To what extent should society help people who don't want to help themselves?

[Independents for George Santos]

One of the great questions of our time is how to differentiate between "won't help themselves" and "can't help themselves". If someone doesn't consent to the so-called Social Contract, we have to figure out a way to assess why, similarly to how a commercial contract can be invalidated if one is not of sound mind. If there can be a "reasonable person" standard is for participation in society, applying it as a sort of means test makes sense on the surface, until you get into the weeds of how that test is defined, sort of like how Badger said.

That said, I tend to err on the old standby of "we live in a society" so you ought to contribute to it to the best of your ability, or at least to some kind of bare minimum. If you don't meet whatever standard we can mostly agree upon, and you have the capacity to do so, then my knee-jerk reaction is to be fine with leaving you out of whatever social safety system there is, or at least bumping you down to a different one. But then there's the question of WHY you aren't adhering to whatever standards our society has, and whether that kind of rejection serves as proof you don't have the capacity to take part in the first place. Not to mention the fact that it would be a tall order to agree on a set of societal obligations at this point, anyway.