spy versus (perhaps) spy

      5 Comments on spy versus (perhaps) spy

Your Blogger has had neither the time nor the energy nor, frankly, the inclination to blog overmuch of late. In part, this is because I am very bad at quick posts, so anytime I think I should post on something I realize I’m looking at half-an-hour, at least, to produce an essay with which I will still be dissatisfied. With. So I postpone. I have enough to do.

This afternoon it occurred to me that one thing that appeared in common in my musings over entries I did not, in fact, write, was a philosophical point about priorities. Amongst the potential subjects were a note on Lawyers, Guns and Money by djw about eliminating the age requirement for voting, several posts there and other places about abortion, the very odd John Tierney piece on polygamy in the New York Times, and of course the continuing military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ll emphasize that I didn’t actually get as far as writing anything at all, let alone anything coherent, but there was an idea which kept coming up, and which I will quickly lay out, for fear of losing it altogether. It’s not a new idea, or really a complicated one, but here it is:

Anytime you have to balance real harm to real people, or even real denial of actual rights to real people, on the one hand, with a probable or speculative harm to society on the other, you should be very, very, very skeptical of the claim that the harm to actual people is justified. This is particularly true when the actual harm is already being done, and it is possible to help, and the costs are primarily speculative. I’m not saying that it’s possible to arrange things so that nobody ever comes to harm, and I’m not saying that it’s possible to arrange things so that nobody’s rights ever get infringed or even delayed. I’m just saying that, as categories of argument, one should take precedence over the other, and that any argument that goes the other way has to be pretty damn’ good to be persuasive.

For instance, in the case of votes for children, the argument that we can’t allow sixteen-year-olds the franchise because they might elect people who might pass laws that might be bad policy is pretty specious. I think it’s possible to construct arguments for a minimum age, but they can’t depend entirely on what might someday happen, if. Similarly, forcing a woman to bear a pregnancy to term because abortion is terminating a potential life is bollocks. Oh, there are arguments, and good ones, to be made all around the issue, but first we need to acknowledge that real, observable harm trumps potential harm. Yes, that means we need to define harm, at least well enough to go on with, and the arguments can go on from there, but start with what can be seen. When we restrict who can marry whom, and again there are compelling state interests involved in all this stuff, but first we need to acknowledge that if we are preventing people from marrying whoever they can convince to marry them, we need something pretty concrete to stack up against it. Not a vague, hell-in-a-handbasket sense that Things are Wrong, but an actual instance of actual harm to a person or even to the state’s aforementioned interests. Otherwise, you got nothing.

Does this make all policy choices easy? Like hell. When we invaded Iraq, there were people already being harmed, people who it was in our power to help. For all the speculations about a democratic domino effect, and they should never have been sufficient to invade, there was a case to be made on the basis of actual harm to actual people. And there was, besides, a case being made, however fraudulently, for the Ba’athist regime being an actual threat to millions of others, by using or supplying Death Rays. And the invasion was admitted to result in people being harmed, of course. I’m not going back over the decision, which of course was a bad one, for all the reasons I admitted at the time and most of the ones I didn’t, but the simple calculus of actual harm vs. potential harm was not enough to cover the situation.

Most policy decisions are actually quite difficult. Difficult enough, I mean, without losing sight of actual harm and actual people. Most policy decisions, though, ultimately create or alleviate actual harm to actual people. So when you argue them—state’s rights, and constitutional provisions, and qualifications for the high court, regulations on business, military invasion, and restrictions on this, that and the other—if you find yourself in a conversation with someone who has lost sight of the people harmed, or you discover that you have lost sight of them yourself, take a step back, and divide the arguments into those categories. Then go back into it. It won’t be over.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

5 thoughts on “spy versus (perhaps) spy

  1. Chaos

    I think this is actually not uncomplicated. I mean, okay, any time you’re considering a law which would change the status quo, any effects of that law are potential rather than actual: if we enact a law under which the state can round up and execute everyone whose last name starts with ‘Q’, there’s still a sense in which it’s potential harm until it’s enacted, though it would obviously be real harm if it were.

    I bring this up because there are quibbles about potentiality in some of your examples. A lot of people would claim that abortion is terminating an actual life. Obviously, you’d disagree with their definition, but you’d never get them to agree with yours, so it doesn’t help your argument. So potential vs. actual is in question.

