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.
