Your friend Umakant hails from a village whose surrounding areas were submerged due to floods during the monsoon last year. Government assisted the affected people by giving them cash doles to purchase household effects, seeds to replant crop and cash to compensate for loss of standing crop. Umakant had his house site on high ground and suffered no loss of personal effects. Luckily, his agricultural land being relatively far away from the flooded river escaped the ravages of the flood.Normally, government machinery is unable to thoroughly assess the damage suffered by each individual family. As a result, people take advantage by making extravagant and often fictitious claims. Umakant has made false claims like others in the village.
What will be an appropriate response to Umakant’s conduct?
1. Umakant should only have made genuine claims.
2. It is for the government agencies to ensure that no false claims are entertained.
3. When everyone is cheating the system, Umakant cannot do anything singly; he should join the crowd.
4. Governments provide relief whenever natural calamities occur for winning cheap popularity. They should scale down the benefits.
The first choice is correct. Actually moral responsibility springs from within. One source of ethical values is conscience. Inside every sentient moral agent there is a voice which tells him/her what is right and what is wrong. An action is wrong, even when nobody else has observed it if it does not pass the test of morality. Umakant or for that matter anybody else deserves the benefit of flood relief only if he has suffered specific losses due to flood. If crop has been lost then for crop loss the claim is morally sound. If no loss has taken place, one cannot make a claim at all. Whether government sanctions a falseclaimor not is notrelevantfromhisethicalperspective. It is withthisdeepsensibility that thegreat philosopherImmanuel Kant hadwritten “Two thingsawe me most,thestarry skyabove me and the moral law within me”. One has to remain sensitive to the promptings of conscience.
Knowingly or unknowingly, Umakant is harbouring a wrong belief that his moral responsibility does not arise because government functionaries are expected to verify details and only after verification pass a payment order. If the authorities have not taken care to do their job, it is they who are responsible and not he. But this answer choice as explained above, is wrong.
Umakant is also wrong in justifying his improper conduct on the ground that everybody else in a similar situation in his village has done the same. This is a bandwagon impropriety as we may
call it. Bandwagon behaviour is a conduct of imitating others – irrespective of whether the conduct in itself is right or wrong. Populism causes social aberration and this is common in our country – everybody wants to take the benefit of government schemes irrespective of whether the eligibility conditions apply to him or not. Other’s conduct is good for imitation only to the extent it is worthy. Confucius put it very nicely: “If I am walking with two other men, each of them will serve as my teacher. I will pick out the good points of the one and imitate them and the bad points of the other and correct them in myself.”
The fact that governments provide relief on a liberal scale is no argument for misusing such relief. Scale of benefits has no connection with morally desirable conduct in this case.
