News – or political news at any rate – has been dominated this week by the government’s decision to withdraw child benefit payments from higher-rate tax payers.

Excitement has focused on two issues in particular. One is the mixed message apparently coming from senior Tory figures. As soon as the policy was announced, traditionally supportive newspapers, such as The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, squealed. Whereas the Chancellor, George Osborne, responded effectively with one word – ‘tough’ – the Prime Minister appeared to waver, apologising that the cut had not been mentioned in the Tories’ election manifesto and offering a sop in the form of a modest tax break for married couples. They didn’t exactly disagree with one another but nor were they obviously on the same page.

The second issue, and the one which had sparked the Tory papers’ revolt, was the apparent unfairness of the way in which the cut had been calculated. Setting the higher tax rate as the point at which child benefit will be cut off would, the papers pointed out, penalise many families in which one parent stayed at home. Family A (father earns £45,000 p/a, mother stays at home) will lose £1,700 a year. Family B (mother and father earn £40,000, kids in nursery) keep it. It doesn’t seem to be particularly fair, and certainly not the kind of signal given by a supposedly pro-family party.

There is a third issue which has gained less attention. It is this: what exactly is the moral logic behind the benefits system? Who should receive benefits and – which is more or less the same question – why?

There was little doubt about the answer a lifetime ago when Beveridge published his report on Social Insurance and Allied Services. He opposed ‘means-tested’ benefits, believing that both contributions and benefits should be flat-rate. This was a system for everyone. Everyone paid in. Everyone could take out. It was an example of everyone looking after everyone else.

The news this week changes this. It may not change it much but there are many people who see it as the beginning of the end for such flat-rate and universal benefits, and many who want it to be the beginning of that end. If it is child benefits today, why not free bus passes or winter fuel payments tomorrow? “Free TV licences for the elderly regardless of need look insupportable,” opined the Financial Times.

The left is generally against the drift away from universality, although not for the obvious reasons. Indeed the obvious reasons suggest they should be for the move. If you believe in ‘from each according to his ability to each according to his need’, means-testing benefits (assuming it is done fairly) is a thoroughly good idea. It is the rich paying for the poor.

The reason they object is that they see in the policy a move away from state provision, period. In essence, unless the middle classes who contribute to welfare provision also benefit from it (or, more precisely, feel that they are benefiting from it), they will no longer back it, not so much by avoiding payments through clever accountancy as by turning their collective back on any party that stands on a welfarist platform.

Underneath all this lies confusion about what it the system for. Is it an institutionalising of the strong caring for the weak? That was certainly the opinion of many Christian social thinkers last century. “In bringing relief to the poor, giving food to the hungry, finding work for the unemployed, caring for the children and the aged, and providing healing for the sick,” wrote Cyril Garbett, Archbishop of York, “[the welfare state] is carrying out the work of Christ.”

Or is it, alternatively, simply a giant insurance scheme, in which we all pool our risks, thereby engaging with one another in a way that is essentially self-interested?

I am not sure we have ever been clear about the answer to this, often believing a system that operated along the lines of the latter was really a system embodying the values of the former. If the cut to child benefits presages further changes in the system, we would do well to bring a bit of moral clarity to our answer.

Nick Spencer is Director of Studies at Theos.