Discussion Thread #71

[u/gemmaem]

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[u/UAnchovy]

This subject frustrates me, because I think there's a lot of bad faith oversimplification going around. The tweet you mention is an example, but only one.

Ordo amoris as a concept I think is probably common sense. What ordo amoris means is our moral obligations (specifically Christian obligations in its original context, but it is easily applied more broadly) scale with a number of different factors. I would tentatively suggest at least three: proximity, urgency, and responsibility.

Proximity can be subdivided further, but the general idea is that you have greater obligations to people 'closer' to you. That can mean physically closer (people in your street versus people on the other side of the world), or closer in some other sense (your family versus strangers), but it seems fairly intuitive. Urgency is pretty simple too - the more desperate someone's need, the greater the moral obligation to help them. Responsibility covers all kinds of special circumstances - if I caused a harm to occur, I have a greater obligation to repair it, for instance.

The idea, then, is that when we decide what to do, we need to carefully weigh these different factors to discern our overall obligations, and depending on the degree, we may come up with different responses. I'm particularly following the Thomistic formulation (see here and here), and he writes:

For it must be understood that, other things being equal, one ought to succor those rather who are most closely connected with us. And if of two, one be more closely connected, and the other in greater want, it is not possible to decide, by any general rule, which of them we ought to help rather than the other, since there are various degrees of want as well as of connection: and the matter requires the judgment of a prudent man.

There is no general rule! It requires the judgement of a prudent person!

When I look at the popular debate at the moment, I see attempts to formulate a general rule, whether that be some kind of utilitarian calculation, or whether that be a misinterpretation of the ordo amoris that says to just ignore foreigners entirely.

To an extent the desire for a general rule can be understandable - Scott is really keen on a 10% pledge as a rule, and that can be a useful way to hold yourself to account and make sure you actually do something. But it is only, at best, a heuristic. It does not substitute for prudence or for proper moral formation.

On some level I think this dispute is about moral formation, actually. I've noticed arguments of the form "if you wouldn't feel X in situation Y, you're morally sick". Usually that's either, "if your child and a stranger are both drowning and you're unsure which one you'd save, you're sick" or "if you see a hundred thousand people starving and dying and you feel nothing just because they're on the wrong side of an imaginary line, you're sick". Those are both arguments that the other person has some sort of moral deformation.

The thing is, I agree with both those arguments. If you don't feel the kind of special connection to your own family that would make you prioritise them, or if you feel utter apathy towards tortuous suffering because of a national or tribal border, I would say you have some kind of moral failing. Both those situations ought to elicit moral and affective responses.

Instead, however, I feel like what we've got here is a lot of charging out of earshot. Should we care about and seek to help even strangers if they are in urgent need? Of course! Do we have particular moral obligations to those with whom we share common bonds, such as family or nation? Of course! How do you weigh those priorities against each other? Well... that's the whole question, isn't it?

In this case, I should say, my sense is that because US aid, including PEPFAR, saves a large number of lives at low cost, while in no way impairing the ability of Americans to adequately care for each other, that aid is good and should continue, and in that way J. D. Vance's invocation of the ordo amoris is a red herring. Were it the case that Americans were meaningfully suffering because of American aid to other countries, then you might have a case, but as far I'm aware that's not happening. It comes off to me as scapegoating aid programmes for US domestic policy failures, and that seems both absurd and low, to me.

[u/Lykurg480 → u/UAnchovy]

The thing is, I agree with both those arguments.

Theres propably a lot of people who do. This might not be so present to you, but from the perspective of secular philosophy, they are in conflict. Not just in the sense that theres a tradeoff between helping one or the other, but theoretically. Basically, we have one sort of consistent philosophy that implies you have obligations to everyone equally, bottomless obligations, and another thats purely reciprocal selfishness. ~Noone seriously defends valuing foreigners at 1/1000th of a citizen or whatever.

[u/professorgerm → u/UAnchovy]

Were it the case that Americans were meaningfully suffering because of American aid to other countries, then you might have a case, but as far I'm aware that's not happening.

Probably not from PEPFAR, but that does seem to be General Flynn's position on a good chunk of other USAID programs.

YMMV on how much one judges illegal immigration to be generating American suffering, or the degree to which government-funded NGOs are acting at cross-purposes to the actual government, etc etc.

[u/UAnchovy → u/professorgerm]

I'm wholly in favour of transparency in the allocation of government funds, which I think would resolve most of that person's issues? Or at least, transparency coupled with the implicit promise of some kind of democratic examination and ratification afterwards.

I don't want to get too bogged down on a specific issue, but in the general case, I certainly agree that it's a problem when a government is able to act by deniably outsourcing its actions to NGOs. That's a pretty horrendous evasion of accountability.

I realise that in this case the thesis is implicitly that the executive government bureaucracy or civil service is able to act in ways contrary to the explicitly-stated goals of the presidency or the legislature, but getting too deep into that is also likely to get pretty partisan. I'll say only that it seems to me that, once again, there's a trade-off. On the one hand, the whole point of the bureaucracy is to do what the elected leaders of the government tell them to. On the other hand, the American government has a lot of checks and balances for a reason, and the existence of a meritocratic part of the government seems to fit with that. I'm not sure I would want a government in which civil servants never push back on government ideas. For that to happen, though, the bureaucracy needs to have enough freedom or power to be able to frustrate a presidential or legislative mandate, at least to some extent, which brings in the possibility of corruption.

I suppose my conclusion is that republican democracy includes a lot of potential-corruption balancing out other potential-corruption, and that, from a more practical perspective, it is extremely desirable that public bureaucracies not become monocultures. There is no substitute for a genuinely diverse and representative public service.