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Idle, Able-Bodied and Undeserving: the Persistence of Undesert in Western Political Thought

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Idle, Able-Bodied and Undeserving: the Persistence of Undesert in Western Political Thought IDLE, ABLE-BODIED AND UNDESERVING: THE PERSISTENCE OF UNDESERT IN WESTERN POLITICAL THOUGHT by Kinnar Power Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia August 2018 © Copyright by Kinnar Power, 2018 Dedication This project is dedicated to Dave and to everyone else who is inherently deserving of a good life but isn’t treated as such. ii Table of Contents Dedication ....................................................................................................................... ii Abstract .......................................................................................................................... v Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................... vi Chapter 1. Introduction ................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2. Literature Review ......................................................................................... 10 Chapter 3. Theoretical Framework and Methodology .................................................... 14 a) Theoretical Influences ........................................................................................... 14 b) Methodology ......................................................................................................... 18 c) Additional considerations regarding the framework ............................................... 20 d) Practical relevance and limitations of this project .................................................. 22 Chapter 4. Interrogating Work-Based Desert: Its Anachronism and Persistence ............ 24 a) Introduction……………………………………………………………………........24 b) On post-industrial political economies and the anachronism of work-based desert…………………………………………………………………………………..30 c) The argument ........................................................................................................ 36 Chapter 5. The Protestant Work Ethic ........................................................................... 41 Chapter 6. The Right to Private Property and Poverty as Moral Perversity .................... 48 a) Introduction ........................................................................................................... 49 b) Locke the Leveller? ............................................................................................... 49 iii c) Locke’s argument for private property ................................................................... 51 d) The relation of private property to the deservingness of the poor, contextual power relations and debates surrounding who deserves a good life ....................................... 56 e) Locke’s understanding of the causes of poverty and solutions to poverty ............... 58 f) The anachronism of Locke arguments regarding private property and poverty ....... 62 g) Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 62 Chapter 7. Adam Smith and Free Market Egalitarianism ............................................... 65 a) Introduction ........................................................................................................... 65 b) Egalitarian Adam Smith ........................................................................................ 65 c) The anachronism of Smith’s free market ............................................................... 71 d) The anachronism of Smith’s free market ............................................................... 71 Chapter 8. Mill, Marx, and Marxism in the Shadow of the 21st Century ......................... 74 a) Introduction ........................................................................................................... 75 b) Mill’s commitment to work-based desert and undesert .......................................... 75 c) Marx and Marxism ................................................................................................ 79 Chapter 9. Conclusion .................................................................................................. 90 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………104 iv Abstract This essay argues against the idea that desert of a good life must be contingent on work. To do so, I document the increasing preeminence, over time, of conceptions of desert based solely in the work ethic. The idea that some people wilfully choose not to work due to moral perversity – and are thus undeserving of social assistance – stems from these conceptions. I argue that this position suffers from normative and logical weaknesses and is increasingly anachronistic in advanced post-industrial societies. If the scope of analysis is limited in this manner, and we assume that, in this context, goods and wealth are increasingly abundant, and redistributable without adverse economic consequences, while opportunities for employment are scarce – particularly during recessions – then the force of these ideas is considerably weakened. However, their persistence is explained not by their philosophical force, but rather by how they sustain the diffuse power relations endemic to market society. v Acknowledgements I would first like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Katherine Fierlbeck, for her help and guidance this past year. I truly appreciated all of your advice, criticisms, and our spirited discussions; it was a pleasure working with you. As well, Dr. Florian Bail’s meticulous review of my earlier drafts had an immensely salutary impact on this project. He made me rethink passages I thought were already set in stone. Dr. Louise Carbert, made me think even harder about this subject during and subsequent to my thesis exam, and Dr. Karen Foster provided some timely advice and pointed me towards several resources that proved invaluable. I am grateful for all of you. Your expertise and careful reading have significantly strengthened the arguments presented in this essay. I would also like thank my friends in the Department of Political Science’s cohort of 2017-18. Your support has helped me get through a challenging year of studies. Most importantly, I would like to thank Harini, whose strength and compassion for those who suffer have been my deepest source of inspiration for this project. vi 1 1 Introduction Poor people aren’t really deserving of sympathy until their rib-cages are showing and their eye-sockets have swallowed their eyes. Wise 2018: para. 2 Tyler McGlothlin is a young, able-bodied man from Grundy, Virginia, who was profiled in a Washington Post article in 2017. At the time the article was written, he wasn’t working and instead spent most of his days and nights playing video games with his wife. He relied on his mother’s disability checks to get by, but they were never enough to feed everyone for the month. When the checks ran out, he would resort to begging, as did Tyler’s father, Dale. When David Hess, a wealthy, hard-working man encountered Dale begging, Hess offered him a job, which Dale turned down due to his painful disability. Enraged at Dale’s refusal to work, Hess left, returning shortly afterwards to stand beside him and hold a sign that said, “I offered him a job and he refused.” He then posted a picture of the scene on social media, a post which was subsequently shared thousands of times over. For Hess, asking for handouts instead of working was deeply immoral; people like Tyler or Dale McGlothlin who chose not to work deserved deprivation until they overcame their laziness and got to work. (McCoy, 2017a). This line of thinking is quite pervasive in contemporary society. For example, espousing similar ideas to Hess (and citing a Heritage Foundation study), Bill O’Reilly remarked incredulously that most ‘poor’ people have things like microwaves, televisions, air conditioning, cable television, and cell phones. He wondered how they could be considered poor and deserving of government aid if they had all of these things. O’Reilly’s comments are indicative of an underlying normative claim about social assistance: only those who are completely destitute are deserving of aid, and even these people are undeserving of any more than what is required for their physical survival. The moral norm underwriting this judgement is that a good life must be earned through hard work, and those who do not work are undeserving of a good life. This normative claim will be the focus of my essay. By a “good life,” I mean one’s ability enjoy oneself and 2 make choices that would contribute to one’s comfort and enjoyment of life, as well as one’s ability to experience personal dignity and social inclusion.1 Moral objections to social assistance such as those espoused by Hess and O’Reilly are not only found in popular culture, they are also deeply rooted within western political thought. They continue to be deployed to argue against unconditional poverty-reduction mechanisms, such as the negative income tax and the universal basic income, both of which would ensure that a guaranteed level of income is de-coupled from work.2 Even in a time where technological innovations are progressively making certain forms of labour obsolete (as demonstrated by Byrnjolfsson & McAfee (2011)), and threatening to drastically increase unemployment (Acemoglu, 2017), these objections continue to appear in popular discourse, political discourse, and even in the work of philosophers and economists who consider themselves classical liberals
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