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Yes, exactly.
People make choices. Sometimes people make choices that are straightforwardly destructive to themselves and others. Sometimes these choices can't be un-made. When such choices are made, the people who made them sometimes need to be written off in any one of a number of ways. Sometimes this involves shaming or shunning. Sometimes it means imprisonment, exile or execution. We can wrangle over which choices require which responses, but the simple fact is that not all people are good, and not all people can be saved from themselves or their demons.
Not everyone who is suffering deserves better. Some people's suffering is the direct consequence of their own bad decisions.
This presumes that the poor are actually going to be fed, and that it actually costs 10% of their wealth to do it. What I observe is that vastly more than 10% is taken, and that a large percentage of it is either pocketed by the takers or wasted on absurdities. I also observe that the poor around me are not starving, not by a very wide margin, and that many of the ends this system is supposed to support are never achieved.
The sin I was referring to is the sin of regarding a human being as having merely instrumental, rather than terminal, value.
That doesn't change the fact that they are still human beings.
Doesn't excuse us from doing our damnedest.
The former does not follow from the latter; what is natural is not necessarily just, and it is entirely possible for a decision to have consequences which are not deserved.
For many centuries, suffering from cholera was the direct consequence of the decision to live in a city; then we built sewer systems.
There is certainly a conversation to be had about the effectiveness of our attempts to help people; however, I was addressing the arguments against even trying.
As a society grows materially wealthier, the standard of living it is obligated to provide to the least of its members also increases.
In a society several orders of magnitude wealthier than today's OECD nations, people might very well be entitled to things which cannot be bought today at any price.
I am not clear on what it would mean for humans to have terminal value. I am very comfortable saying that other humans are not merely a means to my preferred ends, which is what I would assume you mean by "merely instrumental", but they are also pretty clearly not an end in and of themselves, which is what I would assume you mean by "terminal".
I would say that our common humanity imposes upon us both significant rights and significant obligations. I am not sure you and I are anywhere near agreement of what those rights and obligations actually are. Certainly they do not override all other concerns.
The treatment other human beings deserve from me ranges from tender affection to swift, merciless death. That is a pretty wide range, and you don't seem to recognize a fair portion of it.
And sometimes they are somewhat deserved. And sometimes they are entirely deserved.
I'm a big fan, but I notice that you picked something where the harm was entirely separated from the choice made; there was no germ theory of disease, people knew that cities were plague-ridden but they had no idea what the cause was or how to stop it, nor which actions helped or made it worse beyond "don't go to cities".
Now swap cholera for methamphetamines, and explain to me what the equivalent of the Sewer is supposed to be. My understanding is that there isn't actually a sewer equivalent; a lot of people who get addicted to narcotics cannot be "cured" of their narcotics addiction in any sort of reliable way; if you have data to the contrary I'd love to see it. And so it goes with many, many other similar choices. You are speaking as though you have a solution to these problems, as though effort expended on these problems translates into improved outcomes. At this late date, my assessment is that such claims involve willful deception, of the self and often of others.
"Trying" is not an exciting new strategy you thought up in a stroke of genius five minutes ago. We have been "trying" on some issues for half a century, others for multiple centuries, others for millennia. Any claim that we should continue trying needs to engage with the extant results of previous efforts, or it should be discarded out of hand as fundamental irresponsibility.
No, I don't believe it does. Human wants expand without limit. Human needs are unchanged over millennia. You can disagree if you like, but neither I nor others are obligated to subscribe to your bespoke morality.
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I'd go one step further and say that some people's suffering is the direct consequence of their parents' bad actions, and we still need to write those people off.
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