[thegrimmest]

To elaborate, it seems that for most of human history the value proposition for most people, as imposed by nature, was "work hard or starve". Somehow, sometime, we've decided that this value proposition was unethical. So now it's "work hard, or live in the social safety net, such as it is". This is much more palatable for many more people, despite the downsides, so many more people take the offer.

I assure you many people on earth would enthusiastically clean the worst filth in order to feed their families. This should not be regarded as degradation, but rather strength and triumph.

[fineIllregister]

> it seems that for most of human history the value proposition for most people, as imposed by nature, was "work hard or starve".

Many people and cultures have celebrated and promoted leisure. The US strain of the Protestant work ethic is not most of human history, most people, or imposed by nature.

> This should not be regarded as degradation, but rather strength and triumph.

It can be an individual triumph over circumstance, but the circumstances are still degrading.

[thegrimmest]

You can celebrate and promote leisure only to the degree that it allows you survive. In tropical areas where food is plentiful year-round, there tends to be more leisure. In harsh climates that require hard work and careful planning to avoid starvation, there is less.

The protestant work ethic has led to the most successful economy on earth. Other economies competing for the title work just as hard. There is an ongoing competitive/evolutionary process of culture and ideas, and "work hard" is winning.

> the circumstances are still degrading

Why do you say that? What is degrading about destitution, exactly? I'm not sure those who live it, and especially those who choose it, would agree that they exist in a degraded state. I don't think degradation exists in nature, it is a condition imposed by one group of people on another. Destitution however is encountered frequently in the natural world, and in itself does not imply a moral condition.

[everforward]

I think you and I have a different set of core beliefs, but I can expand on my side as well.

> To elaborate, it seems that for most of human history the value proposition for most people, as imposed by nature, was "work hard or starve". Somehow, sometime, we've decided that this value proposition was unethical.

For myself, that turning point is when food ceased to be a scarce good. When food is scarce, somebody has to starve and allocating by contribution is a reasonable way to do it. When food is so plentiful that we inefficiently convert it to crappy gasoline because we have so much (corn) and cram caves full of it (cheese), letting someone starve is more of a conscious decision than an incredibly unfortunate situation.

In other words, being unable to share essential goods is very different from refusing to share essential goods.

I'm willing to sacrifice a portion of my efforts so that people don't starve. The "work hard or starve" mantra has a nasty implication that people who can't work should just starve. If you're going to provide for the disabled, it's no longer "work hard or starve", and you need a new justification for why people who can work but don't deserve to starve. It becomes very morally murky and arbitrary.

> I assure you many people on earth would enthusiastically clean the worst filth in order to feed their families.

Many people on earth would also enthusiastically kill each other to feed their families. That doesn't make it a noble pursuit.

> This should not be regarded as degradation, but rather strength and triumph.

I don't see any triumph here, so you might have to expand on that thought. I guess they're triumphing over starvation, but that's not really a show of strength in a country with 1.4 billion pounds of cheese stashed in a cave. It seems like calling breathing a triumph over asphyxiation.

If they were paid enough to live a remotely decent life, that would be a triumph. Enough to afford somewhere to live, food, a little leftover to pursue a passion.

Working hard and foul jobs so your boss can pay you so little that you're almost jealous of barn animals, so they can then use the money they saved to throw you out seems very degrading to me.

Most people take better care of their household pets than we afford the homeless. Most dogs do nothing but emotional support, yet we feed them, take them to the vet, make sure they come inside when it's hot/cold. Cats don't even do emotional support, they're mostly a walking curiosity. Everybody's happy with that arrangement, but the homeless wanting a semblance of fair pay for shitty work is a step too far?

[thegrimmest]

For all of agrarian history resources have been unequally distributed - hoarded by few at the expense of many others. This is also true in nature - animals will viciously defend as much territory as they can, and not limit themselves to what they "need". Furthermore, having secured the best territory, food, and mating opportunities, they (whether as individuals or in groups) will spend their free time harassing their competitors. This is optimal behavior in a Darwinian environment - take as much as you can, and pull the proverbial ladder up behind you.

"Civilization" hasn't really changed the realities which give rise to these optima. It only defines the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. It doesn't change the rules of the game, as it were. We've not suddenly become a colony of ants, selflessly behaving as a single organism. Nor do I think it reasonable to carry the expectation that we suddenly will. Nor do I consider it particularly virtuous to compel us by force to emulate the ants.

Indeed we do have an excess of calories in our society, but that's not really the problem the parent post describes. It describes homelessness - often correlated with drug addiction and mental illness. When I see a homeless person, they don't seem much different to me than the similarly destitute animals sometimes depicted in nature documentaries. Those animals who, by failure or misfortune, have found themselves unable to compete with their peers and unable to carve out a niche for themselves. They wander listlessly, with ever decreasing energy and opportunity, until they finally succumb to their fate.

None of this strikes me as particularly "wrong" or "degrading" or really having any moral character at all. It is just an inevitable, inescapable, fact of life. To suppose otherwise is to think that human beings are somehow more special, or more intrinsically valuable than other animals. Given your comparisons to household pets, this clearly doesn't hold any water. In the scheme of things, we're just a hair more clever than our ape ancestors, and that has pushed us past a tipping point into civilization. I don't see how this makes us any "better" or more worthy.

