Charity v. Justice
Early in 5th grade, having
recently survived Y2K, my class held a mock presidential vote. I do not
remember exactly how our class split between George W. Bush and Al Gore, but I
distinctly remember that I was the only person to vote for Ralph Nader. I also
do not remember what deciding issues swung my vote. It must have been my early
and unshakeable commitment to progressive policies, espoused by Nader’s Green Party,
like environmental protection, nonviolence, social justice, gender equality,
and LGBT rights. I am confident my views were rational and well founded.
Now in 2018, my formal education
still unfinished, I live in a Harvard Law School dorm. Strewn across tables in
our common rooms are copies of a small paper packet with a bold-letter cover
page: Please read these articles before
the Harvard Law School curriculum culture envelops you. Thank you. – Ralph Nader.
Of course I pick it up. For some context, at this point I am in my seventh
semester of law school. Law school is typically six semesters (three years),
but I love it so much that I decided to stick around for some extra indoctrination
and cultural envelopment. Moreover, I am committed to entering Big Corporate
Law, one devil of institutional power that Ralph Nader certainly takes to task
for their complicity in systemic injustice. But hey, better to find out what I
should have known three years ago now than never.
Inside are three articles written
by Ralph (I feel like we are friends, I can use his first name). They are short
and clear. They did not use jargon. They do present facts. I find them digestible
and thought provoking. One of the articles is a list titled, “An Open Letter to
Harvard Law Students.” The third item on the list calls for “a deeper awareness
of the distinction between charity and justice. For example, soup kitchens are
a necessary charity in a society
without enough. A just economy with livelihoods for all would prevent the daily
hunger that flows from systemic poverty. Charitable work by lawyers is about
immediate assistance, while advancing justice is structural work that foresees
and forestalls the conditions that give rise to the … need for charity.”
I cannot stop thinking about the
distinction between charity and justice.
Americans are enamored with
charity. I went to a lunch talk given by a distinguished HLS alumni (aren’t
they all? ‘We all’ very soon!). He made millions as an influential tax lawyer
and public company director. He currently sits on several boards of household-name
companies where he continues to enjoy power. He is not famous but his influence
certainly matters. One of my fellow classmates asked a question, I do not
remember its exact phrasing, but essentially about how ‘to do well and do good’.
Our esteemed guest expounded the virtues of doing good and, by way of example, recited
the amounts of charitable donations made by the organizations he leads.
Americans are so enamored with
charity that our tax code encourages charity in exchange for tax deductions.
The presence of tax deductions for charitable giving has an extreme corollary in
political thought. This strain advocates for an abolition of taxes in favor of individual
charity. I personally doubt two premises of the argument. First, that those who
espouse this view are as charitable in practice as they give themselves credit
for. Second, that others are as charitable as these people give them credit
for. But I will grant both premises for the sake of argument: people who think
all redistribution should be through personal giving are extremely charitable
and so is everybody else. It is still a bad idea.
First, important social interests
might be neglected. Government budgets are large and varied. They support
unsexy and even unpopular spending that are, nonetheless, necessary. Sewage
infrastructure might not get funded until people start dumping poop in the
streets. Basic scientific research might go underfunded because it does not seek
to solve any particular problem that people face today, so it lacks the
emotional pull of other potential research projects. Examples of things that
might be under- or un-funded are too numerous to cite.
On the flip side, other activities
might be grossly overfunded. A quick perusal of the Google results for “stupidest
gofundme” shows that people will give money to some ridiculous activities, like
for other people to buy beer or vacations. More seriously, it is quite likely
that important things will get overfunded. For example, veterans’ retirement
and health benefits might get overfunded because it is an understandable human
and national need that many citizens are probably willing to give money to
support.
Second, charity as social spending
distorts the concept of one person, one vote. When money is funneled through
the political process everyone, in theory at least, gets an indirect say on how
that money is spent. If the money is spent poorly or on things that citizens do
not like, they can vote for new representatives with different spending
agendas. When social spending is entirely dependent on individual decisions,
democracy is subjugated to the whims of the wealthy.
Third, charity disrespects the
autonomy of those who receive it. Charity is given for specific purposes and
people can only benefit from it if they conform to the requirements set by the
charity or the purpose fits into their lives. For example, a person with food
allergies who eats at a soup kitchen that serves items that trigger their allergies
needs not only get to the kitchen but also to, more or less, accept the food
they find there. Liberal social redistribution, on the other hand, gives decision-making
autonomy to the recipient to choose how to use their benefits in terms of both
location and substance. A program like food stamps sits somewhere in between.
It dictates that recipients use the value for food and they can only go to
stores that accept TANF.
