Value and Gun Rights

The American Dream

Introduction
I've mentioned before that philosophers distinguish between lumpers and splitters. Splitters take a category of things, actions, concepts and show that there are important distinctions to be made within that category such that we should really see it as two (or more) distinct categories. For example, someone might argue that 'motor vehicle' should be treated as two categories because cars and motorcycles are importantly different in the skills required to drive them. 

Lumpers do the opposite. They take what appear to be a collection of distinct things, concepts, or actions and argue that in some important respect they are all the same such that we can treat them as all belonging to the same category. For example, someone might argue that apples and oranges should both be considered 'fruit' from the point of view of import taxes.

Shortly following the news of the mass shooting in Las Vegas Reason magazine, a Libertarian publication, published an article predictably calling for restraint (i.e., do nothing) with respect to gun control legislation. All the standard arguments were there for why gun control legislation is bad. What stood out to me, however, was the euphemistic lumping of guns as mere tools. Here are a few prominent examples :

The unwillingness to leap to a legal solution to mass gun murders requires recognizing that guns are tools, with genuine uses for personal safety, personal fulfillment, and convenience, just as are cars, as well as noticing that a tiny number of people who own or have access to these specific tools ever use them to harm another human.

For the vast majority of their owners, guns are no more worthy of banning than any other element of their peacefully enjoyed liberty, one tool among many to shape their chosen life and leisure. Banning something that tens of millions of people innocently value and imposing onerous costs on American citizens, generally downward in socioeconomic terms, is a recipe for disaster.

Notice the effect on our emotional response to 'guns' when we lump them in with 'tools' (and refer to them as such). Much of the emotional charge runs out of the word. I have no doubt that this is what the writers at Reason magazine intended. I assume their thought is something like this: [Read in your learned teacher voice lecturing to students] "If we are to understand the issue of gun violence we must take a cold reasoned approach to the issue. There is no room for irrational emotion." This is Reason magazine, after all.

Setting aside that most philosophers (since Aristotle) reject the view that all emotions are purely irrational, I want to sporatically adopt this lumping convention for this blogpost: Listen, you hysterical liberals, guns are just tools. There are no relevant distinctions between a philips head screw driver and a gun. They belong in the same category. Settle down.

Preferences

Before moving forward, I need to quickly introduce a technical term. 'Preference,' as it is used in every day speech, is sometimes used differently from its more narrow meaning in economics and political theory. Preference, as it is used technically, is always an expression of relative choice or value; it's an expression of ranking something relative to some other choice. So, I can never just say I prefer a. I must say that I prefer a to something else. 

Example: 
P = some person;
a = apples
b = bananas

P {a>b} means that some person prefers apples to bananas.

The main idea here is that whatever we choose, we make that choice in the context of available alternatives. How we rank our preferences is an expression of what we value relative to other things.

Now that we've got the fancy talk out of the way, let's move forward and discuss gun legislation.

Preamble: Gun Violence Statistics and Scope of Argument

I don't want to turn this post into a cut-and-paste of gun facts. I'll just pick a few so I have something to work with.

In 2013, there were 73,505 nonfatal firearm injuries (23.2 injuries per 100,000 U.S. citizens),[2][3] and 33,636 deaths due to "injury by firearms" (10.6 deaths per 100,000 U.S. citizens).[4] These deaths consisted of 11,208 homicides,[5] 21,175 suicides,[4] 505 deaths due to accidental or negligent discharge of a firearm, and 281 deaths due to firearms use with "undetermined intent".[4]
In 2010, 67% of all homicides in the U.S. were committed using a firearm.[7] In 2012, there were 8,855 total firearm-related homicides in the US, with 6,371 of those attributed to handguns.[8] In 2012, 64% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides.[9] In 2010, there were 19,392 firearm-related suicides, and 11,078 firearm-related homicides in the U.S.[10] In 2010, 358 murders were reported involving a rifle while 6,009 were reported involving a handgun; another 1,939 were reported with an unspecified type of firearm.[11] (Wikipedia) 

I will add without argument, because you're all capable of googling, that the per capita numbers of all kinds of gun deaths, gun crime, and gun injury are much higher in the US when compared to other Western democracies even when crime rates are controlled for.

