Ethical Responsibility and the Flu

I heard a debate on CBC's The Current this morning about the amount of money western countries are spending on preparation for the H1N1 virus. Some fellow has called it an "epidemic of indecency" to spend billions on a relatively mild virus while millions around the world are dying of malaria, TB and other diseases.

This is one of those cases where rational reasoning talks its way around to absurdity. We have to be able to hold to our own interest: first myself, then my family, then my circle of friends, then my community, my country, my country's allies. A flood in my town that kills two people is more important to me than a flood in China that kills a thousand people. It has to be that way: we each have to take care of our own, look out for our own, before we can reach out further.

To suggest that I should be more worried about children in Africa than about my own child is simply not on. Yes, I know that children in Africa are much more in need than children in Canada, but it is my right and my responsibility to put my own first. We applaud Bill Gates for providing aid to people in need around the world, but we would also rightly condemn him if he neglected his own children.

In this case, there is a lot more riding on the preparations for H1N1 than just the fatality rate. The world has not yet come out of a global financial crisis and recession, and H1N1 could destroy our recovery - whether or not a single person dies. Even in its current "mild" form, H1N1 makes people very ill for a week or two. Look at the transmission rates in Australia and New Zealand during their flu season last year. Look at the transmission rates on US college campuses this fall. Now imagine your company: what would happen if 50% or more of employees, suppliers, and service workers were too ill to work for two weeks? Even if they weren't sick, parents would have to stay home if their kids were. What if schools closed, transit was curtailed (due to sick drivers), grocery stores went unstocked, banks shut down, we had electricity brown-outs? That's not even mentioning chaos at doctor's offices and hospitals, where staff unavailability could threaten people who require care for other sorts of ailments. And it's not taking into account the very real threat that the virus will mutate and become more dangerous.

It's not "indecent" for our government to spend a lot of money preparing for this year's flu season: it would be indecent if they didn't.

I am reminded of a small section of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird: a church group in the small southern town is collecting money for people in Africa while showing no concern for persecuted African-Americans in their own community. The reader's instincive response should be that it's appalling and hypocritical that they care for people far away more than for their neighbors.

Other than the ethical issues, there is a practical problem with caring more for the far-flung than the local: help is much more effective when applied locally. Parents have to be the ones to take responsibility for their children, and governments have to take care of their citizens. It seems absurd even to have to argue this point, but I increasingly run into arguments that deny the primal importance of the personal and local, and attempt to assign a universal guilt because of the mountain of suffering elsewhere in the world. Part of this line of reasoning is the fallacy that our own problems are somehow invalid because other people have bigger problems.

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Is Morality Too Relativistic?

Back when the first Lord of the Rings movie came out I was talking to a friend about the books and I mentioned that my favorite character had always been Sam. My friend was somewhat taken aback by that and said that Sam was the only thing he didn't like about the books, to the point that Sam's character almost spoiled the books for him. He was bothered by the fact that Sam was presented as a low-class person who voluntarily served as Frodo's servant, called him Master, and so on.

My friend is British, and it dawned on me that during his childhood 40-odd years ago, classism was a big problem that had probably left him sensitive to that form of discrimination - while during my childhood in the US and Canada in the same time period, I became most sensitive to the issues of racism and sexism. Does that mean there was no class discrimination in North America? - Certainly not, but even though there is all kinds of evidence that poverty is self-perpetuating, North Americans still don't talk much about class discrimination.

Likewise, while there's mainstream agreement that racism is an abuse of human rights, my sensitivity to sexism is something that few people seem to share. When I blogged about sexism facing the Hillary Clinton campaign last year, commenters were borderline abusive. One fellow blogger who I generally agree with wrote that I was making a fool of myself by repeatedly writing about sexism. Most denied that there is any serious sexism at all, and some even felt that it's men who are widely discriminated against. It's one thing to disagree with someone and it's another thing to tell them that their sense of right and wrong is invalid, silly and overblown. It seems that others see my moral sense as a pet peeve.

When I lived in Africa I had an eyewitness view of one culture trying to impose a moral code on another. Many Africans were unimpressed - simply because we were so inconsistent. There were massive campaigns to get Africans to wear condoms to slow the spread of AIDS - with all sorts of funding and advertisements; there were other massive campaigns (by Roman Catholics) telling them that they'd go to hell if they used condoms. Many Africans told me that they refused to take the issue of condoms seriously because of the conflicting messages.

Africans I met were also plenty angry about whites moralizing about human rights. As they explained it, not long ago the colonial powers flogged wrong-doers and used capital punishment; now they've changed their minds and decided that both are human rights abuses. If we can change our minds so quickly about weighty moral issues, we cannot expect others to take our sense of right and wrong seriously.

These days, in western cultures, moral issues seem to mostly be about social control. A "good" person is one who is unselfish, generous, helpful, honest, law-abiding, and so on. It doesn't have to be like that. A good person could be someone who is self-reflective, fully realized, creative, open to new ideas. Instead of "do no harm," our preiminent moral imperative could be "know thyself." Social rules could be something that we have to follow because we live together, but that are pragmatic rather than moral issues. In other words, we wouldn't have to teach our kids to feel shame at their natural urges to be selfish or unkind. We could instead instill a deep inner drive to express their souls.

I'm not arguing that we should do that; I'm just trying to create a convincing alternative to our current moral sense. There could be many others. I'm an atheist and not a fan of religion, and I don't see that there's any reason to adopt Christian morality when you don't accept Christian dogma. It would be interesting to learn to drop the shame we learned as children (also known as internalized morality) and to adopt a more rational moral sense.

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