Sticky situations
How do we assign blame for the oil spill?
Much of the discussion about the continuing oil spill in the Gulf revolves around the issue of locating blame. It’s pretty obvious that the oil company is at some fault here, but the talking heads disagree over who is responsible for fixing the problem now that it has happened.
Interestingly, many commentators have connected two issues that aren’t necessarily related. In some way, being responsible for fixing the problem seems to actually make one responsible for causing the problem.
It is according to this thinking that politicians, especially modern presidents, have reacted to a number of situations, such as President George W. Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina or President Jimmy Carter’s response to the Iranian hostage crisis.
If Americans think that a person or organization’s identification with the consequences of an event create a special relation to that person or organization’s responsibility for the event, then we might say that Americans have a “consequentialist” outlook. That is, it seems like most Americans determine the goodness and badness of an event by its consequences.
On especially cynical versions of this way of thinking, President Obama and his staff might have hesitated to respond to the oil problem in the Gulf because the American people would see their action, understand this response as marrying them to the consequences, and therefore blame them for the problem.
Whether or not the talking heads are correct about the President having this fear or about Americans blaming and criticizing people this way, or whether or not Americans ought to couple consequences with moral responsibility, a lot of politicians often do seem to act as if cleaning up a mess means you caused the mess in the first place.
After all, pragmatism is the great American contribution to philosophy—and this sort of consequentialist thinking might groove with pragmatism well enough.
-Jonathan
Related posts:
- Who is responsible for cleaning up this mess?
- Democracy, what is it good for?
- Kagan’s consequentialism
- The lessons of the Stephen Farrell rescue
- Pragmatism cont.
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One Response to “Sticky situations”
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If we task a person with fixing a problem he didn’t start and he is doing a poor job at it, then we can say that the continued existence of the problem is his fault, and he ought to be held responsible, whatever that may entail. Of course, such a judgment is difficult to make, since we can always appeal to non-verifiable claims about how well things would have gone if a different route was taken.
But I think it’s less about saying he’s responsible for causing the mess in the first place (which would be nonsensical, unless he was tasked earlier with closely regulating the activity that created the problem), and more about his responsibility for the current and future state of the problem.
It concerns taking “ownership” of a problem, with all the associated risks and rewards. Where as in the case of the oil spill our expectations for solving a problem may be unrealistic, it’s very risky, politically or otherwise, to “purchase” such a problem.
-Jake