IS POVERTY MORAL OR IMMORAL?

Is poverty moral or immoral?

Is poverty moral or immoral?

Introduction

Though poverty deals with the lack of possessions or the inability to do the things that are considered "normal", the word "normal" depends on the society in which the person lives. The usual accepted indicator of third world poverty is the number of people living on an income of less than $1 per day, and is termed "absolute income poverty". As this indicator would be inappropriate for use in the UK and the developed world the most widely accepted threshold to show poverty in these regions is 60 per cent of average income after housing costs. This is called "relative income poverty" and is accepted by most researchers, the EU and the UK government.

Is poverty moral or immoral?

We should not forget that there are two faces of moral poverty: the materially wealthy who are morally poor and the materially poor who are morally poor. Our social obligation is to all those who have been cut loose from their moral moorings, rich or poor. The fact that we concentrate on the urban poor, needy as they may be, obscures the embarrassing truth that the morally poor are among those of us who are materially wealthy. They may be our neighbors, our leaders and our family members. They may be ourselves.

If morality is culturally rooted in religion, as many social scientists and most theologians believe, it is a religion inseparable from historic institutions within existing communities—not the faith of an isolated believer. The morally rich are rooted in traditions and institutions. They have ties to family, church and civil society and feel an obligation, a sense of mutual aid, towards those experiencing the brunt of material poverty. Not only do the morally rich trust their families, churches and communities, they also have that inner certainty that comes from a faith in a God who created their lives with purpose and meaning and the means to accomplish His purposes.

Although it seems so intuitively obvious that moral poverty is the foundation of many social problems, as a society we have elected to concentrate on material poverty. One reason for this is that the strength of civil society —the churches, free markets and mediating institutions—has been eroding relative to the increasing power of the government, which, at least according to current interpreters on the Supreme Court, is constitutionally restricted from actions with even the slightest tinge of religiously-based morality. These legal interpretations have caused the government to neglect the spiritual and moral root causes of immoral behavior of some of those who are materially poor and to focus instead on its socially pathological manifestations such as crime and drug dealing. The government's policy is simple: redistribute money from those who are productive and wealthy to those who are poor. In theory, at least, this provides a “social safety net” for the most materially impoverished.

In practice, it hasn't worked. Arguably, there are as many or more poor people today then there were when President Johnson ...