Conversely, would you reject vigilantes so categorically if the ability of your government to enforce the law was crippled and you had no prospect of immediately improving it?
No (I'm actually of a pretty vigilante mind myself, despite recognizing that it doesn't work on a societal level).
But that's not the situation in which we live.
And in any case, I'd rather fix said crippled ability to enforce law instead (though vigilantes might be a stopgap, but they aren't a long-term solution).
Where did I say that charity is a viable and sufficient alternative for government? It's apples and oranges.
Read the part I quoted. You say that relying on solidarity through state it's a way to get good conscience and do nothing. Sounds to me it means that charity should exists even in the case of a viable government and as such it's legitimate even for functioning government.
I actually hold the same reasoning, but reversed : charity allows for a society to get good conscience and not actually do something when it fails at solidarity.
I happen to live in a state that both has decent law enforcement, and clear laws about how citizens may participate when law enforcement is unavailable.
In a completely Lawless environment, vigilantism might be a superior alternative to doing nothing. Case-by-case, obviously. Much like how you spend a charity dollar . And the person who refuses to do something, despite the lack of a proper government agency, is making the wrong choice.
Agree, but the fact is, we DO live in area with functioning governments, and as such we should pressure them to work instead of compensating the failure with charity and allowing them to get away with it.
Let me get another example : it's been years that our whole health system is understaffed and there is a tremendous amount of pressure on the nurses to do ever more with ever less.
We still rank 1 in the world for health. Because the nurses do insane hours in order to help the patients. And the result is, the government keeps cutting the budget, because, well, it hasn't exploded yet.
The dedication of large part of the staff allows increasingly unacceptable levels of what can only be described as exploitation. This dedication is like charity : it's people doing more than what they should so other can use them to fill their own pockets or to ignore their responsability. It's taking patients hostages (and, for charity, the poors/downtrodden/etc.) to force good-nature people to cover for a-holes.
Such things are positive when they act as emergency relief (which is why people tend to stick together when disasters hit), but they actually hurt society when they become the norm.