Finally, let me point out that when I vaguely gesture at 'gun control legislation' below, I'm referring to some empirically supported combination waiting periods, background checks, licensing, and training--whatever it turns out to be--to reduce some subset of recognized gun violence. By 'gun-control legislation' I do not mean confiscating guns or prohibiting their sale (generally). For some reason any mention of gun control legislation is automatically interpreted, by pro-gun advocates, as confiscation or prohibition. This is not what I (or most gun control advocates) mean.

Reread above as many times as you need to.


Let's Get Philosophical
With the empirical and technical out of the way, let's get into the philosophy. The pro-gun lobby argues that we should do nothing in the face of gun violence because they want to own and purchase guns in a way that is unrestricted. Let's express that in the cool unemotional language of economics. Given a choice between 

a = easy access to tools.

b = even attempting to reduce loss of human life.

The anti-legislation person's (P) preference ranking looks like this: 

P: {a>b}

Easy access to tools is more important than any attempt to reduce the loss of human life.

Let me reframe that. The average annual death toll from guns is 30 000. Now suppose some piece of legislation could reduce the average gun-related death toll by a paltry 10%. That's 3000 human lives saved every year. Now, imagine we put 3000 people into a theatre and we say to someone who loves tools: 

You have a choice: we can make everyone wait [insert some trivial number of days] to receive a tool or we can let these 3000 human beings die unnecessarily, and repeat the same thing every year.

The choice the anti any legislation tool-lover makes expresses their preference ranking. More specifically, they are expressing the ranking of their values. The anti any legislation position says, in the language of economics: There is more value in everyone getting tools promptly and without hinderance than there is in 3000 people/year dying preventable deaths.

This, simply put, is the 'preference ranking' of the anti-any legislation position.

But It Won't Work

Now, I know what you're thinking. But gun control legislation won't work!!! 

Really? How do you know? Most (but not all) of the evidence points in the other direction for some but not all kinds of gun violence. The exceptions to this trend in the literature are outliers which the pro-tool lobby cites ad nauseam, ignoring the general trend. Why not introduce targeted legislation to address the kinds of violence that seem to respond to legislation in other countries? 

Let's see what this denial of even attempting targeted legislation expresses in terms of value rankings. In doing so, let's grant that no one really knows for sure (in the Cartesian sense) whether a particular kind of tool regulation (that somehow works in just about every other Western democracy) will work in the US. Refusing to even try some targeted legislation expresses the following value ranking:

a = easy access to tools  

b = even bothering to try to prevent the loss of 3 000 lives/year

P: {a>b}

In everyday English, this preference ranking expresses the following: 

It's more important for me have easy access to tools than it is for me to even try saving 3 000 human lives per year from preventable death. That is, me owning a tool and being able to buy tools with minimal restrictions has more value than even trying to prevent the (preventable) loss of 3 000 human lives. 

What the gun-control advocate fails to see is that life's meaning, purpose, and value comes from owning tools. Tools, not human relationships, not cultivation of ones virtue nor talents, not contribution to one's community, not preventable human death, are what matter for the good life. A purposeful and meaningful life depend on, above all else, easy, unrestricted, and unfettered tool ownership.  

In support of this view, Aristotle, in The Nichomachean Ethics famously argues that certain external goods are required in order to live the good life. He writes

But nevertheless happiness plainly requires external goods too, as we said; for it is impossible, or at least not easy, to act nobly without some furniture of fortune  GUNZ. There are many things that can only be done through instruments, so to speak, such as friends and wealth and political influence AND GUNZ: and there are some things whose absence takes the bloom off our happiness, as good birth, the blessing of children, GUNZ, and personal beauty; for a man is not very likely to be happy if he is very ugly in person, or of low birth, or alone in the world, or childless, and perhaps still less if he has worthless children or friends, or has lost good ones that he had, OR CAN'T BUY A GUN IMMEDIATELY WITHOUT A BACKGROUND CHECK.

