…the underlying question is: Why are we providing help for the needy only by treating the symptoms of poverty and hunger? What happens when the holidays pass and the poor are back where they were last year and the year before?
Being charitable and caring at any time of the year is wonderful. But if we never get at the underlying causes of poverty and hunger, we will never really help the poor and hungry among us.
Charitable organizations such as Gleaners, the Salvation Army and Catholic Charities can’t do it alone. Government policies that keep people in poverty and prevent them from opportunities for a decent living should be changed. The push for increasing the minimum wage is a good start. But why can’t this blessed, prosperous nation provide adequate health coverage for all, affordable housing for all and safe child care for those who need it?
Make a New Year’s resolution to urge your lawmakers to have the moral and political courage to pass legislation that will reduce and eventually eliminate poverty and hunger among the least of our brothers and sisters.
Mr. Burford makes a great point about the need to treat the causes and not the symptoms of hunger and poverty. However, government cannot do this. Indeed, government policies favor the rich and powerful, and we need to stop that. We need to stop government from contributing to problems such as hunger and poverty, and we need to stop government from preventing solutions to problems such as hunger and poverty. Nonetheless, government cannot solve these problems. Interfering policies such as minimum wages just increase divisiveness, and don’t truly solve the causes. Perhaps, private unions that non-governmentally negotiate with employers or corporations can help.
Greed creates Poverty. Greeds hoards that which does not belong to it, and deprives people of what they need. Eliminate Greed, and wealth naturally circulates throughout the entire Society, enriching everyone.
The philosophic analysis: Humanism addresses the symptoms not the cause.
The underlying problems of poverty are mostly caused by the misanthrope of humanitarian sympathy without thinking about the structure of the topic of their concern. What we are looking at here is a failure of the morality of humanists, the last great bastion of classical Christian morality, and, the Golden Rule, which is a wholly selfish interpretation of moral responsibility.
The Golden Rule says, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It is a reciprical relationship divined as morality, and hence, nothing is required by it, until it is too late, and poverty is at your door.
The moral imperative of life is to live a life that detracts not at all from the lives available to those who will follow us into this world.
Here, the emphasis is on the future. The essense of this statement means, no one has the moral right to harm the prospects of humanity in the future. The implications of the moral imperative are vast, and yes, the implications of the moral imperative are clear, you have no right to harm the future, or even to gamble with thewager being harm to the future.
Had Kant given humanity the moral imperative of life, we would all be living its benefits today.
Now, it is up to us to provide those benefits for the future.
Don Robertson, The American Philosopher
Limestone, Maine
An Illustrated Philosophy Primer for Young Readers
http://www.geocities.com/donaldwrobertson/index.html