Philosophy: Who should society focus on providing advantage for?

I would offer a third option - what we can do for our society.

Provide for those who are not able to provide for themselves: children, seniors, handicapped, mentally ill, phsyically ill/injured.

Except for children, not all of these categories are helpless. But many are, and those are the ones society should provide for.

Even elephants take care of their own when it is needed.

Personal. You can not help all or advantage all. But the children are the future. You take the poor, disadvantaged kids. You have a certain amount of go getters. Kids that will not make it with out a little help. But are workers, tryers. Those you help advance. You see they have a school uniform, a pair of glass's, lunch at school for the school year. They only know they have a benefactor if they ask. Because they are the workers. Those kids willing to pull & work there way up. Those you give a helping hand to.

Being a democratic society we want to distribute it to the most people, without however diluting it too much. We need to have concentrations of money because that is what makes everything else possible. The leisure to think and experiment. To be a do-er. As opposed to a cipher.

The best possible advantage for all people like in the 1957. USA was been so scared about the spudnic probe that they wanted to have all humans to have the best education to get advantages over USSR. The cultural elite usually prevent that pupils of worker parents attend a higher school (the same like today).

If you want to make a real progress with the whole country or world, you need to give everyone the possibility to reach their mental limits. The requirements are a healthy environment, the scandinavian school system and a real, supportive government.

I think the most valuable should be considered as the people that produce the highest products in demand such as farmers. I also think that our elders should live on more Social Security Insurance than they do now. Instead of giving big bucks to those that entertain us, and those who are athletic we should be giving money to people who justly deserve it, justified by the principle of utility. Even without it, I think we should have a special value for our disabled and our elderly.

This is a very complicated problem.

One aspect of the issue concerns how we approach questions pertaining to the domain of politics and ethics. Jonathan Haidt and some of his colleagues identified primal moral intuitions through careful analysis of large scale survey data, each relating a peculiar inclination to adopt a certain opinion to certain aspects of a problem. There are concerns about care and harm, fairness as proportionality, loyalty and betrayal, liberty and oppression, the sacred and the profane, as well as respect for authority and traditions. These six groups of concerns constitute what Haidt calls 'moral foundations' and they animate our intuitions about political and ethical problems. He also notes that each one of them probably grew to facilitate our ability to coordinate ourselves and reap the benefits of cooperation while avoiding the problem of free riding.

The reason I mention these emotions is that depending on where you place the most weight, you will insist on peculiar aspects of the problem. Moreover, as Haidth points out, extensive evidence gathered from various experiments and surveys suggest that the arguments you will use to justify this position are largely meant to rationalize your moral intuitions. As a consequence, even if it appears as sensible and justified, the process of forming these opinions is in fact much less cognitively involved than you would think and, by extension, much harder to change than you would think.

For instance, conservative people tend to be more evenly responsive to all those categories of intuitions than liberals who generally are more specifically responsible to harm and care. If we, as a society, insist on making things very good for the people who are responsible for the bigger share of the workload, it could end up leaving the less productive member of the society in less desirable circumstances than if we insisted on focusing on their conditions specifically. It's not a necessity, but it does seem like a plausible consequence, at least for small to medium time frames.

To a conservative, this is fair (because the rewards are proportional to the contributions). They might acknowledge that some people suffer more or enjoy themselves less than if we did things differently. On the other hand, using public institutions to solve the problem does mean you give other people to authority and power to meddle in how the fruits of your labor are being managed (i.e., they see it as bullying or an abuse of power). Because they do not specifically focus on caring for others, it's not enough to tip the scale in most cases. For a liberal, things would be different. They perceive bullying and oppression, but usually see wealthy and influential people as the bigger threat, so they might worry that giving a lot of control to the most productive member of society on resources is not a good idea. The commonality here with conservatives, if you can see it, is that 'big is bad.' They would also be much more worried about how the little guy does than conservatives -- enough so it could tip the scale.

Now, this is just thinking about how this question will spur conflicting intuitions that will fight with one another to win our favor, but the problem has many more dimensions than complicated moral sentiments. What does it mean to make things 'better,' even granted that we pick a group of people? This is a very complicated question, one that in fact bothered economists in the middle of the 20th century. Kenneth Arrow provided a profoundly disappointing answer in his PhD dissertation.

Suppose we would insist that what 'better' means cannot be imposed on individuals, so we cannot just form a theory of what they think is best for them. One way to proceed is to then assume that their behavior reveal an ordering of outcomes and that it is this ordering precisely that we should use to evaluate what 'better' means. Further assume that we refuse to make arbitrary choices about how to compound individual preferences: we do not put explicit weights so we can compare 'better' across people. Now, how do you go from individual preference ordering to a single set of ordered preferences which we could use to choose how society should be organized?

It turns out that you can't. If we want to aggregate preferences, we have two options:

(1) Put values on each option for each people to numerically represent how much better each option is versus the next to each people, as well as enable comparison across people. This is unappealing because those numeric values are not revealed by behavior and thus are arbitrary;

(2) Make someone a dictator: pick his preferences and claim they are the social preferences.

If you want an example, look for the Condorcet paradox: three people (A,B,C) and three options (x,y,z). If the preference ordering are A(x>y>z), B(y>z>x) and C(z>x>y), we have a problem. Assume we use a majority rule to form social preferences. A and C prefer x to y, as well as y to z, and B and C prefer z to x. This would imply x>y, y>z and z>x... which violates transitivity (because x>y>z>x implies x must be preferred strictly to itself). What many philosophers do is adopt (2) and use a normative theory to say what is best. What economists do is use a slightly different approach that avoid appealing to social preferences. Pareto efficiency finds cases where the ambiguity is relieved and the related Kaldor-Hicks criterion used in cost-benefit analysis by economists does a similar job.

Yet another aspect of the problem is how the question is framed. We usually move readily into concerns about welfare -- that is, we talk about the consequences in terms of pain and pleasures, restricting our attention to one of the six moral intuitions. You could make a good case that the question you ask prioritize the wrong things. To a radical environmentalist, the welfare of wealthy and poor citizens is of secondary importance to the quality of our physical environment: nature is sacred and human activity, especially when it involves pollution of any form, is perceived as degrading nature. If you put near infinite weight on this issue, you might be willing to accept just about any distribution of pains and pleasures, so long as nature is maximally preserved.

In essence, anyone who answers this question in two lines and pretends it's simple doesn't understand the question.

Society is not a decision-making entity.

You are confusing society with the State. But this is easily disproved. Society is not the State, and the State is not society.

Other people are not your property. It is not okay to threaten people with being caged, bashed, stabbed and raped, to force them to submit to aggressions against their person and property, promoted or agreed by you, and using the state as your instrument.

That is the effect of the philosophical error you are making.

As you can see, it is both evil and stupid.

NO ONE should be given advantage. Everyone starts out equal. Everyone can get an education even if it's at the public library. What you do with your life is up to you. Win or lose is based on your own fire and determination.

I don't think society should provide advantage for anybody. Because society doesn't always know what's best for people. So... how could society possibly know what's an advantage? And what's dictatorship?