Republican Senator Tom Coburn was reported in today’s NYT as saying:
I don’t believe that everything that should happen in Louisiana should be paid for by the rest of the country. I believe there are certain responsibilities that are due the people of Louisiana.”
Hmm…..let me see now. Taking responsibility for something usually implies that one has done something wrong. But hurricances are unforseeable, chance phenomona for which no human being or group of beings could possibly be held responsible. It just happened to strike Louisiana and not Delaware this time. Delawarians were lucky and Louisianians were not. So who should be held more responsible: the victims of misfortune or the ones who escaped it?
This is the most profound difference between liberals and conservatives right here. Liberals tend to beleive that the latter are responsible for the former while conservative tend to beleive that the unlucky are responsible for themslves. In fact, the whole idea of individual responsibility which is the fundamental cornerstone of the modern conservative (or neo-liberal) economic philosophy can be interpreted as a project to eliminate the very concept of luck or indeterminism from the realm of social and political discourse.
But it is quite easy to see why this is completely ridiculous. Indeterminism enters into almost every single aspect of daily life. Even our most fundamental moral decisions are often inextricably tied up with luck.
The philopsher Thomas Nagel has identified four kinds of, what he defines as, “moral luck”:
Consequential luck: take the case of a man who attemptps to kill his wife and succeeds versus the case of the man who attempts to kill his wife and fails because his wife fell backwards because the house started shaking as the result of an earthquake a moment before the shot was fired. The first man is guilty of murder and may even be executed while the second is guilty of only attempted murder and will probably receive
a relatively short sentence or get off the hook altogether. Whatìs the diffrence between the two cases if not a matter of luck? Or, again, take the cases of two drunken drivers. One of them is driving along when a 5 year old child suddenly jumps out in front of the automobile and ends up dead. The other just drives along carelessly and is potentially capable of killing a 5 year old child who just happened to jump out in front of his car. What’s the difference between the two cases? Consequential luck.
Circumstantial luck: A man just happens to live in Nazi Germany and has a profound predisposition toward racist and nationalist ideas. He joins the Nazi party and ends up working as an member of the SS helping to herd Jews onto trains headed off to the gas chamber. Another man who was also born in Germany and has equally profound predispositions toward racism and nationalism and who would have, if given the chance, acted in excatly the same manner as the first, was living in Argentina at the time of the Shoa and therfore did not actively participate in the process of annihilating the Jews. It is a matter of circumstanial luck that the one was living in Nazi Germany at the time of the Shoah, while the other was living in Argentina. And yet out moral intuitions are to condemn the first (probably hope and pray for execution), while, even if we knew about the second, we would just call him and “racist” and stop and that.
Constitutional luck: this is luck in who one is or how one has come to be what one is. Can a person be said to be responsible for his actions given that he was endowed with certain genetic predispositions by chance and that he grew up in a certain environment totally involuntarily?? To what extent?? How much of an individual’s background and constitutional luck should be taken into account in determining his degree or lack of degree of moral responsiblility.
Causal Luck: this is defined by Nagel as “luck in one’s antecedent circustamces”. He insists that this form of luck is essentially synomymous with the problem of free will. If the laws of nature and the physical universe, including our mind/brains, are deterministic, then there must be determinate causes for our actions. If the world is indetermimistic, then there must be probabalistic causal explantions for our actions, and the situation is equally problematic for certain theories about the existence of free will. It seems to me that causal luck reduces to the other three, howevere, so that this form of luck is redundant.
Conservatives simply shove aside all such complex questions, alongside such even more problematic questions as the degree, if any, of responsibility that one has for one’s own economic destiny,with self-contradictory slogans about “God taking care of things”, “put it all in the hands of God” and, on the other hand, “individuals are responsible for their destiny”, “if I can become a millionare so can everyone else”.
One of the things that natural catastrophes really bring to the fore, and this should be a decisive factor in analysing, evaluting and assessing the response to Hurricane Katrina, is the question of how much Americans are willing to take responsibility for
others when they are clearly in absolutely no position to take responsiblity for themsleves.
