Our social safety net is tattered. Our jails are overcrowded. Children are hungry. Families are homeless.
For the past few decades, at least, our civil discourse on these issues has been framed in terms of deserving versus undeserving. This applies whether we are talking about food stamps or young black men being gunned down by police. Do these sound familiar- “Michael Brown was a thug who stole from a convenience store” or “I see people at Walmart with their EBT cards buying cigarettes and alcohol”? In other words, Michael Brown got what he deserved and most SNAP recipients are lazy fraudsters. (Leave aside that FDA regulations, enforced by grocers and retailers, limit what items may be purchased to food and seeds/plants for producing food.)
There are deep moral judgments involved in how people speak about the poor, hungry, homeless and anyone else who relies upon income support programs for a significant portion of their income. (Again, ignore that EVERY single person receives a multitude of benefits from local, state and federal governments.) A not small portion of Americans believe, or at least support politicians who believe, that the needy are really only that way because of some deeply flawed moral decision making.
Single mom struggling to make ends meet? Should have closed your legs.
Unemployed man who now lives in a shelter? Shouldn’t have done drugs. Should have stayed in school.
Minimum wage worker who receives SNAP (food stamps)? Get a job that pays better!
Woman who needs reproductive health services at Planned Parenthood because you’re poor and/or uninsured? Stop being a slutty baby killer!
A certain worldview underlies all of the above responses to need- it’s their own fault for making bad decisions, which can only be explained by poor morals. After all, don’t all “good” people have jobs, homes, food on their table, etc.? If only these needy people were decent people, raised by decent people, making good and prudent decisions over the course of their lifetimes they would not be needy.
This type of argument is not only simplistic and wrong, but allows its adherents to feel morally superior. And who does not want to feel that they are living a life of moral honor? Never mind what just about every religious text says about one’s duty to others or its counsel against moral judgments.
If the only outcome was that the needy in our society felt moral scorn from their neighbors, it would be bad enough. But it poisons our politics and leads to shortsighted public policy. Moral judgments do not leave room for public policies that work.
Moral judgment about abortions leads to efforts to defund Planned Parenthood even though providing abortion accounts for a small part of the services provided and the Hyde Amendment prevents public dollars from being used to fund that service (except in cases of rape, incest of life of the mother). And what happens when we make reproductive health services less accessible? More unintended pregnancies, which means more abortions (especially those outside of the regulated medical sector) and more unwanted children. Do either of those predictable consequences sound like a good policy option? (I will not even touch on the fact that those same people who oppose abortion also oppose comprehensive sex education, the ultimate in lose-lose policy.)
Moral judgment about welfare (TANF, SNAP and other income supports) leads to drug testing recipients. It does not matter that all of the available data indicate that welfare recipient drug use in states who have tested ranged from 0.002% to 8.3% while the national rate (general population) is 9.4%. States have spent (wasted!) millions of dollars in order to save a few bucks. Does this sound like good policy?
Moral judgment about crime leads to a prison population that is the largest in the world (per 100,000) at a cost in the tens of billions of dollars per year. Criminal justice policy, driven by moral judgments, emphasizes punishment at the cost of rehabilitation. After all, why should we provide education and training to morally bad criminals? Does locking people up without any rehabilitation, thus increasing recidivism and cost, sound like good policy?
There are dozens of examples of policies driven by moral judgment that lead to some very deleterious (and predictable) outcomes. All of these policies, though, find support, often at a certain place on our political spectrum. It does not matter what evidence is presented regarding how counterproductive these policies are, or may be, because moral judgment is, most often, immune to reason, logic and debate.
When moral judgment is substituted for reason, life becomes simpler. Its adherents/advocates do not have to deal with the complexity of this world. People are either good (like them) or bad (unlike them). It does not matter how perverse the consequence of a policy may be.
There are people who support spending millions of dollars trying to find hundreds of dollars in waste or fraud. And they will explain their support by either challenging the data or, if they’re being honest, by arguing that it’s about the principle. And what principle is that, really? That they are better, more morally upright, than those others.
That should make everyone who cares about public policy and/or morality incredibly distraught.
Suburban Buddhism 