The Wordsmith's Forge

People have expressed interest in deep topics, so this list focuses on philosophical questions.

Do people have an obligation to help others or should people be responsible for helping themselves?


For the most part, I consider individual obligations something that people freely choose to take on. They are responsible for those. Sometimes people try to saddle each other with unwilling, often abusive obligations. I typically consider those invalid. Because if you can't set boundaries around your own time, energy, money, safety, body, and other resources then there are people in this world who will eat you alive. Look at the anti-abortion crowd practicing brood parisitism on women. To hell with that.

Societies have a communal obligation to ensure that most people can meet most of their needs most of the time. You can never achieve perfection in an imperfect world, but you can strive to get as close as possible. Sometimes things will go wrong that interrupt the usual meeting of needs for some people for a while, but members should not be living a crisis-to-crisis lifestyle. The everyday condition should be stable and sufficient. When hardships overwhelm individual resources, then society is responsible for helping people survive and recover. That is why societies exist. The way I usually put it is, "Life is not fair. The purpose of civilization is to make life more fair."

You also have to consider the context. Some people, like children, are helpless or nearly so and cannot take on much if any responsibility. All humans are obligated to help young humans survive, lest the species go extinct. That one is an evolutionary imperative. It applies to things like public education and taking care of someone else's child in an emergency. It does NOT apply to things like militarized rape or forced birth, because those violate another tenet of reproduction: the responsibility of fertile adults to make the best possible breeding choice they can. Also, "You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."  A compassionate person or society will generally help and protect the vulnerable; a cruel one will ignore or abuse them.  The former tend to be more enjoyable and resilient than the latter.

Last, consider the pros and cons. What could go right or wrong with each possible decision?  And what would happen if everyone did that?  Helping people generally improves the quality and security of society. But it does entail some risk. Too much help can prevent people from learning crucial life skills, and we're seeing that infantilization effect in America today. >_< Too little help creates a vicious circle where people only look after themselves because that is what they learned. A healthy balance usually lies in the middle. And that's precisely why most obligations should be taken voluntarily, so people can make mindful choices about when and how to extend their resources to someone else.

Finally, humanity has some built-in safety valves. One of those is that, under truly extreme circumstances, ALL of the obligations start evaporating from the outside in. The social ones go first, then the family ones, and usually the parent-child one last as evolution kicks into emergency mode so it quits trying to maintain a population and concentrates on salvaging as many healthy -- preferably breeding adult -- individuals as feasible. You can see examples in history where at some point, people break and scatter. The hindbrain takes over, because survival is its job, and the hindbrain does not understand "obligations" at all. That's not a bug, it's a feature. It's just like any other safety valve, it's there to prevent even worse outcomes, so trying to block it is very dangerous.