Treating systemic problems as moral failings ... is why California is on fire
Over the past decade or so as I try to make sense of the world, themes and patterns appearand suddenly start popping up all over the place.
Reading just now, moralising, or more specifically, moralising pathology, is a large part of why California is on fire:
Bernhard Eduard Fernow, a Prussian forestry official who married an American, came to the United States in 1876, and was soon naturalized. He headed the Bureau of Forestry, which was a small agency in the Department of Agriculture. When America’s National Forests were actually transferred to its jurisdiction, it was renamed the Forest Service and headed by Gifford Pinchot, an American who trained in forestry in Europe. But Fernow also brought with him his Central European convictions. The problem was that the place he grew up in is a temperate climate. It's very unusual in the world because it does not have wet and dry periods regularly. So, the only fires that occur in your part of the world are ones set by people. So, fire was seen as a social problem, a problem of social order and disorder. Fernow looked at the American fire scene and declared that it was all a problem of "bad habits and loose morals.” Well, that’s a great phrase. But it was totally inappropriate.
"California Is Built To Burn""
On Moralising Pathology
This piece showed up after discussing the problem earlier today with @John Hummel, on his post Meet the Customer Service Reps for Disney and Airbnb Who Have to Pay to Talk to You. In comments, John observes:
I view the Trump-followers as victims. Incredibly dangerous victims, but victims nonetheless.
This reads tomme as a rejection of moralising pathology, a practice which failed for infectious disease and physical medicine. It fails for mental health and psychiatry. I suspect it fails at social levels as well: crime, politics, economics, culture. Not that bad things don’t happen (they do: they’re pathologies). But that treating them as moral failings ... fails. Four thousand years of ethical medicine achieved little. Two hundred years of germ theory --- and most of that by the very early 20th century --- much. Public health measures account for about 85% of all longevity increase since 1850: solid waste disposal, sewage systems, clean water supplies, food purity laws, early vaccinations, and rudimentary safety practices. Antibiotics, imaging, organ transplants, cancer therapies, and other advanced treatments, comparatively little --- expensive ineffectuality is the great shame of modern medicine.
(Not to get lost in the weeds of another argument over efficacy and complexity of interventiions.)
John asked for clarification, wondering whether or not we were agreeing (we do), and adding:
On my perspective, the question of “morals”, as an objective/normative truth philosophers can discover, is a fiction. I think our “morals” – or moral intuitions – derive from the evolutionary constraints imposed upon us as a social species. Morals, in this way, are utterly unlike mathematical logic, about which “objective” truths can be proven.
The Moralising Error
So I responded in more length, hopefully clarifying more than obscuring.
Where disease, illness, injury, etc., were moralised, they were seen not only as God’s (or the gods’) will, but as their judgement. Bad things not only wouldn’t, but could not happen unless Divine Providence wished it so, and Providence is good, omnipotent, just, etc., etc.
Where we take an empirical, mechanistic, systems, holistic, probabalistic / stochastic, or comparable view, things happen due to some mixture of causal mechanisms and random chance. There are differences amongst these views, and I’m not claiming they’re all identical or even necessarily similar (though there are a set of broadly-shared dimensions). Rather, what they largely exclude is some sense of theological agency. A person gets sick because of a bacterium, or virus, or prion, or radiation-induced mutation, through transmission, propogation, susceptibility, hygiene, risk fsctors, etc. But not because they are a “bad person”.
The case of individual behaviour is harder to tease out, and the questions of agency and free will remain. (I’d argue more the former than the latter.) I’d argue that at the least, stastically over a population, it becomes likely that if a set of prior conditions are met, then a set of outcomes is highly likely. Modern theories of marketing, governance, and economics are predicated on this.
A question is whether or not there is even agency at the level of major influencing agents --- governments, firms, industries, institutions, and the sort. There are certainly stereotypical behaviours which arise again and again, enough so that suggestions of a controlling conspiracy seem highly implausible. A.H.M. Jones’s description of the political scene at the dawn of the Roman Empire in his 1970 biography Augustus remains the most poignant illustration of this I’m aware of. The platforms and constituencies of the optimates and populares could be ripped from today’s headlines.
This isn’t to say behaviours are fully deterministic. Though over longer timeframes they become more so.
What a scientific understanding, in the sense of structural and causal knowledge does is to provide insights as to mechanisms, linkages, relationships, and influences. The list of non-moralistic, non-mythical systems I gave above mostly forms a continuum of complexity. Mechanistic systems have few inputs and outputs, holistic ones evade simple description. Feedback, variation, inheritance, and selection are often present (the latter three give evolutionary systems).
Infectious disease made its breakthrough on the realisation that some infectious agent is transmitted via a vector to individuals exhibiting susceptibility within a population subject to therapies (there’s a great book coming out in the US this fall, The Rules of Contagion, by Adam Kucharski, addressing this). Each italicised term becomes a potential point of control and intervention. We can disrupt disease reservoirs, break chains of transmission, remove vectors, increase resistance (immunisation, nutrition, risk factors), provide supportive or immunological therapies (antibiotics, antivirals). Neither causes nor interventions are morally based.
Similar stories can be made for industrial hygiene, environmental regulation, weather forecasting, earthquakes, floods, climate, personal safety, or online security.
Or of mental health, group dynamics, corporate culture, religious movements, political shifts.
And, to a large extent, crime, racism, nationalism, and genocide.
Where the may be some remnant of the moral argument is in the question of immunity and impunity. A belief, well-founded or otherwise, that behaviour might be beyond sanction can reduce inhibitions. A punitive feedback may help remedy this, though bigger picture we’re back in the realm of systems and selection mechanisms. Disinhibition may come from many causes: structural cognitive defect, chemical, cultural, circumstantial, etc. It’s possible that isolation might be a reasonable intervention. It’s almost certainly not the only or mosteffective option in many circumstances.
But again: moralising seems more likely to impair effective intervention or mitigation
What role remains for morality?
The question of what roles remain for morality is a profound one that concerns me greatly.
I don’t have a good answer, though I’m inclined to say it might be in selecting and assessing values rather than in defining actions and persons.
And mind: I’m not sure that’s quite right though it seems a slight improvement. For pathology is the study of pathos, of suffering, of dis-function. Morality should apply to defining the dis, not in redressing the function.
#moralising #MoralisingPathology #ethics #morals #wildfire #systems #pathology
