Does the Duty of Charity Extend to Public Programs?

I was going back through a series of posts to connect a point made there to one I've made previously, when this made me think very clearly about a view very commonly espoused in arguments over any aspect of political economy:

"But mightn’t the Good Samaritan’s general attitude of generosity towards strangers induce him to support paternalism and the welfare state? I doubt it.First, an immediate response to an unmistakable need is quite a different matter from a programmatic purpose of bettering the human condition, and I don’t think the psychological motives of the two are very similar."

Many people hold this combination of positions: opposition what they call welfare programs or redistribution, those policies intended to reduce poverty and ameliorate its effects, accompanied by adherence to an ethical system, often religiously based, that affirms a duty to help others in need including strangers and the poor. They argue that private, voluntary charity is what this duty calls for, not a communal, government coordinated action intended to be a comprehensive solution; indeed, some argue that the obligatory nature of such a communal endeavor might even negate the generosity's moral worth.


I just can't get with this distinction though. If in your everyday life you have the duty to immediately help others you find in unmistakeable need, then I don't see why you wouldn't similarly have to immediately help others in equally unmistakeable need but who you might not personally come into contact to? Why should that matter whether you've seen them or not? That seems an arbitrary distinction. 

Not every person who you walk by are you obligated to help but only those who need it, which is determined by looking at them. There is something about some people, the sick, the poor, and others that makes it so they require the help of other people, who are morally required to oblige: could it be their misery and the conditions that lead to it that makes it so that they impose an ethical obligation? So if that miserable state indeed imposes moral obligations on others, why should it matter if others see the afflicted? 

Now, these concepts of 'immediate' and 'unmistakeable' might be doing a lot of work here: one could argue that only by personal contact could one be in a position to respond immediately to a person's need and for that need to be unmistakeable. So one way to stop the duty to help others on an individual basis from being generalized into a duty to maintain a communal welfare system is to argue that such a system might be incapable of responding immediately or ascertaining unmistakeable need. But to make this argument would be to deny the possibility of any government agency to really know anything at all (goodbye any appeals to a certain policy creating or destroying jobs, for example), and it flies in the face of the idea that people can identify unmistakeable need in others just by looking at them. Really though, I have no problem with people defending this argument this way because it concedes that if a public sector action could respond as immediately and be as sure about need as an individual, such an action might be obligatory. That leaves us with an empirical argument, which is usually more fruitful ground for progress and consensus, instead of just unverifiable assertions over purported rules.

But of course, as usual in ethics, there is a more plausible method of defending the combination of positions for a charitable duty and against a welfare system. It's just a matter of different ethical schools or theories, similar to Smith's explanation via "psychological motives" (though in the language of ethics instead of psychology). Those who hold this view are deontologists who believe that behaving ethically means adhering to certain first principle rules, or they are virtue ethicists who believe that it means acting as would a good person, to cultivate one's own virtues through habit and that moral good is found in the character of people who do good for its own sake (in which case requiring an action by law negates any good). And I, who can't fathom this distinction, am mostly a consequentialist*, who believes acting ethically means producing the best consequences. It's hard to argue definitively that one of these theories is right and the others wrong; it's a definite possibility that all these schools are simply incommensurate and use different languages.

However I really believe that the reasoning I detailed above, trying to illustrate how this distinction between individual charity and communal projects is nonsensical, gives special force to the consequentialist case in this instance. In fact, regarding the good of following rules or of a giving person's character as the primary, most fundamental, first principle good rather than the outcome that the character aimed at in following the rule seems to me to involve a misunderstanding of the concept of an action as being aimed at a certain end, and is a strong case against absolutist deontological theories that are not compatible with any consequentialistic hybridization. I think this misunderstanding can be accounted for by appealing to a true account of ethical theoretical entities and how they interact (which I'll post on soon, I'm sure).

*I call myself a consequentialist when I must commit to one of the schools over the others in their mutually incompatible forms, instead of carving out a more nuanced hybrid view.