Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!floyd!harpo!decvax!cca!ima!inmet!nrh From: nrh@inmet.UUCP Newsgroups: net.politics Subject: Re: Starvation: The Rebuttal - (nf) Message-ID: <903@inmet.UUCP> Date: Thu, 16-Feb-84 23:56:59 EST Article-I.D.: inmet.903 Posted: Thu Feb 16 23:56:59 1984 Date-Received: Sat, 18-Feb-84 03:11:53 EST Lines: 199 #R:ihuxl:-87600:inmet:7800058:000:10063 inmet!nrh Feb 15 13:45:00 1984 ***** inmet:net.politics / ihuxl!pvp / 5:55 pm Feb 1, 1984 First, let's recognize that there appears to be general agreement on some important facts: 1) No one has argued that we do not have enough food to alleviate hunger in the world, at least in the short term. (say two to ten years) [ That's because you're being vague. What do you mean by "alleviate"? Keep hunger from happening? Make hunger slightly less profound? or what? ] 2) No one thinks that we do not have the technical ability to distribute the food to the starving, should we to choose to do so. [ I don't think we've got that ability. Not while people in THIS country go hungry while others are "welfare millionaires". And then there is the teensey little matter of whether the Governments of those countries will let us waltz in and start feeding people there without taking the cream off the top. If you doubt this, have someone tell you of Lagos's big loan from the World Bank, and how little is actually going to build the New City in Nigeria. Not that attempting to feed the hungry is an unworthy thing to try, but if your budget for doing it ASSUMES no corruption.....] 3) No one has argued that letting someone starve is a good thing, in and of itself. [This I sort of agree with. Would you have force-fed Ghandi, though? No? You would have given in to his demands. Good for you! What about the fellow in the English prison who died about two years back. Not to nit-pick -- I see you're not talking about people who are TRYING to starve, but please don't talk about "everybody agreeing". I don't agree with your three points, so not everybody agrees] The preceding facts indicate that what we have here a moral choice. We can choose to let people starve today (evil), or we can choose to feed them today (good). [Hmmm.... Would you sell your soul (assuming you're religious) to feed them today? No? How about murder a lot of people? ("How many?" I hear you ask.... well, to quote Mark Twain when a woman said she'd sleep with a man for a million dollars but not for 2 dollars (which she refused indignantly, asking what kind of woman Twain thought she was): "We've established what you are, now we're just talking price." ] So why do all these people claim that we must choose today to let people die? Arguments [1],[2],and [6] assert that we will soon exhaust our surplus and then we will all starve together. In short, we must do evil today to avoid greater evil tomorrow. This is merely a variant of claiming that the ends justify the means, that the evil means must be chosen to achieve the good end. I don't know of any moral or ethical value system that allows that argument to justify doing evil. In fact, most of the people whom we rightly regard as the great moral abominations of our time used this type of reasoning to justify their actions. (Hence my previous references to Hitler, Stalin, and Amin.) I suppose if enough people on the net really don't understand why it is both morally wrong and self corrupting to use evil means to achieve a good end, I'll end up posting a tutorial on morality and ethics. But I really hope that they teach at least that much morality in engineering school these days! [Oh? Where do you suppose this "surplus" comes from? I'll give you a guess or two, but ultimately, it comes from government-backed price floors under farm products. The reason the government can do this is by virtue of taking money from those who do not wish to give it. This is called "theft" or "taxation" depending on how directly you wish to put it. To expand, or even continue this program involves expanded or continued theft. What did you say about the end not justifiying the means? ] Arguments [3] and [5] raise the issue of whether we will take away peoples motivation to become self-sufficient by sharing our surplus with them. Clearly, individuals starving to death today due to economic or climactic disaster are highly motivated to become self-sufficient. [Yes, but feeding them for free for a couple of years will change their motives quite readily. Take a look at what happens to people on Welfare in the United States. As a reference, look up the New Yorker series on Welfare (about a year ago, as I recall). ] Their problem is that they do not have the ability to become self-sufficient before they die. So let's assume instead that we are referring to an entire country here. Will being "on the dole" spoil this country? I don't think so. [Does that give you the right to steal other people's property to test your theory? ] Please note here that I am not asking for equal sharing of food between the haves and have-nots. I am not even asking the haves to cut back on their consumption! I am asking that the developed nations use their current surplus to provide enough food to struggling people to keep them alive while we all work on the solutions to their problems. How can subsistance rations demotivate people or spoil them? [Again! It seems unreasonable, I agree, until you look at what happens to people on the dole. They grow dependent. Look it up. Look at history! 