The morality of misfortune
Assigning moral blame to misfortune is evil
(This one isn’t AI. I’ll do another that is. This was just on my mind).
There are many ways to view the world, so this isn’t really a complete survey of politics and philosophy. But it seems to me that there are two main camps of the world, that can roughly be described by how misfortune is interpreted morally. Let me explain.
One school of thought holds that the world is full of chance, and that understanding outcomes has a lot to do with context. In this perspective, if you’re poor (say), that has as much to do with the luck of your birth, genetics, social and political environment, etc. You can’t be judged for these things, they were beyond your control: there is no moral dimension to them, just bad luck.
The other school of thought holds that these things are somehow moral judgements - that if you have a bad outcome, you are inherently a bad person who deserves it. This is easier or harder to see depending on where you look in someone’s life - it’s hard to blame a baby for being born poor, but easier to ignore the earlier deprivation in someone’s life that leads them to bad decisions and poverty later. There’s a continuum, and our old friend dimensional reduction, so the arguments get very sticky. Yay, politics.
But one thing that did occur to me, regardless of where you land on this spectrum. To the degree that you believe that bad things happen to people because the “deserve” them, you are at peril of reversing the arrow. You can do something bad to someone else, because, if they weren’t a bad person who deserved it, you wouldn’t be able to do that bad thing to them. Bullying and oppression become self-justifying. If they succeed, the harmed person is “loser” who “deserves” it - you don’t have to feel any regret for hurting another human being, they are labelled bad by some supernatural or other mechanism, so it’s “ok”.
To me (personally), that means we have to be extremely careful when we assign blame to outcomes. This can get taken too far in the other direction, too! You can decide that everything is context and randomness, and so therefore no one has responsibility for anything. I don’t believe that. At some point we are responsible for what we do with what we’ve been dealt. When that happens is the canonical hard question of politics and civic life - when do we have compassion for circumstance and help, and when do we hold people responsible regardless. I don’t have an answer for that.
So what was the point of this letter? I think we all fall into the habit of assigning blame to outcome - that homeless person must deserve it, people with bad health outcomes must be weak, you must have done something dumb to get that cancer. I guess this is just a reminder that assigning that blame is a very dangerous thing that can also change us - if we’re not careful, we become self-justifying bullies, random and harmful context ourselves.
I was taught to judge the quality of a decision based on the state of information available before the commitment, time, effort, and other resources. I view a decision as the irrevocable commitment of resources and don't view decisions as "reversible" in that all come with a cost. Was the outcome reasonably foreseeable, and was the harm intended, not considered, or part of an effort to stabilize or reverse a dangerous or deteriorating situation?
Challenges remain: how do you help people who are making decisions without regard to the long-term consequences? How do you ensure that the help you provide will actually improve the situation? How do you respect their agency and free will?
I think meditation helps detect self-deception. It enables me to realize how I contribute to my own problems and make life harder for others. One prayer I have found helpful is "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." It reminds me that we are all made from crooked timber
Ego is also a huge part of the equation. When someone else experiences misfortune, thinking they "deserved" it makes us feel better about ourselves, that our superiority allowed us to escape that fate. But when we experience misfortune, we're more likely to blame it on bad luck to soothe our ego.
Overvaluing luck is very risky because it can lead to a defeatist mindset. Most people underestimate how much power they have over their own lives and overestimate how much power other people have — primarily politicians.