Foster Care and Moral Obligation

[note: I accidentally published an earlier version of this upon which a couple of people commented. I apologize to those of you who commented on something that no longer exists.]

I just wrote a post about my response to hearing people who don't have any personal experience in foster care, telling other people that they should become parents through foster care.

I have a series of posts in draft form about foster care/ foster-adoption and moral obligation that I want to write. Some of them are pretty ...um... academic. Some have more to do with personal experience and are likely to be more interesting. This post is probably the most philosophical in the narrow, and worst, way. If you can make yourself read it, I really and truly would love your responses to it. I'm not asking you to respond as philosophers. I want to ask you to respond as people who care about kids.

So, this is a post on the philosophical paradox regarding benevolence, or any notion of duty beyond obligation.

Allow me to explain...

Philosophers have a difficult time with some sorts of moral obligations. The ones that arise out of any sort of contract are easy. When I walk into class as a teacher I have accepted a contract to behave in a certain way to these students. I should behave in those ways simply because I have in some sense promised to do so.

And some philosophers have conceded that we have moral obligations to people with whom we have no contract, particularly family members. There is far less agreement though about WHY we have such obligations. Do we owe our parents anything? Is what we owe them contingent upon whether and how they cared for us? I know I feel that I should care for my mother, who cared for me, if she were to get sick. As for my father, who did not care for me, well, I can't see myself leaving him on the streets. When I imagine possible scenarios I imagine figuring out ways to arrange for care he needed. I also cannot imagine letting him live in my home, as I can my mother.

Philosophers agree that we have obligations to our children, but again a lot of them want to analyze that as a sort of contract. Given that I did not surrender my children for adoption, but instead took them home, I now have an obligation to care for them. Once I have accepted a foster child into my home, I have obligations to that child. Many philosophers would like it to be that simple. And it is not just philosophers, we all want obligation to be connected to free choices. One person should not have to carry on the family business simply because it is expected of him or her. When our siblings seem to need us at least part of us wants to respond, "I didn't ask to have a sister."

And there seems to be something right about that. There is something wrong with the idea that we can incur obligations without having made some sort of commitment. When I society tells some group of people that they have an obligation to do a certain work simply because they are that group of people, we call it oppression.

But when we imagine a world in which everyone only does for others what contractual morality demands, we come up with a pretty cold world. Ayn Rand argues for such a world as the only just world. Rand argues that altruism is bad. I had a class one year decide to right to the Objectivist Society that supports her principles and ask how they thought the perfect society would deal with various forms of dependency: old age, disability, and disease. The class found the answer to be unsatisfactory. Individuals should save money, or buy insurance, or in some way contract for their care. If they didn't, it wasn't the responsibility of the rest of us to take care of them. The side-stepped the issue of the people who really couldn't care for themselves.

Carl enjoyed reading Ayn Rand. For a while he loved it. He kept asking me what I thought and I started out just telling him that I did not agree with her. I said that I disagreed that we had no obligations to people who could not reciprocate. He defended the position. Finally I asked him what his life would have been life in a Randian society. What would happen to a 14-year-old boy whose mother had died? He was somewhat stricken and said, "I would be selling my ass on the street."

The children who are or should be in foster care present the greatest challenge to contractual ethics. Of course, we can say that once the state has taken them away from their parents, the state has assumed responsibility and now is obligated to ensure their care. But what about the kids who are not yet in care? What about the kids who are being severely abused and neglected (I will let you draw the line wherever you think it should be drawn), is anybody obligated to do anything about it? I know some of us are mandated reporters, but I mean morally. Is anyone morally obligated, and if so, then who? And why them?

Here is the way that philosophers tend to set up the dilemma. Let's say that in our town of 100,000 adults there are 100 kids who have been orphaned by a natural disaster. By some fluke that only happens in philosophical thought experiments, none of them have other relatives who can care for them. Let's imagine that the children could be cared for with $1000 each. Of course that is an absurdly low number, but it makes the math easy. You can redo the problem substituting you own more plausible number. Do we, the non-related adults, have any obligation to help them? If we say yes, then how does that obligation get distributed among us? Perhaps each of us has an equal obligation for their care. In that case we each need to contribute 1/1000 of the cost of caring for one orphan or $1.

But what if many people simply refuse to participate? What if only 10,000 of us do? If we know that going in, are we each obligated to contribute $10? If so, that means the failure of others to satisfy their moral obligations increased mine. But maybe we accept that. $10 is not that much for most of us, so we give it.

But what if only one person cares? If we thought that the failure of others increased our obligation, what happens when the number of people who care decreases further? Is that one person morally obligated to contribute $100,000?

