Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility.

• Author: Shapiro, Daniel
• Position: Review

by David Schmidtz and Robert E. Goodin, New York: Cambridge University Press, 240 pages, $14.95 paper

Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility is the first in a philosophical "for and against" series launched by Cambridge University Press. Robert Goodin, a philosopher at Australian National University, defends the welfare state as an efficient vehicle for collectivizing responsibility. David Schmidtz, a philosopher at the University of Arizona, sees the welfare state as a destructive institution that prevents people from taking responsibility for their own lives. Despite the premise of the series, the essays included here are not of the point-counterpoint variety. Goodin and Schmidtz wrote their essays (both of which are extremely well-written) with knowledge of the other person's views, but they only occasionally remark on those views.

This much they agree on: Rather than assigning blame, the issue is what makes people better off in the future. Otherwise, however, the authors inhabit very

different frameworks. Goodin says that the virtue of responsibility is largely irrelevant to the welfare state debate. For him, the key question is: Given that certain people can't or won't take responsibility for themselves, what do we do? Schmidtz thinks Goodin's question exemplifies a static, or snapshot, perspective. For Schmidtz, the proper question is: How do we make it less likely that people will need help in the first place?

Goodin criticizes those who object to unconditional welfare payments because they promote "dependency" and those who extol the virtues of "self-reliance." He points out, correctly, that there is nothing wrong with dependency per se - we are all dependent on one another - and that the suggested alternative to state-funded welfare is more reliance on others, such as family and friends, rather than setting up an independent household. But while Goodin shows that the notions of dependency and self-reliance cannot by themselves be used to criticize welfare policies, he may win the battle and still lose the war on the issue. For what critics have in mind, one suspects, is that the kind of dependency or lack of self-reliance promoted by unconditional welfare payments fails to prepare one for responsible adulthood, making a living for oneself, and in that sense being independent.

Goodin's criticisms of those who celebrate independence and self-reliance are mainly a backdrop to his two main arguments in support of the welfare state. He contends that lack of opportunity for the chronically poor justifies welfare and that greater efficiency justifies social insurance.

The argument for the former at times rests on a very static perspective. Goodin argues that it is false to claim that any able-bodied welfare recipient can get a job, because at any given time one person's success at landing a job precludes others from doing so. Indeed, he even flirts with the argument that those who are unemployed do the rest of us a favor, since they enable us to get jobs that otherwise might not be available. Such notions clearly ignore the actual dynamics of job markets in a capitalist economy, which, in normal times, produce a net increase of tens of thousands of jobs per month.

At other times, Goodin argues that we are in a long-run period of structural unemployment. There are not, he says, enough jobs, or at least enough jobs that pay sufficiently well to get out of poverty. So what critics take to be a lack of will on the part of...