A few weeks ago, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) told CNNs Jake Tapper that he favored the GOPs recent health care bill because it reduces the costs to those people who lead good lives, to those who keep their bodies healthy.
Setting aside for the moment that many health crises are not self-inflicted, Brookss logic is simple: If a person makes poor decisions, no one especially the state is obliged to help them. Or, more fundamentally, every individual is responsible only for themselves.
Liberals typically reject this logic. To the extent that they support health care or other social safety nets, they do so because they believe the state has a moral obligation to care for its citizens, especially the needy.
This divide animates almost every political dispute.
A new book titled The Age of Responsibility: Luck, Choice, and the Welfare State is challenging both the conservative and liberal narratives about choice and responsibility. The author is Yascha Mounk, a lecturer in political theory at Harvard University and a nonresident fellow at New Americas Political Reform Program.
Mounk argues that the left and the right have embraced a narrow and misleading conception of personal responsibility.
I sat down with him last week, and we talked about what a positive conception of responsibility looks like, and why punishing people for bad choices is a mistake. We also discussed what a properly constructed welfare state looks like, and why the left has failed to convince the right that stronger social safety nets are in everyones interest.
Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Maybe the best way to start is to have you explain how you define and think about responsibility.
How we think about responsibility has changed over time. Part of the problem is that it's really narrowed over time. When you think about what associations people had with the word responsibility in the '50s or '60s, I think they often would have thought about the duties we have toward other people. JFK's famous speech, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country," doesn't have the word responsibility in it, but it's a way to think about responsibility responsibility that goes beyond yourself, to your town, your community, your family, your country.
How has the concept of responsibility narrowed over time?
What we mean by responsibility has changed, so that now when we talk about responsibility, what we mean is that you have this sort of obligation to account for your own actions. It used to be that, "Look, you have responsibility outside yourself," and now it's like, "Well, look you have to acquit yourself of your own needs. You have to make sure that you have enough money to eat, that you don't ask things of the state or of others because you've made some bad choices, because you failed at something." Responsibility has become this really narrow and punitive idea not of what you owe to others, but of you making sure that others won't owe anything to you.
So now when we talk about responsibility, we tend to leave out the ways in which each person has duties to a society at large. This is more or less what Im talking about when I refer to this as the age of responsibility. Its an age in which responsibility has come to mean only personal responsibility.
I think a lot of this reduces to a core problem with libertarianism or classical liberalism: These are philosophies of rights, they give us a language of rights, but they dont give us a language of duties or obligations. Its all about what the state cant do to us (which is important, obviously), but theres nothing about what we owe our community, our neighbors, etc.
Yeah, I think thats right. There's this way of thinking about responsibilities and obligations that is all about, "Well, are you a good human being? Have you made the right choices or not? Are you yourself to blame for being in need?" It doesn't really think about the objectives of what we're trying to achieve as a society or what we may have in common.
When you're thinking about larger questions of economic policy, it actually winds up being pretty much in everybody's interest to revitalize parts of cities or to make sure that people who have made bad choices in the past are able to enter the workforce and become productive members of society.
The thing we should all be able to agree on is that this very, very narrow conception of responsibility and of our rights actually blinds us to all of those important considerations of public policy.
Then theres a sort of deeper question that you were raising: How do we think about what our rights are and what our duties are? How do we think about our institutions?
I guess that raises the obvious question: How can we get our institutions to reflect a view of responsibility that obliges us to care about other people and not just ourselves?
The move that I tried to make in the book is to say, "How do we think about something like the law of the state?" At the moment, we have this pre-political conception of rights and duties. It says, "Well, if you're in need for reasons beyond your own control - because you've had a car accident or because you were born with some disability - then we owe you something. But if, on the other hand, you're in need because you've made choices, then we don't owe you anything." " and, "If you're in need because you've made choices, then we don't owe you anything." Then the idea becomes that the institution of a welfare state is supposed to track that preexisting, pre-political set of ideas we have about who you are, what your character is, what choices you've made.
I think that gets it the wrong way around. I think there are political purposes that together, as a society, we're pursuing, and we should be setting up welfare state institutions in order to serve those purposes.