Surely not, most of us would say. It would be nice for them to do so, but they are not morally obligated. it is going above and beyond the call of duty. (For those of you who like to increase your vocabulary, that is called "supererogatory." "An action which is praiseworthy and is more than one is required to do is super-eh-rog-atory.)

So for philosophers this is quite a paradox. If we start with the assumption (which would need to be defended) that everyone was obligated to contribute $1, but deny that one person is obligated to contribute $100,000, then does that mean that that one person only had an obligation to give $1? There are 100 orphans, but if the one person who cares gives someone $1 to care for them, would it be morally acceptable for them to hand over $1 and walk away? Is that person really any more morally praiseworthy than the person who said, "They are not my children. I won't give anything." They don't seem to be, and yet in one way of thinking one has satisfied a moral obligation that the other has not.


One generally accepted philosophical principle is "ought implies can" which means that something can only be an obligation if you are able to do it, or conversely, if you really cannot do something, you are not morally obligated to do it. Though there is debate about exactly what this means*, it does seem right that if you really couldn't do something, you should be punished or otherwise held responsible for not doing it.

That may be our reason for denying that one person should give $100,000. So perhaps we solve the problem by saying that each person is responsible for giving what they are able. It is highly unlikely that in a community of 100,000 adults that only 1 will be willing to help. Surely at least 1,000 of us will want to do something. If we divide the obligation among all of us, we each need to contribute $100. We may agree that not all of us can contribute that much, so we agree to contribute more. A few people can only give $10; any of us can contribute $200; three of us can contribute $1000. We all do what we can, and hopefully it is enough.

That seems more sensible, but troubling. Certain we often find ourselves in those sorts of situations. I have, on occasion, contributed an amount to a cause based in part upon my assessment of the need and my prediction of how many people are likely to contribute. Roland and I contribute regularly to a small group that reaches out to GLBT students in religious schools. They don't spend a lot of time or money raising funds. They bought several versions of ex gay dot com so that when you type that in you go to them. (Careful if you try it though. They didn't get all of them. Some ways of spelling it will take you to gay pr*n sites. I'll save you the embarrassment. If you want to check them out, they're here). Roland and I give money to a couple of different organizations, but we decided a long time ago to support the small ones whom we perceive to need the money more than the big national charities everyone knows about. (BTW, we are happy with our current commitments and not interested in being solicited for other organizations!)

My desire to add that last parenthetical remark is an indicator of the problem with this solution. Doing as much as we can, really, seems to be far more than we should be required to do. I spend money on many things I could do without. Should I? I give to some charities, but in all honesty I don't make any sacrifices in my life style to do so. I give only a fraction of what I could. It is some small comfort to know that I am not alone. Peter Singer who is the philosopher most famous for arguing that we should give all we can, has admitted in interviewers that by his own argument he should be giving away about 40% of his income and yet he only gives 20%. (Okay...I don't give anything like that number...)

The point though is that philosophically it would be nice to be clear about what our moral obligations are. Starting with the assumption that we as a community had an obligation to those 100 hypothetical orphans, leads us to a paradox. Given that many people will not respond, we seem to have no reasonable solution As we imagine more and more people not fulfilling their part of the obligation, either the obligation becomes so heavy as to no longer be something that can be considered a moral obligation, or the resulting effort is so small as to be a complete inadequate response to the original problem.

I told you it was a paradox.

If our original assumption, that the community had a responsibility to the orphans, was the problem. Perhaps we should say, as I believe Ayn Rand would have to do, that we don't have any moral responsibility for them. We could make a deal with them, offer to take care of them now if they agreed to pay us back later. Of course if the orphans are very young they won't be able to agree to such a contract.

The other option is to not worry too much about it. They are not an obligation, after all. Perhaps some of the orphans will be cared for by people who want to be parents. That would be nice for those particular orphans. Of course, the ones left behind weren't owed anything. No one had any obligation to them. And as for the people who care for the orphans, they are not owed anything either. They wanted to do it. They chose it, like some people choose to take up rock climbing. The rest of us have no obligation to help them pay for their hobby.

****Most of this post is my attempt to explain a paradox that I read in a certain body of literature. It is a line of reasoning I am trying to figure out how to reply to. What you read is not an expression of my own views. So please -- discuss among yourselves. Tell me what you think. Be honest, and don't worry about hurting my feelings. I'll even turn anonymous commenting back on it. Do be polite to each other though.****


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* There is some healthy debate about this. Harry Frankfurt has argued against it with examples in which someone fails to call 911, but it turns out that the phone lines were down so even if they had tried, they couldn't have done it. In this case he has said that they still ought to have called. Others have argued that what they ought to have done was TRY to make the call, and that was certainly within their abilities.