The Wrong Rights

Daniel Shapiro from the August/September 1999 issue

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Indeed, in the last half of his chapter on welfare and benevolence, Kelley does an excellent job of explaining why government is far worse than private institutions in distinguishing between the needy who should and should not be aided. He points out that when welfare is a right, personal virtues or vices become irrelevant in making aid decisions, yet it is precisely a person's character traits that play a large role in determining whether he will get off welfare permanently. Private agencies tend, for that reason, to focus upon persons' characters as much as giving them skills, and have the discretion, which a government bureaucracy operating by fixed rules does not, to tailor different kinds of aid to different recipients. (When government agencies do have that discretion, it is dangerous, since as an agency of coercion they should not intervene in clients' personal lives.)

While the positive freedom and benevolence arguments for welfare rights are quite important, probably the most influential arguments today are communitarian in flavor. These stress neither freedom, nor charity, but belonging or solidarity. Communitarianism is part of an anti-individualist tradition that believes the move to a society of choice and contract has gone too far, making us rootless and alienated from our links to our communities, links that are essential for our individual and social well-being.

Recent communitarian literature is of two types. Philosophers such as Michael Sandel and Alasdair McIntyre argue that our identity is largely shaped by unchosen social relationships, which in turn incur unchosen obligations. Hence, individual autonomy is not a central aspect of our nature. Public policy analysts such as Amitai Etzioni and politicians such as Bill Clinton stress a new social contract or covenant between the government and its citizens, whereby the benefits of the welfare state will be matched by the obligation to be responsible, to not belligerently assert one's entitlements, and to give back to the society that nurtures us.

Kelley argues that the more philosophical arguments are fallacious. Of course we are social creatures: Our knowledge, skills, and values are formed by our family, our neighborhood, and society at large. But it hardly follows from that recognition that one is permanently dependent upon those groups for one's identity, since people have the capacity for independent, reflective judgment and are able to choose the groups with which they wish to associate.

Similarly, there is no doubt that we are enormously in debt to the culture we have inherited and that we should be grateful to our parents who raised us. But that doesn't imply the existence of some amorphous moral agent called society, for which the state can bill us to pay for entitlements. Our social nature is thus perfectly compatible with the idea that individuals are autonomous beings who should have the freedom and responsibility to shape their own lives.

Kelley's criticism of the anti-individualist argument is similar to that leveled by other defenders of individualism (though I do wish he had addressed the ties of ethnicity, race, and gender, which are less matters of choice). He provides, however, a distinctive account of the communitarian emphasis on balancing rights and responsibilities, which, he argues, is really a sign that welfare rights are not basic human rights on a par with rights to life, liberty, and property.

The problem is not just that welfare rights as a category conflict with negative rights, since the former require unchosen positive obligations, that when enforced, deprive others of liberty and property. The deeper problem is that welfare rights are in conflict with one another. Welfare rights are open-ended. Rights to housing, food, shelter, and medical care cannot, in the real world, meet all of people's needs for these goods. The state must adjudicate these various conflicts and pick and choose. In so doing, welfare rights become a right to whatever welfare goods the government chooses to provide.

Thus, says, Kelley, we arrive at "a fundamental change in the conception of rights. The original conception is that a right protects an individual against encroachment and oppression by society. A right is not a privilege that depends on the will of others but a claim that they are obliged to respect. Once welfare rights enter the picture, however, the unavoidable conflict among rights, and the need for government to choose among, turn all rights into privileges." All is an exaggeration--it's not clear why rights like the right not to be assaulted are so transformed. That to one side, I was convinced by Kelley's basic point that the demand for balancing rights and responsibilities is really an acknowledgment of how the welfare state has transfigured the nature of rights. Communitarian metaphors of a social contract or covenant may help soften this blow, by giving the impression that we have somehow all participated or consented to this arrangement, but of course that's a fiction.

Kelley sees Social Security as emblematic of the problems with communitarianism. Its pay-as-you-go financing, in which present workers' taxes, rather than investment, fund retirees' pensions, seems to represent a kind of solidarity between members of different generations. As Robert Ball, a former commissioner of Social Security, puts it, Social Security "is based on the premise that we are all in this together, with everyone sharing responsibility for the security of everyone else, present and future."

The financial disaster of Social Security reveals the moral bankruptcy of these arguments. Social Security's huge unfunded liabilities and terrible rate of return for those born since World War II shows that a fictional solidarity between the living and the dead provides no basis for security. The shared "responsibility" inherent in Social Security is a pale imitation of the real thing, since the amount one receives is virtually independent of any planning or prudence on one's part. The "we are all in this together" rationale for Social Security is really a way of disregarding economic reality, of pretending that taxation is as secure a foundation for retirement as investment.

It's hard to quarrel with Kelley on any of these points-except to suggest that Social Security's problems mean that communitarians should at this point consider privatization as better than tinkering with the status quo. After all, solidarity depends on trust and on keeping one's promises (which Social Security cannot do). As important, the public awareness of the unfairness of the system is setting generations against one another, something a communitarian would want to avoid above all.

Kelley's book is an impressive achievement. Most of the arguments are powerful, and even better, Kelley combines arguments that are usually treated separately: moral arguments about the aims or rationales of the welfare state, and practical or social science arguments about its effects. He writes exceedingly well, and the book is not just aimed at or understandable by academics. It will, I hope, have a wide audience.