A Society That Has More Justice Is a Society That Needs Less Charity

In 1942 a British civil servant named William Beveridge delivered a report to Parliament that named five giant evils on the road to reconstruction, which were want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. He proposed that the state, and not the charity of the better off, should guarantee a minimum of security to every citizen from the cradle to the grave. The report led to the National Health Service and the modern welfare state in Britain. It rested on a conviction that the topic states in plain words, that a society with more justice is a society that needs less charity.

The distinction between justice and charity is central. Charity is a gift, freely made and freely withheld, which depends on the generosity of the giver and leaves the receiver in a position of gratitude. Justice is a claim, based on what a person is owed as a member of the community, and it can be enforced in a court. A hungry person who receives food from a kind neighbour is helped. A hungry person who has a legal right to food and a system to deliver it is in a different position, since he is not asking for a favour.

Many thinkers have made the point. Oscar Wilde wrote in 1891 that the worst slave owners were those who were kind to their slaves, because kindness prevented the horror of the system from being seen. He argued that charity degrades and demoralises, and that it prolongs the evil that it relieves. The twelfth century philosopher Maimonides ranked the forms of giving in an eight step ladder, and placed highest the act of helping a person become self supporting so that he no longer needs to receive. Even within charitable traditions, the best charity aims to end the need for itself.

India's recent history shows how rights can replace relief. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005 made work for at least a hundred days a year a legal entitlement for rural households, and not a favour from the local official. The Right to Food Act of 2013 gave subsidised grain the status of a right for most of the population. Their impact is debated, and there have been delays and leakages, but their principle is clear. A citizen who asks for work or food is claiming what the law owes him.

A citizen who asks for work or food is claiming what the law owes him.

The philosopher John Rawls gave the principle a rigorous basis in 1971. Imagine, he said, that you must choose the rules of a society without knowing what position you will occupy in it, whether rich or poor, healthy or sick, talented or not. Behind this veil of ignorance, he argued, rational people would choose a society that arranges inequalities to benefit the least advantaged, since any of us might be among them. In such a society, the poor would not depend on the compassion of the rich, because the basic structure itself would give them their due.

The facts support the idea. Countries with extensive public provision, such as the Nordic states, do rely much less on private charity for basic needs than countries that rely on voluntary giving, and the latter often have large charitable sectors precisely because public provision is weak. A food bank, a free clinic or a crowdfunding appeal for medical bills is evidence of a gap that the system has left. Where the queue for the soup kitchen grows, it is reasonable to ask what the state has stopped doing.

Yet the claim should not be taken to mean that charity becomes useless. Even the fairest society cannot foresee every misfortune, and the first response to a flood, an earthquake or a sudden illness often comes from neighbours and volunteers long before the machinery of the state arrives. In the Kerala floods of 2018, ordinary fishermen took their boats into the streets to rescue strangers, and their work was neither owed nor required. Charity in this sense is the readiness of people to act beyond the minimum of what is demanded of them.

Such efforts also build the habits of solidarity on which a just society depends. People who have given and received help in a crisis are more likely to support a fair distribution of burdens afterwards, because they have seen what the stranger needs. There is also a human value in giving that rights cannot supply. A system of entitlements delivers benefits, but it does not deliver the attention of one person to another. The visitor who sits with a lonely old woman, the teacher who stays after class and the volunteer who reads to a blind man give something that cannot be written into a statute. Gandhi's idea of trusteeship, in which the wealthy hold their wealth for the benefit of society, was an attempt to turn charity into a duty without the humiliation that Wilde described. A just society would not abolish generosity but free it from the burden of doing the state's work.

Another problem is that justice itself is disputed. People disagree about how much a citizen is owed, who should pay and when a claim becomes an entitlement. One person's justice is another's confiscation. Libertarians argue that taxation for redistribution is itself a form of coercion, and that voluntary charity respects liberty better. Thus the claim that more justice reduces the need for charity depends on a theory of what justice requires, and the theory is exactly what people dispute. A society with a long list of rights and no means to honour them is not just but only proclaims itself so.

It follows that the topic is best read as a test. Wherever charity is doing the work of the system, something is out of order, and the measure of a society's justice is how little its poor must rely on gifts. This leaves one uncomfortable remainder. If the generous are the ones who see the failures most clearly, then their charity may keep the system quiet and in this way delay the justice it hopes for. It is hard to know whether the person who feeds the hungry is feeding the revolution or preventing it.