QED

But America Is Different (We're Special)

It is a common trope of the gun control advocate to bring up how, among comparable Western democracies, tighter gun control legislation correlates positively with lower gun death. What these tool-haters fail to appreciate is that our magical American culture is different! Americans have nothing in common psychologically or sociologically or culturally with other human beings. None of the widely studied tendencies of human behavior apply here. Ipso facto, of all the possible gun control legislations that whose number are limited only by the human imagination, we can with absolute confidence and certainty say that none of them will work here. There is no conceivable way that legislation that works on just about every other human culture on the planet--especially those most resembling our own-- could work here. Simply ridiculous to even try.

First of all, this line of thinking is right on both counts. The culture here is different. People here would rather own tools, unfettered and unrestricted, than attempt to reduce the total 30 000 human lives lost per year to tool violence. That, however, is a cultural problem, not something to puff your chest up about. 

Now, here's the really cool part. "Scientists have determined/studies show" that humans have the capacity to reflect on their practices as revise them in light of those reflections. We are not stuck in the culture we find ourselves in! This is shocking, I know. You might need to pause to catch your breath. 

And so, while it is true that current American tool-loving culture makes it difficult to save potentially tens of thousands of lives/year, with some reflection on its values, it could! All it takes is having the thought that the more or less unrestricted access to tools isn't as valuable as tens of thousands of human lives/year.

As it stands, the but-American-culture-is-different-therefore-we-shouldn't-even-try value ranking looks like this: 

a = Maintaining tool-loving at the epicenter of American culture 

b = attempt something to reduce the 30 000 lives/year that are lost. 

P: {a>b}

In plain English, there is more value is continuing to place some kinds of tools at the center of cultural identity than there is value in the lives of the very people who inhabit this community.

To be American means easy access to tools. This matters much more than 10s of thousands of preventable American deaths. Easy access to tools make us who we are. Without our tools and easy access to them we float adrift in a sea of despair with no other possibility of meaning and purpose in sight. Our culture, nay! our very way of life and identity would disintegrate before our eyes without easy access to tools. If 30 000 of us must be sacrificed/year for this end, so be it! We have deliberated and decided what truly matters.

Self-Defense/Protect My Family

Recall the passage from Reason magazine:

For the vast majority of their owners, guns are no more worthy of banning than any other element of their peacefully enjoyed liberty, one tool among many to shape their chosen life and leisure. Banning something that tens of millions of people innocently value and imposing onerous costs on American citizens, generally downward in socioeconomic terms, is a recipe for disaster.

People need to chill. All the anti-legislation people are saying is, "hey man, I just want to be able to own tools." Of course, not everyone just wants to own tools merely to love them and hold them and squeeze them. Some people make the argument that owning guns is an extension of their inalienable natural right to self-defense. 

For the moment I'm going to ignore that (a) from the right to self-defense it doesn't follow necessarily that you have a right to every means of self-defense and (b) gun control legislation is not the same as gun prohibition. I want to continue to focus on preferences and their ordering.

It's not that people merely want the right to own tools it's that they want the right to ensure the physical safety of their person and family. Guns are merely...uh...tools in this pursuit. Amiright? 

Let's grant that people have this right. It's not unreasonable after all. We can then ask the question: Are you and your family safer with a gun-tool in the house than without a gun-tool in the house? If you and your family are safer without a gun-tool, then if your concern truly is safety, you will get rid of your gun-tools. This is something to which there is an empirical answer. It's a verifiable and falsifiable matter. More on that later...

For now, take my word that as it turns out that you and your family are less safe with gun-tools in the house. So, if you insist on keeping gun-tools in your house then your concern really isn't safety or self-defense. You value having gun tools more than you value you and your family's safety. We can express the preference ranking like this:

Hypothetical: You and your family are less safe with a gun-tool in the house. 

a=have gun tool in the house.

b=you and your family's safety. 

P: {a>b}

If they hypothetical turns out to be true then the preference ranking says this: There is more value in having a gun tool in my house than there is value in the safety of myself and my family.

This being a hypothetical, for fun let's see what the literature says regarding safety and gun ownership...