Fantastic diary, gilgamesh. I had the same thoughts reading Colburns poisonous rhetoric earlier tonight. They’ll bitch about paying for New Orleans’ construction, but nevermind the rest of the deficit-building crap the Bush misAdministration has racked up (i.e. the Iraq War).
But the deficit was certainly not the fault of anyone in the governement was it?? Does indivudual responsibility aplly to governement as well, or is that collective responsiblity or shall we just hypoctially invoke “bad luck” as an explation for the budget deficits??
libertarian/conservative followers would remind us that Bush has a pen that can veto spending, but he has refused to keep the pork away from his wingnut friends in Congress.
Now, it’s not really that bad, is it?
Luck has nothing to do with the Gulf Coast. It is all probability and engineering. Ideology and delusions come into play to hide the facts and divert the money. Sooner or later another category 4 or 5 hurricane is going to hit the mouth of the Mississippi River. If the wetland buffer zones aren’t rebuilt; if the below sea level land aren’t reverted to swamps; if storm gates and adequate levees aren’t build, there will be another thousand lives lost, 200 billion dollar catastrophe in America’s future.
Gulf Opportunity Zone, tax cuts and Loan Guarantees without oversight and environmental planning will drain the federal budget into well healed pockets and assure future destruction, all over again.
The whole ballgame in a nutshell.
Luck has [b] nothing [/b] at all to do with the Gulf Coast disaster?? You means it is not a question of luck that an extraodinary number of indivuals happened (they cetainly did not choose and it is has nothing to do with probabalities) to be born African-American and poor in that partcilar area of the world?? More fudnmdntally, it is not matter of chance, that Fred Q. Williams (of nay race or class) happened to be suffereing from Alzheoner’s and was therorefore unable to get himself out of the area, while Fred B. William was not and was therore able to sucessfully evacuate??
Do you think that wealth and success very bradly defined, for example, is a matter of individual repsonsiiliy and that poverty has nothting to do, at leat to a large extent, with tragic misfortunes
like being born without certain genetic endowments and in the right enviromental cirumstances??
Furthremore, the hurricane itslef, like all weather phenonema, is a chaotic matter and hence detremisntic in nature (not even indetermiensitic as you allusion to probabilities would seem to sugeest). But chaos theory means that the most infintesimial and absoltely unpredictable changes in inititial condition cause a chain of determisnticis events to occur. To the extent that one absolutley cannot predict the event, it is a matter of chance how powerful and exctly where the hurricane will hit at any given time.
This is not a matter of getting the governemnt off the hook, of course. You’ve fudndmnatlly misudnerstoof the whole point of thr diary. It was aimed at the ridicousl assertion that the “people of Losiana themselves (that is, as indivuals menbers of a coummity hit by a [b]catastrophe being their control[/b]) should be held moral responsible for the events that happened and for the consqueneces that ensued. The principle of lack of control is all that is need in MORAL PHILOPSPHY to classify a set of phenomena as “moral bad luck”.
Here and http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-luck/] are a few imorrtant links to help you out in this matter.
Notice the emphasis placed on the Principle of Control in modern moral philosophical discourse.
The same argument is frequently made, (and by Buddhists also) in different terms: If you are poor, of a low or even “scheduled” caste, you should endure this meekly because you are being punished for something you have done in a past life.
In the Abrahamic faiths, the explanation is less complex, but equally fatalistic: If you happen to be born in a hole too deep for anybody half a peanut less than George Washington Carver to dig out of, it is simply “God’s will.” You must endure this meekly to show your acceptance of God’s will, and all religions agree that if you do endure meekly enough, maybe you will get a better deal after you die.
Yes, finally, someone who understood my point!!
The Buddhist (or Hindu) tramsmigrational fatalistic idea is very disturbing in its own right.
But modern conservative Chritians, or just conservatives in general, seem to argue two contradictory theses at the same time: “It’s god’s will and you must have done something to deserve this” and also “you danged idiot, why are you so poor? You have to drag yourself out of this mess. It’s ain’t God’s fault!! I did gained my welath all by myself..”