What would a properly constructed welfare state look like? What are the guiding principles?
I think then you get into a complicated discussion where there's a lot of trade-offs, but that captures to me what the truth of the matter is. I cant say, "This is the one principle that applies, and everything else doesn't matter," but that's how we think about it at the moment. We tend to think about this in terms of blame and fault. We say, "Well, it depends on if its your own fault or not. If it's not your own fault, then we owe you something. If it is your own fault, well, fuck you."
Instead, I think we should say, no, we want a welfare state that allows us to become a society of free and equal citizens in which we don't have the same amount of money, but in which each of us can appear in public as a true equal participant in our political system, in our democracy. A society in which we think of each other with respect and think of each other as socially equal, where nobody is so poor that the way they walk through the street marks them out as a member of the underclass. That's an important value to me personally.
There are other values that are very important as well. We also want a prosperous economy. We also want a dynamic economy. We also want to reduce suffering, needless suffering. That's an important goal of a welfare state. Sometimes these things will be at cross-purposes. Sometimes we may have to sacrifice a bit of economic dynamism for the sake of a greater moral good. There are always trade-offs and considerations.
How does your conception of responsibility inform some of the issues being contested today? Im thinking of the health care debate in particular, which is weighed down by divergent conceptions of personal responsibility.
Health care is a great example of how the obsession with personal responsibility poisons our political debate. Republicans say that people have a responsibility to take care of their own needs; if healthy people fail to take out health insurance, and then fall sick, that's their own problem. Democrats retort that we owe people health care irrespective of the choices they've made.
Now, I happen to agree with Democrats on this one, but I actually think this way of framing the question is far too narrow both from a philosophical perspective and in terms of just, well, winning the debate. Because the thing is: America pays far more on health care than other industrialized nations. And all that money buys us worse outcomes. So if we focus on this systemic question, rather than the ins and outs of who made which choice and owes what to whom, then we are both addressing more fundamental issues and, paradoxically, might have a better chance of seeing common ground.
Theres a pragmatism to that point that undergirds a lot of what you write in the book. Youre obviously of the left, but this is a pretty even-handed analysis. You argue in the book that both the left and the right are wrong about responsibility, albeit in different ways. The right is mired in this punitive framework, and the left, on your view, tends to deny accountability altogether.
The story on the right is simple, and it's sort of simple why that story is wrong. The right asks, Well, is it your own fault that you're in need? If it is your own fault, fuck you. We don't own you anything." Even if you're suffering a lot, even if we could easily remedy your suffering, even if it might have these good structural consequences if we help you, its not our duty to do that. Somebody might want to do it out of charity, but certainly the state shouldn't do it. I think this is shortsighted, unproductive, and not appealing as a vision for what we want to be as a society.
Now, what's happened on the left is really interesting. A lot of people on the left have taken on board the basic normative premise that the right has advanced in the age of responsibility. They've come to agree that, "Yes, the choices you've made in the past should influence what we owe you today. You've made bad choices. We owe you less." But they still end up arguing for a total welfare state, and they do it by arguing against an empirical ascriptions of responsibility.
To be clear, when you say arguing against an empirical ascription of responsibility, does that mean denying that people can or should be held accountable for those bad choices theyve made?
Yeah, basically. What you hear on the left is that people may have failed to live up to their personal responsibilities but that this isnt actually their fault in any way. Everybody is a victim of structure, a victim of these forces beyond themselves, and a reason why we can't hold people responsible in any way is that they have no agency.
Now, I get why people attempt to make this argument. I get what's appealing about it, but I think it really has proven politically ineffective.
Ineffective because its basically an incoherent argument or ineffective because its just not politically persuasive?
Perhaps both. I just know that it hasnt worked well in practice. When you keep saying, "Look, yes, people in this community are poor, but it's because they're victims of everything, so we should feel sorry for them," thats not effective. People on the other side arent buying that argument. So if you want to preserve or strengthen the welfare state, thats not the way to do it.
The way I think about it is that most people are capable of agency, and most people want to take responsibility for their own lives. They want to take responsibility for their loved ones, for their communities, for all kinds of things. So we should think again about how we can actually empower people who are disadvantaged to take on responsibility and find this more positive notion of what we mean when we say responsibility, rather than the instinctual left response of just denying that people who are in need have agency.
