Since we’re on basic ethics, let’s take another basic ethical principle. It is impossible to have a good society if you do not punish and reward people for the forseeable consequences of their actions.
Let us take the most simple: in a war people die, they are injured, many rapes are committed. Disease runs rampant, infrastructure is destroyed and people die to to the loss of that infrastructure, such as having sewage mixed in to their drinking water. If we put sanctions on a country, people will die as a result of the lack of medicines, or food, or jobs. Even without actual death, people will suffer who would not have suffered otherwise.
These consequences are forseeable. When we implement the policy, we KNOW people will die. We are responsible for those deaths. That does not meant that war is never the right thing to do, nor sanctions, but it does mean that the bar is high. This is why the Allies hung Nazis at Nuremburg, because they started a war from which all the other deaths and rapes and hunger and so on flowed. Those deaths, that suffering, was the foreseeable consequence of their actions.
The idea of forseeable consequences is fundamental to reasoning about ethics and morality. It is especially important in reasoning about public policy.
It also applies to things like the subprime real-estate bubble, the use of derviatives, the piling on of leverage, the policies of neo-liberalizing money-flows first, trade second and immigration third. All of these things have, and had, forseeable consequences. People have died, lost their jobs, lost their houses, been beaten by their spouses, gone without meals, had their countries erupt in revolution because of the financial fraud and manipulation engaged in by bankers, brokers, central bankers and politicians in the run-up to the financial crisis on 2007/8. The consequences were forseeable, they were forseen by many people (I did, and am on the record as having done so), and the actions taken by bankers and their compatriots were fraudulent on the face.
Entire countries have gone in to permanent depression as a result of the forseeable consequences of their actions. Then various countries, especially in Europe, doubled down on austerity. Austerity has never worked to bring an economy out of a financial crisis or depression, and it never will. It does not work, and this is well known. Engaging in austerity has forseeable consequences of impoverishing the country, reducing the size of the middle class and grinding the poor even further into misery. It also has the forseeable consequence of making it possible to privatize parts of the economy the oligarchs want to buy.
It is done, it has been done and it will be done because of those forseeable consequences. They are all either desirable to your masters or, if not desirable, irrelevant compared to the advantages austerity offers them.
These are, if not criminal acts, then unjust and evil acts, done to enrich a few at the expense of the many, with disregard for the consequences to the many, including death, hunger and violence.
One of the reasons I write so little these days, is that there is so little point. Basic ethical principles are routinely ignored even on the so-called left. Basic principles of causation are ignored. Basic economic reality is ignored. And virtually everyone in the so-called democracies is scrambling to pretend that they have no responsibility for anything that has happened.
If someone does something with forseeable consequences they are responsible for those forseeable consequences. Just because an act has bad forseeable consequences doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be taken, the alternatives may be worse, but whether the action should be taken or not, the decision has consequences.
I will, if I continue being irritated, deal at some point with the idea of alternate scenarios. Too often we pretend that there are only two options, say “bailing out bankers” or “doing nothing” and ignore that there were other possibilities, like “forcing bondholders and shareholders to take their losses, nationalizing the banks and breaking them up.”
As a society we have in the last few decades and are today making decisions with entirely forseeable consequences (as with climate change) that will kill a few hundred million people to well over a billion people. We know it will happen, and we’re doing it.
We are monsters. And we tolerate monsters. And we get worked up over exactly the wrong things, “ooh a single soldier was killed”, rather than what is going to kill the children we care about, like global warming, or the people who have or will kill hundreds of thousands, like George W Bush, or Putin or people who are engaging in ongoing serial murdering like Barack Obama. We ignore financial fraud, we ignore… well, why go on, the list is endless.
Forseeable consequences. We’re awash in them, and we don’t care.