For every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9715182 

Domestic violence assaults involving a firearm are 12 times more likely to result in death than those involving other weapons or bodily forceLinda E. Saltzman, et al., Weapon Involvement and Injury Outcomes in Family and Intimate Assaults, 267 JAMA, 3043-3047 (1992) 

Abused women are five times more likely to be killed by their abuser if the abuser owns a firearm

More than half of youth who committed suicide with a gun obtained the gun from their home, usually a parent’s gun. U.S. children and teens made up 43 percent of all children and teens in top 26 high income countries but were 93 percent of all children and teens killed by guns. 

In 2010, children and teen gun death rates in the U.S. were over four times higher than in Canada, the country with the next highest rate, nearly seven times higher than in Israel, and nearly 65 times higher than in the United Kingdom. 

U.S. children and teens were 32 times more likely to die from a gun homicide and 10 times more likely to die from a gun suicide or a gun accident than all their peers in the other high-income countries combined. A child or teen dies or is injured from guns every 30 minutes. 

http://www.childrensdefense.org/library/data/state-data-repository/protect-children-not-guns-key-facts-2013.pdf 

Huh. It looks like having gun-tools in the house actually makes you and your family less safe than not having gun tools in the house. Obviously, this isn't all the literature there is on the matter but the trend is fairly clear.

Conclusion

I could carry on like this all day but the structure of the argument is the same with each iteration. Every objection to even trying out a piece of gun control legislation that targets a subset of gun violence can be expressed as a preference ranking--an ranking of values.
The anti-even-bother-to-try any legislation position always prefers owning a tool to saving human lives. That is, easy access to a tool is always more valuable than human lives.

No irrational emotions needed. This is the cold-hard language of reason.

Loose Ends

"But legislation can't prevent mass shootings." My reply is simply to copypasta the intro from a post I made a few years ago:

Mass shootings represent only a very small fraction of gun-related homicides (about 1% depending on the study you read). Even if we increase this number by a factor of 10 we're still only looking at 10% of gun-related homicides. From the point of view of policy then it makes sense to argue that preventing mass shootings shouldn't be the primary focus or starting point of gun policy. (Not to say it shouldn't at all be the focus of policy, only that there are perhaps better starting points, and lower hanging fruit).
Consider: Suppose policy aims to reduce mass shootings but not other forms of gun violence (primarily from hand guns). Even if that policy reduces mass shootings by 50%, of total gun homicides it's a hollow victory. If however policy reduces other homicides by just 10%, as an absolute number of lives saved, that policy is much more successful. (Assumption: gun violence policy ought to reduce total homicides and injury from guns).

Libertarianism and Moral Obligation to Others

Libertarianism:  Intro
I've been wanting to write a post on libertarianism for a while and since I have a ton of things I'm supposed to be doing right now, I thought now would be an excellent time.  When I was philosophically naive I found libertarianism quite compelling.  I think this is common for most youth--especially young white men.  (Libertarians in the US are 80% white and 67% male PEW US political demographics ) It's very easy to attribute our individual successes solely to personal effort and to be blind to the effects of social privilege as well as overlook the social hurdles others must face.  

My position on libertarianism, however, is evolving.  For the last decade the pendulum swung to the extreme opposite side.  I considered libertarianism juvenile and naive, not to mention morally bankrupt.  Recently however, I've started to moderate my position, from visceral dislike to a recognition that there is at least some merit to some aspects of libertarianism.  Don't get me wrong.  I'm still see libertarianism--particularly it's contemporary popular form--as a scourge that is merely a justification for greed and selfishness.  Nevertheless, I think there is something to learn from its emphasis on individual responsibility and ownership (which I discuss at the end of the post).