Well, I think this is a bit of a caricature of the smarter arguments on the left, but its probably not useful to debate that here. Let me ask you this: What do you say to someone who straightforwardly makes a normative libertarian argument that if someone consciously makes bad decisions, or if they simply refuse to work hard, they ought to pay a price for that and if they dont pay a price for that, we undercut the incentives for other people to work hard and apply themselves?
I think thats a pretty pragmatic argument. Again, I believe there are going to be trade-offs between having a really generous welfare state that helps people no matter what the circumstances, that strives to reduce suffering, and one that ensures we have the money we need in order to have a welfare state in a sustainable way, that ensures we have a dynamic economy. Those things could be in conflict, and I dont deny that.
Well, this is why we end up with an intractable value problem. Ultimately, people have to buy the moral argument that reducing suffering is a humane and just thing to do, irrespective of the economic benefits or costs.
Oh, absolutely. There are practical reasons to care about these things as well, as I mentioned earlier, but there is definitely a moral dimension to this argument. A lot of this depends on context too. Maybe in some countries, the culture is such that work is more prized and people are more desperate to work anyway, so the incentive isn't as important. Maybe in some countries, there's just more money to spend on a welfare state, so theres less of a competition with other kinds of political goods you might get from spending that money. You will get a range of outcomes depending on the empirical circumstances and depending on the values of a people or culture.
Your book sort of walks the line between a moral argument and a utilitarian argument.
I'm making a moral case that the punitive conception of personal responsibility is really cruel to people, really unfair to people in many circumstances. I'm also making a pragmatic case, especially to the left, that the way we tend to talk and think about responsibility, the way we've tended to play defense against this right-wing conception of personal responsibility, isn't working very well. If we actually want to have a productive conversation about the future of work, about the future of a welfare state or social entitlements, and if we want to win elections, we should think about it in very different ways. We should think about how to empower people by making them capable of real agency rather than making excuses for people by saying that theyre victims of structure.
Im more interested in the pragmatic case youd make to someone on the right, because thats ultimately who youre looking to persuade here. The left will buy any argument that advances a more generous welfare state, but the right has to be convinced that doing so will materially improve society.
Okay, lets take this example: How should we treat somebody who has lost their job for their own fault? They turned up late to work too many times and [are] now stuck in a very poor neighborhood far from employment opportunities. One question is, do we owe them assistance of transport? We could take the personal responsibility view and say, "No, we don't owe it to him because he made bad choices and thats why he lost his job, so we why should we care?
Now, we could take a more pragmatic view here and say, "Well, look, he actually needs access to a car in order to get the next job, and he actually wants a job, so it's in our interest to help him get access to that transportation because that means he will earn money, pay taxes, and contribute to the community rather than sinking further into desperation or crime or drug use or whatever. When that happens, society ultimately pays the price. So these are practical considerations that people on the right should be able to recognize.
My sense is that all the normative and philosophical arguments about responsibility are super interesting to weirdos like us who are into that kind of thing, but most people dont give a damn. If theres a politically persuasive case to be made for a more generous society, its got be less abstract and more concrete.
I totally agree. Look, you can either have this incredibly complicated and interesting debate that philosophers have had literally for thousands of years that ultimately devolves into intractable questions about whether people have free will or you can recognize that almost everyone wants to lead a life in which they consider themselves responsible for their own actions. Most people want to take control of their lives, want to take responsibility for others. We need to be thinking about how to help them do that.
So to the person on the right who says that Im only responsible for myself and my actions, and I dont care about the fate of other people, you respond not by saying, "Here is some abstract moral notion that I derived through amazing logic that you'll understand only if you, too, study philosophy for 20 years." A) I don't think that actually works philosophically, and b) it's not going to work practically anyway. What you can say is, "What does the world look like when you really think we have no obligations toward other people whatsoever? What kind of political, moral world do you enter, and is that a world you actually want to live in?"
I think for most people, if they really consider this, the answer is no.
Original post:
To save the welfare state, liberals need a new narrative about personal responsibility - Vox