Open question: What do you think a normal person’s moral responsibilities are and why?
Some angles you can (but don’t have to) consider:
To themselves, family, friends and strangers?
Do you have thoughts about what it takes to make a good person or at what point someone is a bad person? (Is there a category of people who are neither?)
What do you think the default state of people is? (Generally good, evil or neutral by nature?)
Conversely do you believe morality is a construction and reject it entirely? (Even practically speaking when something bad happens to you?)
I like the point about people being too tired - as much as that might have felt like a side point I think there may be something there - one thing I noticed in Japan is that when I did something nice that was not culturally required people would not only be really happy but actually surprised.
Japan is not only overworked to death, but also very strict on manners and social rules, so you’re often required to pretend to be nice to someone and to follow your duty to others to the point that people start to lose the concept of doing nice things spontaneously.
As the vice grips tighten around the working and middle class, I think what you’re describing has also been happening in the West not only since Corona but gradually over the last several decades. People concerned primarily with survival have less room to be kind. (That said, it means more when they are).
I’ll take this a step farther than you did.
I submit that nobody sees the real you until you’ve suffered some kind of depredation in life. It’s easy to be a decent human being when “decency” is a tiny fraction of your available resources. Try being decent when it actually puts you out. That’s when you’re truly a decent person.
Example time.
A friend of mine used to make a LOT of money in tech. He was viewed as a very generous man, like to the point of handing over an over-sized, custom-tailored leather winter jacket he owned to an acquaintance of his he knew who had been living in the street for six months. That was a $2000 jacket… It was all so very generous … except he was taking home after taxes about $20,000 per month. He barely noticed the loss of it when he bought its replacement.
How did I find out he was decent?
Years later, after being out of touch, I met him again. He’d lost his tech job and his investments had tanked when the tech bubble burst. He was in a mediocre-salaried civil service job and was only just making ends meet. Why? Because he still donated to charities; when not with money, with time. He still shared what he had with those who had less. THAT is a decent person.
The billionaires tossing a million dollars in a careful PR campaign to show how “nice” they are … they’re not. With a billion dollars you could hand out a million dollars a day for almost three years before running out … and that assumes you never earn another cent. A million dollars is rounding error to them.
The weekly meals for unemployed friends my now-civil-servant friend held was a far bigger chunk.
The way I’d put this in technical terms is “What percentage of your disposable income is going towards helping others?” $50 for someone making minimum wage is probably more than $1 million coming from a billionaire.
After a few days thinking about this, it’s still insufficient in my books.
If I have $1000 cash and give away 50% of it, I have $500 left for myself.
If I have $1,000,000,000 cash and give away 99.44% of it I still have $600,000 left.
Which of us is suffering more (in real terms, not fantasy point score) in what we’ve given? With $500 cash … I’m not buying a whole lot. What is that? Ten coffees at Starbucks? (I kid, but … it really isn’t a lot.) With $600,000 left I can live quite comfortably for a long time in a reasonably-priced town or city.
And that doesn’t address non-cash possessions. If I only have $1000 cash total, I likely don’t own my own home, don’t have much of a car if any, etc. If I have $1,000,000,000 cash, I likely have MASSIVE property and possession holdings.
Right, so I think you could push it even further than what I said. Maybe something more qualitative like “What are you willing to give up to help others?”
That said you can also go too far the other way and say that a very rich person who does or doesn’t give away things hadn’t really giving up much, but we certainly would want to say a rich person giving away 90% of their disposable income is still doing something good. (And practically speaking it’s going to have almost as good of an outcome if they gave to the point of diminishing their well-being).
Your angle here is actually getting really close to Peter Singer’s Famine, Affluence and Morality. (Personally I stop a little short of where he’s at, but I think your position more closely resembles his).
This is a very heavily qualified “yes” for me.
It depends on how they’re giving it away and to whom. If they’re doing the usual billionaire “charity”, no, they’re not doing anything good and indeed it may be worse than them just hoarding their cash. Because the norm for billionaire “charity” is to support political parties that aid them in their hoarding of riches and to “charities” of their own founding which are generally used to force their viewpoint on the world, effectively being just another source of power for them.¹ They tend to displace actual expert charities in favour of their own PR branding, their foundations tend to work on projects that mysteriously aid their for-profit enterprises and personal wealth, and tend to fund lobbyists in government (not to mention the occasional hate group or ten).
That kind of “giving away” we can do without. Just eat that kind of billionaire.
If, however, you’ve got a billionaire donating to established, experienced charities with no strings attached, that’s doing something very good. Wake me up when that actually happens.
¹ https://newrepublic.com/post/177019/billionaire-philanthropy-scam-bill-gates