>
>At 03:33 PM 8/6/2002 +0000, justin wrote:
>
>
>>blatant misrepresentation. Singer's argument boils down to this: since
>>>massive governmental increases in the level of foreign aid from the first
>>>world to the third world aren't forthcoming, we're all obligated to give
>>>most of our income to the least well off.
>
>
>Out of sheer curiosity - why does one have an obligation to share his/her
>income with others (both individually and as a society)?
Why assume that one has any antecedent entitlement to any portion of social wealth? It begs the question to say that it's "one's" income ina ny morally relevant sense, any more than the stuff that a robber steals is "his" in any sense other than that he has it. Of course I don't say that your professorial salry is stolen. Rather my point is that entitlements to income reflect social arrangements we make and might make in other ways. Rawls thinks that in general no one is entitled to any income if giving it to him doesn't benefit the least well off person. Singer, a utilitarian, argues that we should choose theincome distribution that maximizes average social welfare. There are other principles one might urge as well.
I
>can see a number of motives why people do so - such as pity, merit-making,
>or social status buying - but these are not principles that one would
>universally accept even if one did not feel pity or altruism or status
>envy.
Who says that the principles have to be universally accepted?> Well, Rawls. But for him, only under very special circumstances that do not depend on any nonselfish motives. I dion't think that Rawls' argument works, and my view is that no principles will be univerally accepted in a divided society like ours. In my view the less well off will simply have impose their preferred principles by coercion, whether democratically controlled or otherwise. I have (yes!) written a paper on why they would be justified in doing that: Relativism, Reflective Equilibrium, and Justice, Legal Studies 1997, also available online by request.
>
>Note that Marx's argument, which rests on the principle of value creation
>- he who creates value should own and control it; workers are sole creators
>of value under capitalism, ergo: workers should own and control all output
>of capitalist production -
I have written another paper explaining why this is a misunderstanding of Marx: What's Wrong with Exploitation, Nous 1995.
does not apply
>here. It is quite obvious that the claim to foreign aid cannot be
>truthfully based on the assertion that the recipients are entitled to it
>because they produced it
jks
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