162. PRACTICAL ETHICS - When Do Economies Become Unethical?
The last few weeks I have kept on noticing a theme in conversations about normative issues requiring a public policy response. It began with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) used in schools and other public buildings. As buildings containing the dangerous material were closed, causing widespread disruption to public services, the solution was obvious: we need to fix them urgently. Rebuild them, or replace the dangerous stuff within them with something that’s not going to crumble, collapse and crush those dwelling inside. (And that this should have been done years ago, before the possibility of collapse got so imminent).
The problem with this solution was also obvious: to do what was/is needed would simply cost too much money. That’s why governments had avoided doing it earlier, in a timely fashion. Because the money could be arguably better used (or seemed more pressingly needed) somewhere else. The same, they argue, is true today: there’s no money to rebuild crumbling schools and other public buildings. We know we ought to, but we can’t.
A second conversation arose when prisoner, Daniel Khalife, escaped from Wandsworth Prison. While one can (and I frequently do) argue that the bigger problem here is the existence of prisons in the first place, the reason this happened within the current criminal justice framework was apparently due to understaffing and overcrowding in prisons. Absent staff meant cuts in security checks that otherwise might have prevented the escape, and those staff were largely absent because working conditions in prisons stuffed to the gills with too many prisoners have become pretty unbearable (that said - you should try being one of the actual prisoners!) Old Victorian prisons have not only got basic maintenance issues which have long gone untended, making them unpleasant places to live and work in, but cells built for one prisoner now usually contain at least two. Conditions are hell, and overseeing hell is a pretty undesirable occupation. One with high rates of absenteeism. (You might also frame Khalife himself as an example of someone wanting to be absent from untenable conditions. It wasn’t as if staying in prison was going to help him in any way!)
Again - an obvious solution here (besides the only morally right one of abolishing prisons all together) is to invest in better, larger, prisons and more staff (if we’re going to continue with the shameful sham of prisons let’s at least make them operate as they should), while simultaneously investing in putting together the infrastructure and support needed to reduce the number of prison sentences given in the first place by providing alternative (more humane and effective) approaches to rehabilitation and justice. But, again, this solution faces the obvious problem that this would cost billions to do. It is therefore unrealistic. The money could be better spent on other things. Especially in a world that demonises criminals so much that making circumstances better for them would be the last thing the majority of average citizens would see as worthy of their hard-earned taxes. (And yes - my preferred alternative of total prison abolition is even more expensive!)
It is fair, at this point, to ask exactly what other things the money is being spent on then, if it is not helping to improve schools and prison buildings? After all, in the UK right now our NHS is equally buckling under the pressure of overwork and understaffing due to lack of funding, as is the education system beyond the safety issue of its crumbling buildings. Our public waters are filling with sewage, our public utilities such as electricity and gas have become unaffordable for many, childcare has become extortionate, care for the elderly continues to deteriorate, our legal system outside of the prisons has a crushing backlog of cases leaving many stuck in limbo, or prison itself, unnecessarily, and basic goods are becoming more and more difficult to acquire while pretty much every major public service sector is either currently striking or has been recently striking. So where is the money going if it isn’t going on replacing dangerous concrete or improving prison safety? My own local council in Birmingham, for example, announced they were actually bankrupt the other day. There’s no new money for anything they say. No money at all. So where has it all gone?
As significant a question as that is, I’m not actually interested today in the specifics of where the missing money has gone (although it does seem to be a scandal we’re not talking nearly enough about). It is enough to know that money that is there has been spent on other things, and that money that isn’t there isn’t there because we haven’t been asked for more in taxes. (And that more money in taxes is seldom asked for because people tend not to like paying their taxes, suggesting a general mistrust in the way they are spent…all of which suggests that the current system of using taxation to pay for collective goods seems to be failing). But those concrete (pardon the pun) failures are not where my focus lies either. At least not merely those concrete failures. What I’m interested in today is how the system of money and economics itself creates a regular and damaging practical disconnect between what is actually needed ethically - what is right, what we ought to do - and what is actually done. I am interested in the question of whether the practical compromises economies necessarily demand on our actions are, in fact, immoral, and whether such immorality makes these economies not only unfit for purpose, but unfit to such a capacity that we actually have a moral duty to replace them?
For example - this week it was briefly discussed, too, that we might potentially have to kill all American XL Bully dogs in the UK following a spate of savage attacks on humans from the breed. I was reminded of similar discussions at the start of the pandemic when it was suggested that household cats might spread the virus: a nationwide cull of all pet cats was a possible strategy the government mooted. The spectre of speciesism in our thinking looms large here, but economics does too. There are expensive alternatives in both cases to taking animal lives. Extensive retraining and rehousing of the dangerous dogs, for example, and long term quarantining of the potentially infectious cats. But to spend that much money and time on preserving non-human lives just isn’t affordable or desirable to most, not simply because of speciesism, but because of the costs involved.
