Walzer Maimonides

Walzer on Maimonides, Charity, and Justice:

Michael Walzer, a leftist thinker who has written one of the most important modern works on Just War Theory, has a new piece on questions of charity and justice. He is interested in the Jewish model -- because it was stateless -- which strikes him as useful because, in the (hopefully continual) absence of a global state, he believes that all of us are stateless. This leads to some interesting lines.

With little or no coercive power, the Jewish communities in the Diaspora had to rely heavily on the charitable contributions of their members. The contributions were indeed necessary, for without them there would be no way, for example, to ransom Jewish captives (a major concern of the Diaspora communities throughout the Middle Ages), help the poor and the sick, provide for orphans, or fund synagogues and schools. And so the medieval philosopher Maimonides argued, following Talmudic precedents, that insofar as Jewish communities in the Diaspora had coercive power, they could legitimately force their members to give tzedakah.

...

Pledge cards were distributed, filled out at the table, and then put in an envelope and passed to the head of the table. There sat the owner of one of the biggest stores in town -- let's call him Sam Shapiro. Sam knew everybody else's business: who was doing well and who was not, who was paying college tuition for their children, who had a sick mother, who had recently made a loan to a bankrupt brother, who had money to spare. He opened each envelope, looked at the pledge, and if he thought that it was not enough, he tore the card in half and passed it back down the table... What moral or philosophical principle was Sam enforcing? He probably could not have answered that question, but the answer seems obvious: "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." That line is from Karl Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program. Sam was not a Marxist, not by a long shot, but he adjusted the demands he made on each of us to his knowledge of our ability to pay. And we all believed that the UJA would distribute the money to those most in need.

A strongly left-leaning thinker will find these principles easier to endorse than a right-leaning one; but Walzer is worth engaging even for those on the right. For example, he has this to say:

What does it mean to address the needs of the poor? This, too, is a question not only of charity but also of justice. Maimonides has a famous discussion of the eight levels of tzedakah, but only two need concern us here. The highest form of charitable giving, he wrote, is to set up a poor man in business or in work of some sort, to make him independent.

All of this talk of charity is directed toward a final assessment of humanitarian invasions. Walzer has an interesting history here, having strongly favored them before the Iraq war... and then, for reasons that strike me as being out of line with the principles he argued so well in Just and Unjust Wars, finding ways to oppose the invasion of Iraq. See what you think.