Just a moral argument on which Id like to get feedback.

In a capitalist society, or any currency based system, your responsibility is equal to your wealth. If you have 5% of the worlds wealth, then you are morally responsible for 5% of the worlds misery, regardless of whether you are aware and even if you disapprove of the specific injustice.

The reason I see this as a good definition is twofold. 1. Your wealth roughly represents how much you are benefitting from the system, especially when considered as the ratio (my percentage of wealth/the worlds average percentage of wealth). 2. There is uncertainty in assigning blame to any person, and in theory even if you took care to not support evil, your transactions could be indirectly benefitting the evil.

There are definitely valid criticisms. 1. A person who takes effort in helping people, e.g. donate, buy local, take in homeless, avoid companies that use child labour, is just as morally responsible for misery as someone who doesnt care or even someone who personally owns slaves. 2. This theory is biased against rich, and your best bet to remove moral responsibility is to avoid using money at all and own absolutely nothing worth value. 3. Not all evil is accounted for. For instance, someone who owns nothing but abuses their child is not morally responsible.

What do you think?

  • RandomSomeone
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    3 years ago

    If you have 5% of the worlds wealth, then you are morally responsible for 5% of the worlds misery, regardless of whether you are aware and even if you disapprove of the specific injustice

    This is a fallacy. A rather obvious one.

    If you have 5% of the world’s wealth, you are 5% responsible for all the wealth generated worldwide based on that percentage. In other words: if you don’t generate more than 5% of the world’s wealth, you are parasitizing the rest (probably for personal interests).

    • MohamedOP
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      43 years ago

      It is a fallacy to say that it follows, but I am defining responsibility that way. No fallacy there but of course it might be a terrible definition.

      By wealth generated do you mean the increase in other people’s income? That is, if you have 5% of the world’s current wealth, you must contribute at least 5% of the rest of the world’s income. (?)