Personally, given all of the above, I think it's best to embrace reality. We live in a world where optimal behaviour is self-interested and the cost of failure is total. This isn't a statement of values, it's an observation of fact. The only question that remains is how comfortable are you using force/authority to compel cooperation? I myself don't want to force anyone to do anything (and rather resent being forced myself). Authority should be used to ensure our coexistence is peaceful, and that we resolve disputes via due process. Beyond that however, I'm not very comfortable telling other people how they should behave, or whom they should help. I would rather die destitute than pry greedily into the pocket of an unwilling and uncharitable stranger.

[everforward]

> This is also true in nature - animals will viciously defend as much territory as they can, and not limit themselves to what they "need".

This is very much not true. It doesn't even make sense from an evolutionary perspective; why would an animal risk their life and waste energy to protect something they don't need? Some animals do take a sizable territory. Typically carnivores, who need a crazy amount of space to get enough meat. Most animals aren't even territorial.

> Furthermore, having secured the best territory, food, and mating opportunities, they (whether as individuals or in groups) will spend their free time harassing their competitors.

Again, this isn't true. Why would they do that? It's a risk and an energy expenditure for no gain. They'll fight over territory if they have to, but I have never heard of an animal going out of it's way to harass each other for the sake of it.

> It doesn't change the rules of the game, as it were. We've not suddenly become a colony of ants, selflessly behaving as a single organism. Nor do I think it reasonable to carry the expectation that we suddenly will. Nor do I consider it particularly virtuous to compel us by force to emulate the ants.

I think you're basing this on a flawed understanding of nature and how we fit into it. The only way humans are a dominant species is through cooperation. Not every person all the time, but in aggregate.

Humans are not particularly strong. Humans are not particularly fast. We are smart, but that's only helpful insofar as it improves our fitness, and can be a weakness due to increased caloric needs. As individuals, we are not particularly high on the food chain. What puts us high on the food chain is the ability to collaborate. We invented farming, giving us a caloric surplus. Then we created societies, allowing us to use that surplus to have people dedicated to research. We then use that research and some caloric surplus to have people create things like guns and concrete and ships that make us highly adaptable and deadly to the rest of the food chain.

Without that collaboration, we go back to being the middle of the foodchain and jumping at every shadow at night.

> We live in a world where optimal behaviour is self-interested and the cost of failure is total.

Self-interested behavior is too local of a maxima to be useful as a species. Evolution encourages the survival of the species, not the survival of the individual. A purely self-interested view would see the optimal solution being to take from others, leading to a collapse of the species. It takes a lot less energy to kill the farmers and take their crop than it does to actually grow the crop.

> Authority should be used to ensure our coexistence is peaceful, and that we resolve disputes via due process.

And this is the logical (rather than moral) reason why we take care of the less fortunate. Starving animals tend to become very aggressive, and humans are no exception. During the Soviet famines, people killed and ate each other. You can't tell someone starving to death that they need to peacefully coexist; it won't happen.

It is dramatically cheaper and easier to prevent that by just preventing starvation.

[thegrimmest]

> why would an animal risk their life and waste energy to protect something they don't need?

To displace its competition and further secure its dominance of the local area. Too much is always better than not enough. Even animals who occupy enormous territories will seek to expand them further at any opportunity. Bands of chimps will murder neighbouring bands over territory, despite neither group being remotely close to starving. Coalitions of male lions will seek to take possession of a pride of females by killing the existing males and all of their juvenile offspring. Many groups of human hunter-gatherers, ignorant of the modern world, will kill strangers in their territories on sight.

Nature evolves these behaviours simply because animals who display them have a greater chance of passing on their genes. Anything but hostility to direct competition is usually suboptimal.

Human dominance evolved through cooperation in small familial groups numbering less than 100. That is what our social biology is equipped to handle. There are many examples of company culture fragmenting past ~150 headcount. Past that group size, we're no longer able to cooperate based on shared in-group status and mutual trust. The mechanism of civilization is bureaucracy, but the interactions are still between small tribes of people each competing for their own interests, and in practice totally apathetic to outcomes outside their group.

We've managed to put some rails around the process, but legal and corporate interactions are the civilized equivalent to war. The same language is even used. We're still the same apes, with the same limitations regarding, frankly, how many other people we are capable of giving a damn about.

> It takes a lot less energy to kill the farmers and take their crop than it does to actually grow the crop.

Not really sustainable over a generation though, is it? Your strategy has function long enough for your offspring to reach maturity, and their offspring, etc. The winning strategy is to take as much from the farmers as they will tolerate and funnel it into extravagant displays of power and social status that further cement your position. All we've done is put some rules around the taking, mandating (in civil society) that it be voluntary and not under the threat of violence. This way, you invent iPhones, sell them at huge margins to all the farmers, become absurdly wealthy, and no one need die. It's a winning system.

> It is dramatically cheaper and easier to prevent that by just preventing starvation.

I'm not actually sure that's true. Shocking escalation of violence is also effective, and very cheap. In places where amputation is a common punishment for theft, wouldn't you know it, people don't steal as much. In places where punishment for crimes is severe, and police are effective, crime rates are low. Japan being a great example.