When distrust and suspicion are problematic in CCTs?

GARCÍA VALVERDE, FACUNDO

Salzburg

Workshop; Give man a fish, but control him; 2022

Center for Ethics and Poverty Research

Anti-poverty policies and attitudes of distrust sharea long history. From the narratives of de Quevedo’s El Buscón or Dickens’ Oliver Twist, in which beggars arereally able-bodied individuals making a concerted effort to take advantage ofothers, to the invasive physical tests and “workhouses” that formed part of theEnglish Poor Laws, the poor have long been seen as deserving careful scrutiny.Unlike other moral cases in which the cry for help entails some positive dutyof assistance, a request from the poor changes the burden of the proof; theymust prove that they are not trying to obtain unfair advantage from thoseproviding assistance. Although in increasingly subtle ways, this historycontinues as part of a popular set of policies in Latin America called“Conditional Cash Transfers,” which make income support conditional on certainbehavioral changes.This paper claims that attitudes of distrust areidentifiable in CCTs’ design rules and in its adoption of a specificrisk profile of potential beneficiaries. This risk profile has three elementsof distrust: one motivational, one guiding-action and one interpretative. Accordingto the first, CCTs assume a flawed motivation of its beneficiaries; accordingto the second, it implements a series of precautions and punishments in case of failure in social cooperation; thoseprecautions unilaterally condition the interaction between the parties involved;lastly, concerning interpretation of other’s actions, it adopts a pessimistic outlook of the beneficiay’scommitment to their duties, since any failure to invest in children’s humancapital is interpreted as the direct result of an inadequate motivation, andnot of a lack of resources or capabilities. This identification, however, does notraise any specific normative problem per se. On the one hand, if everyone wereto be distrusted across endless domains of action, the problem would begeneral, since basic conditions for a society will be compromised, but nobodywould be individually harmed. On the other hand, unwarranted distrust is almostcompletely overshadowed by likely improvements, as in the case of strictcontrols and surveillance needed to receive a millionaire bequest that willimprove your social position or when checks and tests are part of theapplication process to a high esteemed job.The mainobjective of this presentation is to justify three criteria to determine whendistrust is problematic from a normative point of view, and apply them to CCTs.First, distrust becomes instrumentally problematic when it is fueled andexploited to justify significant exclusions of beneficiaries, reductions ofbenefits, etc.; since internal features of distrust, it can lead to reduceseverely cooperation and interactions. Second, distrust is normativelyproblematic when the attitudes of surveillance and precaution are stabilizedand maintained through time, regardless of the actions and behaviors of the allegedlyuntrustworthy individuals or groups. In this sense, the maintenance of distrustturns insulting. Third, distrust is normatively problematic when it does notonly reinforce and crystallize inegalitarian relations between a “trustworthy”group and an “untrustworthy” group, but when it creates new patterns and modesof inegalitarian relations. For example, distrust can strengthen stereotypes,stigmas, gender roles but, at the same time, can create new arbitraryhierarchies that structure the relations between individuals.