Who should make you eat your brussels sprouts?
The market, responsibility and perfectionism
The New York Times has an article from last week on a duo of internet filmmakers, known as the Internet Celebrities, who use humor and YouTube to spread a unique brand of social criticism. One of their most watched videos has them entering the world of Bronx food bodegas to highlight the diverse, yet disgusting food options available to many New Yorkers.
Beyond the humor – for example, the bodega food pyramid – their video raises important normative questions about the availability of healthy foods in low-income communities.
It is a well documented fact that middle- and upper-income communities have many times more supermarkets than low-income neighborhoods. As a result, people in these communities are forced to purchase food at corner markets, convenience stores and bodegas. And these food providers have little in the way of healthy options. This matters because a diet short on healthy foods increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, obesity and other illnesses. So if healthy foods have such a direct impact on the life of individuals, whose responsibility is it to ensure that everyone, including those in low-income communities has access to them?
Guest Post: Responsibility in Rwanda
Searching for justice after a genocide
On August 9th this year Rwandans will take to the polls to elect their president. This election will be the second since the horrifying events of 1994, when the death of President Juvénal Habyarimana triggered a frenzy of mass murder commonly referred to nowadays as the Rwandan Genocide. It is believed that 800,000 people, three quarters of Rwanda’s Tutsi minority were killed by members of the Hutu majority, most of the atrocities taking place in as short a period as three weeks. Read more
On oil & the environment
Our ethical stance towards the natural world
In response to the recent oil spill Andrew Sullivan writes that it’s time to reconsider the “morality of oil” He argues that even if the “cost benefit analysis of offshore drilling make sense” there are deeper ethical concerns to consider: Read more
Who is responsible for cleaning up this mess?
A massive oil spill caused by an explosion on and subsequent collapse of an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico is threatening the fragile environment of the Mississippi Delta region. According to federal law, BP — the company leasing the rig — is ultimately responsible for paying the cost of response and cleanup operations. Does that sound right? What about the owner of the rig, Transocean? Why not the U.S. government for allowing drilling so close to shore or for not regulating safety well enough? In the case of industrial accidents, where does moral responsibility fall? Are the companies always responsible? Or might the U.S. government ever shoulder some of the blame?
-Marc
The blame game
How to talk about blame with diseases like AIDS?
In Tuesday’s NY Times Infectious-disease physician Abigal Zuger writes that it is time to move beyond “obsolete H.IV. statues” that seek to punish those who transmit the disease. She explains that our fascination with playing the blame game over the spread of AIDS is representative of a larger human desire to hold someone else responsible for our illness:
We blame that coughing woman in the subway for our cold, the giant meat company for our food poisoning, all manner of chemicals and electromagnetic radiation for our cancers, and fast-food outlets for our diabetes and heart disease. We cannot experience illness without casting around for blame.
Zuger is certainly correct that the spread of AIDS cannot be distilled into simple terms like innocent victim and murderous sexual deviant. The disease often “moves among the poorest of the poor, the disenfranchised and socially marginalized, where substandard education means no escape.” Read more
Steroids and the dangers of sports
How should we handle the health risks associated with athletics?
Sam had a good post on the problems with George Will’s “naturalistic” argument against steroid use in baseball. I think many of the people who are strongly opposed to steroid use in sports would struggle to articulate a clear and coherent theory to support their belief. This is certainly not to say that there aren’t very compelling arguments for prohibiting steroid use but I think the issue is more complex than most peoples basic intuitions would lead them to believe. Read more
Controlling the uncontrollable
Righting wrongs during wartime
War is difficult to execute, and its costs are inevitable. Good people die, the innocent are hurt or killed, and the destructin – physical and otherwise – persists long after the fighting has stopped.
But that hasn’t prevented us from trying to limit the extent of war’s evil. New facts have surfaced with regard to a disturbing incident in Afghanistan that raise – again – the question of whether such attempts are simply a fool’s errand.
In February, three women were killed in an American Special Operations gaffe, although U.S. soldiers denied it at the time. Now an Afghani investigation has not only confirmed that American forces were responsible for the deaths, but that they attempted to actively hide their involvement. A chilling account in the New York Times reports evidence that Special Operations soldiers dug bullets out of the women in order to disguise the cause of death. Read more
Can the Catholic Church sin?