    In another direction, you seem to be classing the WMD threat as an actual threat. I’d call it a potential threat — if it were real, it would be an actual problem, but we didn’t know if it was real or not.

    In other words, i think we need to start by differentiating between cases in which something will definitely have effect X but we don’t know for sure that X will be harmful, and cases in which effect X will definitely be harmful but we don’t know for sure that the action in question will have effect X.

    Or i may be missing the point. That is known to happen.

    Reply
  2. Vardibidian

    No, I don’t think you are missing the point, although I hesitate to go as far as you do. After all (to reduce this probability matter to absurdity), when we throw the creep out of the tall tower, it’s only probable that he will be killed, it’s certainly possible that he will be saved at the last moment by a happy, and melodic, coincidence. Yet a policy of throwing the creep from the tall tower is a policy of doing harm to the creep, whether or no.

    I think I was intending, by leaving in the bit about the Death Rays (and I took out a bunch of the irrelevant arguments, one side and another), not to say that the Death Rays were Real Harm, but that they were a serious matter of potential harm. That is, I was acknowledging that there are cases where potential harm does need to be taken into account, and that, as you say, we then need to ask questions like how likely is the harm and how harmful is the harm, whilst remembering that all this harm is indefinite, and must be held at a lower weight than the definite harm, whether that is the malnourished children of “sanctions”, the tortured prisoners of the Ba’athists, or those buried under American bombs.

    And, yes, I know that some people would say that abortion is terminating an actual, rather than a potential life, but they are (a) a minority, large enough to influence the discussion, but not large enough to really influence policy, and (2) not actually participating in the policy discussion. Well, and that’s false, as they are participating, but generally under false pretences, as hardly anybody, anywhere, is currently suggesting that both women who have had abortions and those who have aided and abetted the abortions, before and after the fact, be prosecuted for murder. No, the conversation is about regulating, and balancing, and reducing the numbers, and so on, none of which makes any sense at all if it is an actual life at stake.

    And of course, you are right that it is, as you say, not uncomplicated. Far be it from YHB to say anything is uncomplicated. On the other hand, I think it’s easy to lose sight of what in fact is a (comparatively) simple and mightily important difference.

    Thanks,
    -V.

    Reply
  3. irilyth

    This is an oddly libertarian argument, the notion that actual harm to individuals is more important than vague benefits to society. Or if not libertarian, at least small-government; isn’t all government activity based on the premise that the government is in a position to do things that are good for society (and thus desirable to have done) but bad for individuals (so the individuals who make up society would never do them on their own)? Consider, for example, government funding of the arts: That’s is fundamentally about doing actual harm to individual taxpayers (by taking away their money) in order to provide the social benefits of a richer culture, right?

    Reply
  4. Vardibidian

    Well, and I’m not sure it’s libertarian unless you accept that harm to people’s rights is actual harm, and is on a scale to harm to their persons. I might call that an intermediate level of harm.

    Certainly, I don’t think taking somebody’s money (through taxes) is anywhere near as harmful as killing them, or hurting them, or depriving them of medical care, or restricting their movement, or their freedom of association. Unless, of course, you were taking money from the poor, taking lunch money, which would be a harmful policy, and which I wouldn’t endorse. Of course, it’s possible that taking money from, say, me will ultimately lead to my being unable to buy dinner next year, when my income will be vastly reduced, and when my savings will be less than they might have been had last year’s income not been so highly taxes (and had I actually, you know, saved the difference), but that’s potential harm.

    As for the general rule, I’m not sure how things can be good for society unless they are good for people. Take, for instance, the government ensuring clean water. If they don’t do that, people will be actually harmed (as they were before the government did it). In order to do that, the government takes money, which as I say lies more in the realm of potential harm. Going back to the general, the libertarian attitude is that government taxes individuals to help society, which it sees as nebulous and equivalent to my “potential” harm in priority. The liberal attitude is that government taxes society in order to help individuals, the taxes coming from the individuals who make up society and the individuals themselves making up society and thus spreading their benefit. But we don’t give welfare so that society will be better, but so that individuals will eat.

    Thanks,
    -V.

    Reply
  5. Michael

    I like your way of phrasing the balance for cases where there is actual harm to specified people vs. speculative harm to unspecified people. Legal cases are generally only allowed when there is claimed to be actual harm to specified people. This is supposed to be because we’re too busy as a society to worry about speculative harms, yet too many legal decisions wind up going against those actually harmed in favor of those speculative harms.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.