Thread by @deontologistics

It's very hard to definitively determine which acts are evil, but I'm pretty sure that framing impossible demands ('damned if you do, damned if you don't') for no good reason is on the list. Nevertheless, I think we tend to underestimate just how easy it is to do this.

This is sometimes the result of vindictiveness, but it's more commonly the result of indifference: imposing a set of rules/norms with a blindspot you can maybe see, but simply don't care about, largely because you'll never be in the position to make that impossible choice.

I've been complaining about the ways this indifference manifests in bureaucratic systems for quite a while now (cf. deontologistics.co/2019/11/04/tfe…). But I think it's important to see how we can channel this indifference even when we don't have any special role in enforcing rules/norms.

I think this is nowhere more strikingly obvious, and thus more actively ignored, than on the social boundary between the homed and the homeless:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1356026420435316739?s=20

Virtually every demand we make upon the homeless, either as a purported condition of assimilation back into society, as a punishment conditioned by some infringement of said society's norms, or as gift conditional upon our own good graces, is constitutively impossible.

There are few things more representative of the evils of our society than police demanding a homeless person move on: 'Where?' there's no positive answer, only 'Not here'. It's not the policeman's job to find them a place to go. This particular buck stops nowhere.

I don't have anything else particularly enlightening to say about this, because there are no solutions to these evils that aren't conditional upon widespread systemic changes whose nature and possibility are highly non-trivial. The least we can do is not to ignore the issue.

Still, I think there are similar cases we have more control over. Cases where an implicit demand ('Do something!') is met by an inevitable clarificatory question ('But what?'), where the all too easy response ('You figure it out, that's not my job') could be usefully avoided.

Often, it really is our interlocutor's job to figure these things out, either because they claim some special social role (e.g., politician, police, manager, etc.), or because this is something we may expect of anyone who has the capacity (e.g., adult, educated, citizen, etc.).

But social sanctions that contain no corrective instructions, by default get interpreted as brute evaluations not of our actions, but of our character, or even more primitive features of our very existence: 'you ought not to be' packaged as 'you ought not to do'.

I think this is the underlying logic of claims made by marginalised groups who insist that their right to exist is infringed by the ways in which the demands made upon them are articulated: 'It's not your job to figure out how we can live' entails 'You're willing to let us die'.

Just in case anyone misreads me here: I'm saying this is a materially good inference in most cases you'd care to mention, and perhaps in more than you'd immediately recognise. The impossibilities of living are both more common and more varied than the actual deaths ever shows us.

If ethics is about anything, it's coping with these concrete impossibilities in ways that confront rather than ignore their ubiquitousness: looking at what we (individually) can't do, and asking what we (collectively) should do about it. This is never going to be easy.

But it's a task we can divide amongst ourselves, refusing to give any one person more than their fair share, in the awareness that, when the buck has nowhere else to go, it's up to us to pick it up and pass it on again, circulating moral responsibility in social solidarity.🖖