But once government starts taking the responsibility for charitable works, people naturally tend to feel, "Well, fuck it, I pay my taxes. That's my good deed." The corrupting influence of government run welfare makes it very easy to become cynical about the whole idea of charity even though the failures of welfare is no more an indictment of charity than the failures of crony capitalism are an indictment of free market economics.

The Peace Corps is a pretty good example of how the good intentions (of some, at least) are squandered by this kind of compulsion. If they actually had to convince people to fund them and couldn't just coast on being a relic of the Cold War that people just have some weird emotional attachment to, they probably wouldn't be such an ineffectual vehicle for economic development (or anything else, really, other than a way for idealistic young people to take a derp-y journey of self-discovery at taxpayer expense). And their lack of accountability has enabled worse things than just wasting billions of taxpayer dollars, like being totally unresponsive to the rape of volunteers.

Sure. But nationalized welfarism erodes a sense of duty by abdicating it to "other people", just as the nationalization of the family in western nations has resulted in the collapse of the actual family.

Where does one derive any sense of duty from a negative rights based ethics system?  Duty has nothing to do with a rights-based system.

Where does one derive a sense of duty from a positive rights based ethics system? It ultimately just leads to everyone trying to live at the expense of everyone else.

Since when have any ethical systems influence shaped one's sense of duty or the actions that are taken out of the sense of duty?  How one acts isn't based on a set of moral codes as this has rarely anything to do in real life. Most people may claim to be the ethically superior by believing in god and following the good book to the last word and still not help other people should they be in direct offence  of the first parties belief system.

People that claim to have an ethical system that compells them to help people in need end up freezing when a life threatening situation occurs because the codes tells them what they WANT to do and how they WANT to act. It doesn't really mean that they will. As such I would propose to overthrow the notion ethical belief systems somehow determine the feeling of duty as this is a more primary based mechanism within every individual. Ethical systems might be correlated to such feelings of duty but they sure as hell do not determine them.

Man, I know now why some say that Americans seam stupid. They use all their brain power to understand and discuss the things that are being discussed in this thread. Who's rights of what are being violated if the state offers free contraceptions?

This is probably one of the most ridiculous claims I have ever heard from a politician. It sounds like the people opposing Obama are attempting to grab at threads on his shirt sleeve while he is kneeing them in the face.

Does this Mitt Romney also think that Jewish and Islamic people should be exempt from paying taxes because a portion of taxes subsidizes agriculture which includes pork farming?

Also, it's a little funny having Romney defend the Catholic Church, I would think that any Catholics that are THAT pedantic about their faith would be much more concerned about voting in someone they would deem a heretic as president.

I might as well reply to both these here.

First, I had been saying that rights-based ethical systems don't provide any basis for duty.  They PARTICULARLY don't in the case where someone only believes in negative rights.  The people most likely to fulfill the demands of a negative ethical system, are corpses in a graveyard (unless they turn into zombies of course).  

In regards to other ethical systems, they do have duty and place demands on individuals to do something, and not just avoid anything.  If you see the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you", for example, you see a case where positive action is called upon, not just not to cause harm.  Others would produce a reasoning for doing duty, and having obligations and requirements to do so.  This, of course, is in their purist form.  Whether or not people act on such is another story, and whether or not people really do consistently follow an ethical system, is a different issue.

A purpose of an ethical system is to provide a framework for education and conditioning one's behaviors and shaping priorities in life.  It alone won't guarantee people actually DO anything though.

I think basically all ethical systems (save hedonism, perhaps) provide a basis for duty, though what that "duty" is might differ. If one believes in negative rights, then at the very least one has the duties of being self sufficient and not a burden on others and of respecting the rights of others.

If you want to say that negative rights ethical system has a duty, the duty is arguably as little as possible, and be fullfilled by just rolling over and dying.  It is all about leaving others alone, and you don't even need to do anything to help anyone else. You don't even need to be aware of others.