come at increasingly heavy costs.

For instance, we now suffer from a radically “medicalized” view of life: Because illness is beyond guilt or innocence, because suffering is suffering, it demands attention. Even bad behavior often comes itself to be treated as illness (for example, alcoholism or rage behavior) or sometimes as inborn, hard-wired predisposition that one must not judge in moral terms. The medical view of life not only focuses on the ills of the body to the neglect of the soul; it seeks bodily causes for all psychic and moral phenomena.

While science forges ahead toward the goal of complete mastery, the continuing presence of personal misery and misfortune becomes mainly the responsibility of society, often of the state. Compassion is “elevated” from natural human sentiment to necessary political principle. Society becomes one big hospital, government one big healer. The technological approach to life — rational mastery through methodical problem-solving — finds its political expression in bureaucracy and the welfare state.

Driven partly by guilt for its own good fortune, the utopian elite takes up the cudgels for the least fortunate, demanding a politics of compassion on behalf of society’s victims. This is ironically a politics that blithely victimizes those hard-working and morally responsible Americans who do not have the margin to be very generous to strangers and who are not yet aboard the train to utopia.

The bureaucratic enforcement of compassion saps most of the impulse to care for another. For to look on every man as brother, and on every stranger-brother as guiltless victim for whom I am responsible, eventually produces a condition in which I feel myself victimized by the burdens of care, and therefore seek to excuse myself even from primary duties to those who are nearest and dearest.

The utopian project for mastery of fortune through rationalized technique is thus in danger of bringing about the very tragedy it willfully sought to prevent. For to produce a herd of people who don’t care for themselves and who consequently have to rely on unreliable and ineffective powers that are only capriciously responsive to their needs is to re-create the ill-fated and fatalistic world against which modern science first took up arms, a world that today is returning to our inner cities.

Fortunately there is another world-view, between an irresponsible surrender to indifferent fate and an unreasonable belief in human mastery. It is the sensible, moderate, but hope-filled world-view of human freedom and dignity under the rule of law, both encouraged and demanded by divine providence. It champions personal morality and responsibility, duties as well as rights, genuine neighborhoods and communities, hard work, fair play, and the pursuit of excellence.

Organized philanthropy, if it is truly to promote human flourishing, must come to the aid of this now beleaguered world-view.

Concretely, this means supporting strong family life, rigorous schools, and all sorts of religious and other voluntary associations capable of renewing our moral and spiritual capital. It means flying the banners of decency, justice, liberty, reverence, and truth, as well as the banner of compassion. It means supporting those individuals and groups who can combat the relativism, cynicism, and decadence purveyed in our best colleges and universities and our worst popular culture, who can reinvigorate our belief in everything good, beautiful, and holy.

Anything less will be a betrayal of true philanthropy, of the wise love of humankind.

Leon R. Kass is a professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. This article is adapted from “The Ethics of Giving and Receiving: Am I My Foolish Brother’s Keeper?,” edited by William F. May and A. Lewis Soens Jr. and published last month by the Cary M. Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility, at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, and Southern Methodist University Press.