Happily, in each case, new information or alternative and affordable strategies prevented the mass culling of an entire species or breed…but the fact that we even consider mass extermination of non-human animals so easily, whereas to do so for human beings is the preserve only of the most monstrous figures from history, comes from the fact that our valuing human lives more than we do non-human ones means that we therefore financially value them more too. We remain guided in our moral actions by what our wallets will allow.
I remember as a child my sister’s pet rabbit was put down after getting some awful disease. She was understandably distraught and so my friend and I did a little digging. Did the rabbit need to die? We called the vet and asked if the disease the rabbit had was treatable. “Yes.” was their response. “But it’s so expensive to do so that we always recommend it’s best to put the animal to sleep.”
We were astounded: the life could have been saved, but was deemed too costly to bother. How many other euthanised pets were killed only because people had decided to spend their money on other things? And did the same thing happen with people? Of course it did! The more I learned about medical ethics and the question of limited resources in hospitals, the more I realised that it was a necessary evil in a world of finite things. Three ventilators and five patients? Two will simply have to die because we didn’t buy enough machines to treat them all. We all saw this most transparently during the early days of the Covid pandemic. It wasn’t always the virus itself which killed people, but the lack of available treatment for them as hospitals become overwhelmed with cases. It was economics that killed them as much as the virus itself. Hence why soon every economy in the world diverted its efforts into buying more ventilators, effective treatments, and developing and manufacturing a vaccine. When we think a price is worth paying, we pay it. This is why, sadly, we can always find the money for war even in times of great economic recession or austerity. We will always find the money to bring us more ethical alternatives when sufficiently motivated to do so. The problem often is that the motivation to spend money where we ought to is not always there.
When we say, ethically speaking, that X ought to happen we are saying something far more than that we’d like it to happen if it could. We are saying that it should happen. That we are obliged to make it so. Increasingly though, there are two levels of thinking at work when it comes to structural or public problems: what we ought to do vs what we can afford to do, with the economic demands of the first thought becoming limited by the practical scope of the second. We ought to do X, but can’t afford to, so shall do Y instead, or maybe nothing at all.
And maybe that is just the harsh truth of reality. I said already - the world has limited resources and things are finite. You can’t save everybody all the time and sometimes what we ought to do is simply impossible on a mass scale.
Except…when something is preventing us from acting as we ought, we have to look at what that obstacle is and ask some more questions. When someone breaks the law, for example, conventional wisdom is that the pressing demands - often financial - which made them do so are not an excuse for the criminal act. They know what they should have done, and what is, or isn’t, in their wallet cannot excuse the fact that they did it.
And that very wisdom has come under fire - because of course sometimes practical considerations crowd out abstract normative ones. You might know you ought not to steal, but if you’re starving and someone else’s food is there, can you really be blamed for taking a bite?
But while a distinction can definitely be made between acting unethically and moral blameworthiness, I want to focus on the special case here of money and economics as the obstacle to ethical action. Why is it special? Because the economy, and our personal economic conditions, are a human-created and entirely artificial structure imposed upon us by collective choice and the entrenchment of tradition rather than a naturally occurring and unstoppable phenomenon. They do not need to exist. And furthermore the existence of these artificially imposed economies come specifically from a normative edict: the claim that we ought to have a system in place for regulating and arbitrating trade and resources. That the existence of these imposed economies are legitimate because they are the ‘best’ (i.e. most moral) way of raising and distributing funds, services and property within a society.
Perhaps, historically, this may have been true. But if we can see (as we undoubtedly are seeing all over the world today) that these imposed and invented economies are actually failing to do the very thing their existence is morally justified on promising - enabling us to do as we collectively ought - then the justification for their continued existence starts to come into question. The fact that it is economic considerations actually creating the obstacle to being able to do as we collectively ought suggest that such systems are actively failing in their justificatory purpose and, further, that perhaps we have a moral obligation to remove and transform them so that we can, in fact, do what morality demands.
Put simply:
1) The world existed prior to the existence of economies.
2) We have chosen to create economies in the world on the moral argument that they are believed to be the best way of securing vital common goods morality demands, such as health, security, education, etc.
3) However, increasingly, these economies seem to be failing to be providing those vital common goods.
4) Furthermore, they appear to be creating an active barrier towards achieving many of the things that morality demands.
5) Therefore such economies, as obstacles to ethical action, can no longer be morally justified.
Unfortunately I can already hear the objections to the idea that we need to replace our current economic systems with something better - it would be too costly to do so. We couldn’t afford it. Maybe we ought to do it, but practically we just can’t.
And so the treadmill continues to turn.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
My new book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere now on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. And if you want to buy it from me personally I shall be selling it at the London Anarchist Bookfair Saturday October 7th, the Peterborough Radical Bookfair Saturday October 14th, and the Manchester and Salford Anarchist Bookfair Saturday November 4th.
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