 Lets get the definitions out of the way so I can get to what I actually want to talk about:  the relationship between libertarianism and moral obligation to others.  I guess before I do that, I should say that there are several different flavours and aspects of libertarianism and so I'll give a couple of definitions soz you get the gist of it:

Libertarianism: (1) is the idea that individuals fully own themselves and have certain moral powers to acquire property rights in external things. SEP

(2) is a set of related political philosophies that uphold  liberty as the highest political end. This includes emphasis on the primacy of individual liberty, political freedom, and voluntary association. Wikipedia

(3) is the view that people should be permitted to run their own lives as they wish. The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman

(4) is the view that each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others. Libertarians defend each person's right to life, liberty, and property-rights that people have naturally, before governments are created. In the libertarian view, all human relationships should be voluntary; the only actions that should be forbidden by law are those that involve the initiation of force against those who have not themselves used force-actions like murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, and fraud. Libertarianism: A Primer by David Boaz

There are a couple of key elements you should extract from these definitions.  
(1)  Libertarians typically favor individual rights over collective/community rights. 
(2)  From (1) it follows that government should have very limited power and a very limited roll in people's lives.
(3)  Property rights are very important to libertarians.  (Gid doffa my lawn!) 
(4)  Libertarians are primarily concerned with negative freedoms rather than with positive freedoms.  (distinction is discussed below.)
(5)  Classically, the libertarian view of moral obligation to others is simply that we ought not to interfere with their negative freedom.

Negative freedoms are typically described as "freedom from x."  For example, I have the right to be free from harm and intervention in how I live my life.  It is primarily concerned with absence of constraints on what I do or think.  Summed up, it's the philosophy of "you're not the boss of me so you can't tell me what to do" or "your right to swing your arms ends at my nose."

Positive freedoms, on the other hand, are about having the possibility of acting in such a way as to control or fulfill one's life purpose.   So, under this idea of freedom, the absence of physical obstacles isn't sufficient for one to be free.  Freedom also requires having the available means, infrastructure, and social support (amongst other social goods) to pursue one's goals.  Basically, it's not enough to say someone's free to eat if they can't afford a meal.

Example
Lets consider an example to bring out the differences.  Consider college education.  A proponent of negative freedom says since there's no one physically stopping the poor marginalized individual from attending college, they are free to go.  The proponent of positive freedom sees things differently.  They say that an individual without the social and economic capital to attend is not free to attend, even though there are no physical obstacles.

This is taking us a bit off track, but such scenarios are at the heart of the conflict between small 'l' liberals and libertarians.  Libertarians argue that it's not the role of government to redistribute funds (because that'd be stealing another's private property through taxation) and provide the social goods necessary for the marginalized to attend college (or do whatever to increase their positive freedoms).  

You cannot interfere with another's negative freedom (to do what they want with their money/property) to help another (i.e., increase another's positive freedom).  If someone voluntarily donates the money, that's fine, but it has to be voluntary.  

Isaiah Berlin's famous essay "Two Concepts of Liberty" lays much of the groundwork for discussions about a tension between the competing goals of social equality and negative freedom.  

Moral Obligation
Ok, so now that we have a little background I wanted to throw one more element into the mix: moral obligation.  I'm just going to assume that most people feel some moral obligation to help people or animals who are badly off in life.  There many be disagreement over just who is deserving, but I hope most people reading this blog feel that there are at least some categories of people (and/or animals) that are badly off to whom we have a moral obligation to help.  

Libertarianism and moral obligation to others: one of the more pernicious aspects of the modern libertarian movement--especially the brand espoused by Ayn Rand and her followers--is that everyone is somehow responsible for their own situation, no matter how poor it is.  

All circumstance result from a chain of perfectly autonomous decisions on the part of the agent, so it follows that they are responsible for the end result.  Because they're solely responsible for their circumstances, others are not; and there is, therefore, no moral obligation to help them.  I may have missed a few steps of the argument but this is what it amounts to.

Problems for Libertarianism: Although, not the main topic of this entry, I'd like to point out a few problems with the above argument.  First, implicit in libertarian is the idea of absolute free will.  I think this is mistaken because it flies in the face of well established empirical research in psychology and social psychology.  The social sciences provide us with more that enough evidence to show that mere willing is not how people make decisions nor how they end up where they do in life.  We have to consider the subtle and not so subtle effects of culture, genetics, home-life, socio-economic class, ethnicity, and so on.  Basically, there are a whole bunch of things outside of our control which influence how we make decisions.

Anyhow, even if we dismiss the psychologic/sociological evidence against total free will and suppose that people are 100% responsible for their current circumstances--no matter how poor, it simply does not follow that we are absolved of any moral responsibility to them.  

