The Fundamental Problem of Practical Ethics

When I think of the arguments for my political opinions (I’ll not aggrandize them by calling them beliefs), they often run like this: people have moral weight, therefore its not good to harm them, or through inaction allow them to come to harm (apologies to Asimov). So now we’re committed to helping others, and so we debate the best way to do that, the best way to for it, and so on.

For example: we aren’t OK with people dying in the streets because they can’t afford healthcare. So we (as a society) will guarantee that doesn’t happen by some mechanism. But somebody has to pay for that mechanism. I think the best (or perhaps it would be better to say, the best politically feasible and sustainable) way to do that is through single-payer healthcare. But it is more important to me that the problem is solved than that problem is solved in the best possible way. So while we might disagree about the appropriate mechanism, about how pays and how, but we recognize that there is a problem caused by our moral commitments to other human beings, and we desire to solve that problem in some way.

But when I interrogate this argument I notice a stumbling block, which has, as I have grown older, seemed less like the exotic cruelty of the sociopath and more the ordinary cruelty that Americans swim in. If I say “Its not right to just let people die in the streets of some ordinary illness, just because they haven’t got any money”, how many will say “Why not? I do not know these people, they are not me, or my kin, why should I care?”. That response chills me and leaves me dumbfounded. And perhaps after some flailing argumentation, I will retreat into a long silence.

Because I do not have a good answer to that question. “Why should I care about other people?”. I cannot explain it. Those with whom I have political disagreements who do not think, cannot think to ask that question, who do not see empathy and compassion as self-evident, I cannot disagree with them about ways and means of attaining goals. I disagree with them about beginnings and ends. To my mind, a person who simply does not care about other people, who cannot even muster up some feeble excuse for their cruel indifference, such a person is simply a bad person.

And all of this troubles me greatly, because it is hard to square the common (in certain influential circles) refrain for bipartisanship and compromise, that there are two (morally defensible) sides to every argument, the popular belief among the apolitical that the truth always lies between two extremes, and that political virtue involves giving all sides weight, with the belief, even the knowledge that some of my political opponents are simply bad people. This is difficult for the apolitical and those who participate in politics while disdaining it. Their minds rebel against the notion. This denial of the plain facts is as much a barrier to reform and progress, to the concrete improvement of the world, than the indifference of the cold-hearted to the suffering of others.

Edmund Burke, that famous conservative, one said “All that is required for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing”. I do not think the apolitical are bad people. I am sure that in their private lives they are by large as kind and decent as other folk, perhaps more so. But I think they are very inclined to do nothing.