Sacrifice and Help, or Else

A conversation I had not long ago with a friend of mine revolved around the underlying philosophical underpinnings of social justice politics. His assertion was that social justice philosophy lies in the answer to a common philosophical thought experiment.

The basic premise of the thought experiment is as follows. Imagine a man dressed in a nice suit walking on a path near a pond. That man notices a small child drowning in the pond. If that man refuses to jump into the pond and save the child because he doesn’t want to ruin his suit, he is a terrible, awful, immoral human being.

I think most people would agree with that assertion. The social justice philosophy then asserts that anyone who is well off in a society and doesn’t want to contribute to a government run social welfare system is morally equivalent to that man refusing to jump in the pond. On it’s face and at first glance that seems like a reasonable assertion. If you can help, you should.

However, what would be the equivalent of a tax funded social welfare system be in the context of that thought experiment? I would equate it to another man standing on that same shore, pointing a gun at the guy and forcing him to jump into the pond. So my assertion is that the most immoral person in such a situation is the guy with the gun, forcing someone else to jump into the pond instead of helping out himself.

It was then pointed out to me that we were both making a rather bold assumption in any case; that it was possible for the man to save the child and not drown himself. And thus arises the fundamental problem with a large, taxation funded social welfare system. It assumes that it is possible for a government to force the wealthy in a society to contribute at gun point and save every needy person in the world without drowning all the productive members of society in the process.

So the fundamental question is this: Would you rather potentially destroy society, or learn to live with the fact the some people are ass-holes?