1 ounce of history = 10 tons of theory] Argument [4] is at least direct, if nothing else. "I've got mine, Jack, Screw you." The main feature of the more lucid versions of this argument seems to be theassumption that "we" deserve the food that "we" earned, and "they" don't deserve it because "they" didn't earn it. As if we went out and developed this country all by ourselves by the sweat of our brow! What hard work we've all done! "We" just happened to have been fortunate enough to be born here, and "they" just happened to have been born there. For that mistake, we choose to let them die. We treat mass murderers in this country better! [ Nope! "We" choose NOTHING. You can send half your salary to these people (good luck!) and test your theories of how to save them. I wish you luck, I sincerely do. I might even participate. BUT -- neither you nor I have the right to seize food owned by others and send it to those you deem deserving. You have no right to help set up a committee to do the same thing (rather, you do have that right, but such a committee still does not have the right to seize the resources) That the food has already been seized makes it no nicer. We must end the seizure. If you argue that the food has not been seized, I agree! The money to buy the food has been seized. There's a difference, but not so far as the legitimacy of the government piling up the surplus is concerned. ] So enough refutation of the reasons to let people starve. Are there any positive reasons for us to feed them? First, someone once talked about the rights to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness". From what I have seen in this discussion, there are a few people around who think that the right to life is only applicable to people in developed countries. Perhaps they think it comes with U.S. citizenship? No, all human beings have the right to life. If we take their lives from them by withholding the food that would save them, are we any better than if we simply turned their country into a "glass parking lot", as somebody recently suggested? ["we" are not taking their lives from them. "we" do not have the RIGHT to take tax money from individuals to buy the food for this purpose. Remember -- the end does not justify the means. You cannot steal money from me to give to your church, no matter HOW GOOD the purpose the church will put it from. If you find money that's been stolen from me, the moral thing to do is return it, not to use it for your favorite charity. ] How can we proclaim our respect for human rights if we do not grant other people their most basic right? Remember that sins of omission are no less evil than sins of commission. [Okay Phil -- I hope you're living at subsistence level yourself. That's YOUR philosophy, not mine. Mine holds that coercion is the ultimate evil, that property rights are human rights, and that I don't have the right to grab money from other people to put it where I think it will do the most good. Give it a little thought. I don't like the idea of starving people, but I won't steal from others to prevent it. ] Second, if you believe that our stockpiles of food will run out in the not too distant future, then hoarding merely postpones the fateful day of reckoning. Better to face the problem today, while we still have some shreds of our self-respect left, than to wait and watch the rest of the world slowly starve. The morally acceptable response is to share what we have, and then put on our thinking caps and get to work finding the new food sources for all of us. Perhaps we could spend 2 or 3 percent of our defense budget on solving the world's food supply problems. What would that be, about 10 billion dollars a year? [That's real kind of you to re-allocate those resources so casually. NO. They're MINE. You can't have (roughtly) 0.5% more federal taxes from me. You're welcome to ask for it, but taking some more by force (federal taxes are backed by force) is immoral. Ends do not justify means. ] Finally, we can, indeed, choose to do good today, and still prevent evil tomorrow, if we have the moral courage and vision to do so. If we turn our faces now from the needy, then proclamations of our righteousness, and our denunciations of Communism will ring hollowly in a world that will see no difference between us. If we wish to claim the moral high ground, then we must act accordingly. ["we" cannot decide any such thing. Only individuals can make decisions. Such proclomations do indeed ring hollow. I'm not all that interested in what the "world" thinks. Let them think as they please, but I for one am not willing to participate in another Great Boondoggle (the Great Society used a lot of your rhetoric, but was staged in the US) simply because you think "we" should. ]