In Social Life and Moral Judgment, author and philosopher Antony
Flew examines the social problems induced by the mature welfare
state. Welfare states make ever-increasing financial demands on
their citizenry, yet the evidence clearly supports that such
demands are not sustainable. In this superlative collection of
thematic essays, Flew investigates and explains why this is so, and
calls for a return to individual responsibility.
The first essay establishes the philosophical basis for his
argument. "Is Human Sociobiology Possible?" answers its titular
question in the negative, asserting that we are all members of a
peculiar type of creature that can, and therefore must, be
responsible for whatever choices between various courses of action
or inaction that are open to us as individuals. In other essays,
Flew shows how state welfare systems inevitably corrupt and
demoralize their citizens by encouraging ever-more people to apply
for welfare entitlements and reducing the incentives to avoid or
escape the conditions warranting those entitlements. He
investigates the origins of this new kind of welfare entitlement,
and shows how very different what politicians and public sector
employees produce is from what these people claim to be
producing.
Flew shows that the drive for "social" justice appears to
require that the justly acquired income and wealth of all citizens
should be progressively axed away or supplemented by the state so
that the eventual result is more, though never perfect, equality.
This objective, he asserts, must be radically distinguished from
old-fashioned, without prefix or suffix, justice. It was this type
of justice Adam Smith referred to when he famously said that itis a
virtue "of which the observance is not left to the freedom of our
wills" but "which may be extorted by force." Flew question the aims
of those who would discredit wealth creators and wealth-creating
investment, showing that these are the same people who promote the
rising "progressive" taxation needed to finance expenditure in the
growing welfare state.
Social Life and Moral Judgment is a timely critique, one that
will be appreciated at a point in history when governments on both
sides of the Atlantic have begun to describe spending on state
health, social, education, and welfare services as investments,
instead of mechanisms to achieve social justice.
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