Institutional Responsibility
We’ve learned recently of
more children molested and raped by Catholic priests, and of more cover-ups by Church higher-ups, likely leading all the way to the Pope Benedict XVI. Is it right to scorn the Catholic Church as an institution? When is it right to hold an organization in moral contempt for the actions of an employee or member? There are two main questions.
The first is whether he committed the offense in his official capacity, at least incidentally related to his institutional responsibilities and authority. If a priest killed someone while driving drunk, it wouldn’t impugn the Catholic Church as an institution, at least not directly. It’s a little different for the Church than other organizations insofar as priests have dedicated their entire lives to the institution and its teachings and, as such, everything a priest does in some sense reflects upon the Church. But we can still draw a line between the activities a priest performs though his position as a priest and everything else. And the molestation is a case of the former. The offenders had access to children because they were priests charged with caring for or educating these children, somewhat analogous to a daycare worker; anything they do with these children in their capacity as caregivers or educators qualifies as incidental to their official responsibilities. These molestations and rapes were committed on the clock.
The second issue is the complicity of institutional leadership. The leaders direct the institution as a whole. They speak for the institution. If they decide that the institution will take an action, the institution then stands for that action. If the crime in question is an isolated incident and leadership works honestly to prevent its future occurrence, it seems inappropriate to hold the organization as a whole responsible, or to put the act in question on the organization’s moral ledger.
Whose fault is Glenn Beck?
A friend and I were discussing Glenn Beck’s comparison of social justice (ie. the authentic original teaching of the Jesus of the Christian gospel) to Nazism and Communism (which, to the radical right, seem to always be pretty much the same thing). My friend’s claim was that Beck, as a general charlatan in this case making clearly irresponsible claims, holds the moral responsibility for making the claims that he does. However, I suspect that more responsibility should be placed at the feet of Beck’s viewers.
Beck’s ilk have existed in all times and places — showmen who will say anything for popularity and prestige. Before Beck, I’m guessing there were hundreds of unknown bloggers saying the same things. What makes Beck different is that people actually listen to him. In this way he is a symptom of cultural degradation rather than a cause. I’m not sure we can let his viewers off the hook as sheep, free of agency or responsibility for associating themselves with these views.
Do we get the media we deserve?
-John
Involuntary risk
Morality in a recessionary world
It used to be that the American retirement system relied on a so-called three-legged stool of assets: Social Security, a pension, and private savings. Changes in our economy over the last 50 or so years have cut away at two of the legs.
Our personal savings rate dropped to the low single digits for much of the 00s and most Americans don’t have access to a good pension (much less a career-track job). That’s why so many of those forty and older are suddenly scared to death about their retirement. With the precipitous decline in markets, few have truly adequate savings to bridge the gap between their 401k (if they have one) and Social Security.
Corporations have struggled, too. Those that invested their pension funds bullishly now have billions in liabilities they can hardly afford to cover. That’s why so many are reinvesting more conservatively. State and local governments, however, are doing just the opposite:
But states and other bodies of government are seeking higher returns for their pension funds, to make up for ground lost in the last couple of years and to pay all the benefits promised to present and future retirees. Higher returns come with more risk.
“In effect, they’re going to Las Vegas,” said Frederick E. Rowe, a Dallas investor and the former chairman of the Texas Pension Review Board, which oversees public plans in that state. “Double up to catch up.”
State and local governments employ about 14.8 million people. These employees tend to belong to strong unions that often negotiate for health and retirement benefits comparatively better to those found in the private sector (when they are offered at all).
But a good pension contribution plan isn’t much help when the bottom falls out. Because employees can’t control the investment portfolio, state and local workers are forced to take on an inordinate amount of risk–one that we now recognize can be crippling.
What’s the solution? Giving employees some measure of control over the pension mix seems like a coordination disaster, and there is no guarantee that a majority vote would prevail in favor of a more conservative mix.
That said, giving workers a choice about what risks they incur lessens the apparent moral harm when stock market swoons wipe them out. But many have argued that the current recession shows exactly why we need to give individuals less, not more, choice over how they save for retirement. It’s too easy to underestimate far-off risks, even when so much is at stake.
A more sensible approach would be to enact more stringent regulations about retirement investment–both for public and private funds.
It seems like we’re relearning the lessons that led to the creation of Social Security during the New Deal. It’s not good to be poor when you’re old, and it’s worth forcing people to insulate themselves from that risk. Liberty reaches its its limits when the capacity for informed choice is similarly limited.
-Sam
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