Fourth, charity disrespects the
dignity of those who receive it. Recipients of charity may feel subordination
or subjugation to those who give, especially when donations are not anonymous. These
emotions denigrate individuals’ sense of dignity and may also reduce their
dignity in others’ eyes too.
Fifth, the psychological benefits
of donating distort the individual’s sense of moral righteousness in the
presence of a morally unacceptable system, reducing peoples’ desire for
systemic change. Giving to help others has demonstrably positive psychological
benefits. Donators feel good about themselves and their positive impact on the
world. But this good feeling masks the continued underlying inequality and
injustice that will necessitate ever more charity in the future. A constant
stream of charitable psychological shots can blind donators to the persistence
of, and remedies to, need.
But let us return to the more
realistic world of our esteemed guest speaker, who might justifiably believe in
the beneficence of our mixed tax and charity system. His examples of charity,
the millions of dollars given to causes X, Y, and Z, still ring hollow as justifications
for enriching himself in a morally unjustifiable world.
Why is our world morally
unjustifiable? Extreme poverty is rampant while wealthy excess threatens
catastrophic consequences. Arbitrary differences like skin tone or geographic
birthplace are determinative of life outcomes. I am not writing this piece to
defend this particular claim. If you are not convinced on this point then I
will not do the work necessary to change your mind.
Also, before continuing, I should
clarify that I do not mean to condemn the practicalities of earning a
comfortable living in a wealthy society. The exigencies of quotidian life in a
rich society make it necessary for any individual in that society to be a
member of the global rich, and to be rich in such a way that is often, at best,
morally dubious. I also do not fault those who enter the a-moralistic technical
worlds of elite white collar professionalism. Aside from the broad critique
that the social complexities which necessitate elite white collar
professionalism are themselves a tool through which inequality is filtered and
cemented, white collar professionals are necessary grease for modern society’s
gears.
Unfortunately, it is these two things,
personal exigency and technical expertise, that beget hollow charity
justifications to gild a life’s work embedded in a morally dubious power
structure.
The founts of personal exigency
have a tendency to expand without limit. A recent Planet Money episode interviewed
an economist who estimates that one day’s work for the average American begets
20,000 hours of artificial light. We have so much artificial light that many of
us struggle to sleep. When I can sleep, I sometimes dream that I am drowning in
BIC ballpoint pens. And I could not survive classes without a quiver full of
rainbow highlighters. Show me one person with a private jet, and I will show
you someone whose fount is overflowing.
Personal desires must be checked at
some point. I do not deign to the draw the line for anybody else. I can hardly
figure out the line for myself, much less implement limitations effectively. But
the salient facts to guide our individual demarcations flash red all around us.
Excessive greenhouse emissions should lead us to, among other things, shift
from person automobiles to public transportation and reduce electricity use
(maybe we will sleep better!). The proliferation of physical waste should make
us shy away from non-biodegradable packaging like plastic and seek to recycle
or reuse whenever possible. There are innumerable issues that could be
addressed and personal boundaries need not track society’s existential threats.
Find your favorites and set some inviolable boundaries.
One input to the ever-expanding
fount of personal exigency is peoples’ desire to care for their progeny. Behind
a veil of ignorance, where we do not know whether we will be rich or poor, I
would want to live in a society that treats the needs and desires of all
children equally.[1]
We do not live in such a society. Personal wealth is easily passed to children
through, among other things, tax-free annual gifts, estate bequests, and
tax-advantaged education savings. Personal capacity to care for progeny,
sometimes multiple generations into the future, leads individuals to amass
enormous fortunes today to deal with the uncertainty of tomorrow. Those fortunes
function more equitably when deployed in the name of justice today than hoarded
for the future.
Technical expertise, on the other
hand, shrinks so small that professionals forget that their work hammers away
at the head of a pin. They see context in the rolling hills of metal-head
contusions that extend no farther than the opinions of their own wonky peers
who live but millimeters away. In Professional Responsibility our professor
extolled the virtuous tax bar who have made transparency a core tenant of their
work. It strikes me as odd that the tax bar considers transparency to be a core
tenant of their work. Nobody except tax professionals have any idea where money
‘is’, how much of it sits offshore, or how it is spent by our governments. This
particular set of problems does not sit at the feet of tax professional alone.
They directly implicate, for example, corporate and finance law. And that is
the problem.
Professionals are conditioned to
think in compartmentalized ways. They tackle a particular problem. That problem
may be complex and difficult to solve, but the professional’s tools are known
or discoverable and must simply be put to work. Ultimately, the task’s
boundaries are demarcated for each person by their realm of expertise.
