Keeping Justice in its Place: On the Division of Labour between Charitable Organisations and the State

Daniel Halliday (University of Melbourne), Matthew Harding (Melbourne Law School)

ABSTRACT:
Most goals pursued by charitable organisations could, in principle, be pursued through the powers of the state. While charities rely on eliciting the voluntary supply of funds to pursue their goals, the state can source funds coercively, through taxation, and then allocate the revenues to similar programs to those conducted by charities. Our paper will look into some of the reasons for preferring the state mechanism. We will do this largely by drawing on a positive account of what charity law is for, as an element of the liberal state. On our view, charity law provides protection for a range of activities through which citizens can exercise their autonomy. Relying on charities to pursue justice risks diminishing the extent to which the charitable sector can realize this function. This helps explain why the pursuit of justice should be left primarily to the state, via other branches of law. In this way, our approach contrasts with much work in political philosophy, which lacks any kind of sustained attention for why a charitable sector ought to exist.