Proof of Moral Obligation:  
Scene A:  You're the only one around except for some guy who has a heart attack in front of you.  Are you morally obligated to help in whatever way you reasonably can?  In this case, probably just calling 911?  Or is it OK for you to just walk away?  I'm going to assume your answer is that you're obligated to call 911.

Scene B:  Suppose you see a guy do a jump with his skateboard.  He lands about 10ft from you and smacks his head on the concrete.  He's bleeding everywhere and he's got a concussion.  You're the only one around.  Since you've been trained in first aid, you know that if you bandage his head with your shirt and call 911, you'll save his life.  

Question:  is it morally permissible for you to just walk away?  Or do you have a moral responsibility to help?  The skateboarder chose to do the stunt.  Does this absolve you of your obligation to help?  I don't think it does, and neither does sweet baby jesus. 

The point is that between Scene A and B the only important difference is that while the skateboarder chose to engage in potentially dangerous behaviour, the man in A didn't choose to have a heart attack (assuming he lived a healthy lifestyle).  Nevertheless, I don't think we can reasonably say that we are morally responsible for helping the heart attack victim but not the skateboarder.   You may disagree, and if you do, please tell me why in the comments section, however, I'm going to assume that most of you are with me up to this point. 

Notice that it doesn't really matter whether you are a moral realist or some form of anti-realist (relativist, constructionist, etc...).  All that is needed is that you agree that it'd be morally wrong to not to help and morally right to help.  Quick qualification: ...so long as helping doesn't impose an unreasonable burden on the helper.  I'm not going to quibble over what the conditions for an unreasonable burden might be. There will certainly be grey areas, but this doesn't mean that we won't be able to identify clear cases. 

Before moving to my next point lets quickly recap where we are right now:
(A).   There exists a moral obligation to help others who are badly off if we are in a position to help and helping doesn't place an excessive burden on us.  

Libertarians and Taxation
Libertarians are often opposed to taxation.  Why?  Personally, I think it's just greed and selfishness, but they also have a reasonable philosophical justification that follows from their doctrine of non-interference. 

Recall that negative freedom and property rights are 2 pillars of libertarianism.  When the guvamint comes along and, against your will, takes a portion of your property (i.e., your money) and does with it something you wouldn't have otherwise done, then they interfere with your negative liberty as well as commit theft.  

So, as you can see, taking money from some and redistributing it to others via social programs that enhance the positive freedoms of others (i.e., via funding public schools, universities, medical care access, roads, welfare, food aid, rent subsidies, etc...) is incompatible with strict libertarianism.  Because these public social goods are quite diverse in nature, I'm going to focus on the idea that the government should pay (i.e. collect taxes for) programs like welfare, healthcare, and food stamps.  Recipients of these programs are generally the ones to whom the moral obligation to help is greatest and least controversial.

So, lets start to relate this back to the previous section on moral obligation.  To my mind, social programs such as I have mentioned are a logical consequence of accepting (A) (i.e., there exists a moral obligation to help others who are badly off if we are in a position to help and helping doesn't place an excessive burden on us.)

Libertarians argue that it is morally wrong for the government to collect taxes for and to administrate such programs because doing so necessarily infringes on the negative freedom and property rights of those from whom the tax money was collected.  The negative freedoms of taxpayers supersede the needs of those who are badly off. 

The Moral Libertarian?
But lets suppose the libertarian also has a basic sense of moral obligation and accepts (A).  How does he reconcile (A) with his commitment to libertarian values?  In other words, how can you reconcile a recognition of a basic moral obligation to others and at the same time uphold negative freedoms and individual property rights as paramount?  

The libertarian answer is that both moral commitments are not in conflict.  They only come into conflict when they are forced against their will to help (via maditory taxes).   They reply that it's not a necessary condition that social programs be conducted through government-run tax-funded programs. To meet the moral obligation of (A) and to avoid infringing on negative freedom, it's perfectly fine for an individual to donate to a NGO, create their own charity, or hand out money on the street. 