Professional compartmentalization
and the wealth it begets yield a benevolent function as long as the expansion
of personal desires does not impose negative externalities on others. Unfortunately,
we know that it does produce a wide range of negative externalities. At the
most basic level, elite white collar workers’ inattention to a wide variety of
non-work issues and a-moralistic attitude about their technical work hurts
society. The world is rife with un-remedied injustices that could benefit from
the attention of our most educated, smartest, and hardest working citizens.
More pointedly, elite white collar professionals sense of reality narrows and
disconnects from reality writ-large. Problems emerge in social justice. Contemporary
professional civil rights lawyers are often disconnected from the needs of poor
incarcerated African-Americans.[2] Problems emerge in
environmental justice. Frequent business travelers, whether by plane or car,
bust through any semblance of a ‘carbon budget’. Problems emerge in economic
justice. The near complete privatization of our food system allows for food
deserts in poor urban centers, leaving people with nothing to eat except high-calorie
processed junk.
Modern justice demands that elite
white collar professionals with technical expertise come to society with more
than tweaks to their own domains but with more comprehensive plans to rectify a
fractious and justice-starved reality. Professionals must think beyond the
technicalities of their spheres, which leads them to think of marginal reforms
to our social structure, toward a world structured positively to achieve justice.
In the absence of such large scale change, charity will remain a necessity.
There are myriad possible projects to
which motivated office workers might turn their intellectual firepower. Human
rights is not linked with corporate governance in any meaningful way. I could
go on about the moral paucity and corresponding importance of corporate governance.
Most of the 100 largest economies in the world are corporations; their governance
is essential to economic and civil justice. Mass incarceration blights our
society. In many cities, individual car ownership paves the way to a
middle-class lifestyle rather than public transportation. All of these issues
are multilayered, require diverse skills and perspectives to tackle, and, most
of all, require comprehensive and visionary, rather than marginal, reform.
There are several infirmities of my
call for comprehensive, professional-led, change.
Professionals may do no work
related to justice issues. Professionals who only give money, even substantial
amounts of money, to charity are not really connected with the practical
realities of those who need the charity. They do not see the systemic and
institutional reforms needed to cut at the root of those problems that beget
the need for charity.
This same critique often applies to
those who sit on boards or executive committees. These governance bodies can be
removed from the realities of the people those organizations exist to serve.
Meeting once a month to discuss a charity’s financial and operational health
does not always suffice to understand the depth of change necessary to obviate
the need for your charitable organization.
Professionals who do work with
charities still may not have the time to understand the extent of social vines
that need chopping to obviate the need for their preferred charity. An
accountant who volunteers at a food bank every weekend may not have the time in
the rest of her week to put together a complete vision of what changes are
needed to end hunger.
Professionals are also self-consciously
limited and insecure human beings. Even influential and respected dentists,
doctors, architects, or teachers may look at embedded social injustice and wonder
what they, as individuals, can possibly do. This is especially true when
burdened with time-consuming demands from work, children, family and friends,
and personal mental and physical health.
More systemically, the world as we
know it caters to the interests of elite white collar professionals. It may,
upon reflection, be morally dubious and unjust, but it is comfortable if you
graduated from a decent college, passed a licensing exam, and are a passable
socialite. We live in segregated neighborhoods, with limited contact with
people from other social strata, so we do not need to feel the visceral pain of
our society’s injustice. Environmental problems have not yet really affected us.
I do not see the Texas-sized plastic gyre floating in the Pacific Ocean when I
fly to Tokyo for vacation, so I can easily ignore it. As a globally rich
person, and as a rich person in a rich nation, radical systemic change
threatens my comfort and status.
I do not have answers to the
inertia of technical professionals in modern society. Undoubtedly, some of it
exists because people disagree with the broad sweep of one of my core premises:
that the world, as is, is morally unacceptable. For the rest of us, who find
even aspects of immorality that could use rectifying, if not the whole, the
challenge has been set out.
Do not feel shame that you strive
to succeed in the context of modern society and its quotidian requirements
through a-moral technical professionalism. Just reflect at some point, when you
have enough to live that comfortable life, on what charities soothe your
conscience and what we might do to make your charity-of-choice obsolete. Remember
that your charity is merely a shimmer ricocheting off the surface of a cesspool
of injustice. Then act to change the world.
[1] Although “we take
the rightness of parental preference so for granted that we often neglect … the
fact that it is anything but self-evidently morally appropriate. … [C]areful
reflection shows that the degree of parental preference systematically
encouraged in our own culture is far too extensive to be morally justified.” Richard
Wasserstrom, Lawyers as Professionals: Some Moral Issues, 5 Human Rights 1
(1975).
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