But here's the prollem with that.  What to do when, given the choice, people don't help others to whom they have a moral obligation?  Is there then an obligation for guvamint to step in?  Or are these people who need assistance to receive that assistance only at the whim of those who can help?   In a culture that worships the accumulation of money more and more, I would not like my chances if I had to rely for help on the good will of wealthy strangers.  I'll come back to this in a moment. 

This leads me to an aside.  The libertarian might respond here that..."welp, tough titties.  Whatever crappy circumstances you're in, they must be the result of choices you made, so you sort of deserve it. And besides, if I help you, you're not going to learn your lesson and it's only going to encourage you to stay in your shitty position."  Sadly, I hear stuff like this all the time from libertarian-minded folk.  

Or worse, you get responses like this: (The fact that this type of statement can be made in public without inciting the same reaction one would have to a psychopath is evidence of a sad state of affairs of American morality.)

Obviously, this type of response ignores the reality that many people who are in a crappy situation aren't there as a consequence of poor decisions.  Many people lose their homes and go bankrupt because they had to pay medical bills.  And I don't think many people chose to get sick.

People can suffer from mental illness too.  Are they responsible for that?  Are they responsible for the psychological consequences of a poor upbringing? There are plenty of other counter-examples, but that should suffice.

Anyhow, returning to the main issue:  the conflict between individual negative freedoms and property rights with the moral obligation to help others.  Let say we agree with the libertarian and say, OK, ain't no guvamint gong touch your precious $ or force you to do anything you don't want to do.  Suppose we do this, and lo and behold, no one helps out the poor or the ill and they all die the death.  But hey, at least no one had their negative freedom transgressed! 

The libertarian objection to taxation for social programs is that it violates a moral obligation to respect people's negative freedom.  Fine.  But why does the moral obligation to not violate negative freedom win over the moral obligation to help others when you can (and it won't adversely harm you).  We have a moral values cage match on our hands.

You Want to Make a Wrestle? 
So here's what I think.  Oh shit.  I just realized that to properly support my view and pre-empt obvious objections, I'd probably need to write a book...so, I'll just restate what I've already said:  The moral obligation to help others is fairly uncontroversial if helping them isn't excessively burdensome.  We can quibble over what "excessively burdensome" means another time, but for now, going to leave it mostly unqualified except for this: Helping would be excessively burdensome if it prevented an individual from living their life in modest comfort. 

(Particularly) in a culture that worships the accumulation of wealth for its own sake and in which there are massive inequalities in wealth, the guvamint plays a necessary role in ensuring the moral obligation to help others is met.

What I Think Libertarianism Gets Right
I think libertarianism is partially right about emphasizing personal responsibility and the dangers of creating a psychology of dependence.   I'm too tired to look up the articles right now, but there is some psychological literature supporting the idea that top-down assistance programs can create a culture of dependancy.  (See especially the literature of foreign aid to Africa).  

But these problems on their own aren't an argument against government supported social programs.  The moral obligation to assist isn't dissolved simply because some methods of discharging it are ineffective.  It simply means that social programs need to reconsidered and perhaps employ some libertarian principles such as being bottom up and actively empowering its participants in coming up with solutions and pathways. 

Projects that eschew a top down approach in favour of individual empowerment have had very good success rates:
http://eefortomorrow.com/EE_Press.html
http://www.odalc.org/

By and large, it seems people will live up to the standards and expectations that are set for them--whether they be high or low.  And of course it doesn't hurt to help people set their own standards...

When we talk of personal responsibility I think we have to be careful that it doesn't devolve into victim-blaming.  There's a distinction in there somewhere, but I'm too tired right now to tease it out.   Maybe someone can point me to some literature on the topic.  Anyhow, social and psychological factors should be recognized but not seen as an excuse.  This approach robs the individual of their autonomy.  I think the libertarians have that part right.

I think there's also something to their idea that ownership of personal property is important, but maybe it needs to be toned down a bit.  From personal experience, (that's science!) since I've become a home owner and landlord, I not only take better care of my own living space, but I'm better able to understand why I need to respect and take care of other people's property.  When everything I owned fit in a backpack, I don't think I really understood why it's important to respect and take care of the property of others.  If more people can develop this respect for other's property, there might be less vandalism and theft. 

Anyhow, I'm fading.   Lemmi know what y'all think.