Monday, March 31, 2003

Responsibility and War. Summary: Wars are the result of collective laziness and irresponsibility.  To stop war, stop being irresponsible. Responsibility Life is about making choices.  The choices we make every day can build up to have tremendous long-term impact on others.  Suppose that before embarking on his research, Alexander Fleming had decided that a career in research was too difficult.  Or suppose that he had decided early on to retire when faced with a personal tragedy.  If Fleming had not discovered Penicillin, how many millions of people would have suffered and died before someone else eventually made the discovery?  Fleming is a great example, because his contribution to mankind was "accidental" in many respects.  Most of life's choices are made in the context of conditions over which the individual has no control.  There are countless factors which can't be changed or chosen, but that does not diminish the importance of making good choices in those areas which the individual does have a choice.  If Fleming had ever decided to quit, he wouldn't have known the tremendous potential that he was throwing away - his discovery was "accidental", after all, so there is no way he could have predicted that his work would lead to such fantastic results.  Yet the fact that his decisions were made without knowledge of their consequence does not in any way diminish the awesome societal consequence that those decisions ultimately had. For every Alexander Fleming who resists the urge to give up, there are many potential contributors who take the easy way, and never unlock fate's rewards.  Look at it another way: Fleming's work saved millions of lives, but he undoubtedly suffered the occasional discouragement and poor decions that we all do.  Perhaps he might have discovered a cure for heart disease if he had been able to overcome his occasional discouragements and give just 1% more.  Perhaps an extra 1% of effort on his part could have saved millions more lives.  Unlikely of course, but so was penicillin, and since it didn't happen we will never know. Now, any intelligent reader will be able to retort "if he had put in an extra 1%, he might just as likely have caused an accidental epidemic that killed millions of people, so his laziness was very ethical" or "if he had taken up kites, maybe he would have discovered something that saved more lives than penicillin, so his venture into research may have been a net loss for humanity"  This is all true: since my entire argument rests on hypotheticals, we can never really know whether it is correct or not.  But to say that this absolves individuals of all responsibility for their choices is to say that all choices are fundamentally equal.  This might make an interesting position for sophomoric argument, but humans know that some choices are better than others.  We don't always know which choice is better, and sometimes one is no better than another, but we undeniably have the capacity to judge.  Ever since we ate from the tree, we have known that some decisions are better than others. War War is senseless.  War labels people, puts borders between people, and turns brother against brother.  But wars happen.  And when people go to war, they don't do so out of laziness or "shirking duty", but quite deliberately.  Individuals fight because they believe it is the "right thing to do", perhaps with deeper conviction than any other decision that occurs in human endeavor.  This is important, because it demonstrates how hopeless it is to try reasoning with parties who have come to the point of war.  When the situation has reached the brink of war, it is evidence that many people have already decided that fighting is the moral thing to do from their individual perspectives. On the other hand, every war is precipitated by a long sequence of missed opportunites and individual failures for which all humans share responsibility.  War is the terminal result of a long, steady slide toward an increasingly zero-sum situation where individual survival can only be guaranteed by ensuring someone else's destruction.  By the time societies begin to consider conflict openly, the situation has already deteriorated and the slide is gaining momentum.  Changing people's attitudes at the brink of war involves challenging and redirecting their deepest values, while prompting people to behave like Fleming involves only combating their inaction and spurring them to pursue values that they already hold.  Which do you think is a more responsible use of your energy? The more that we all behave like Fleming, the better we avoid ending up in the place where wars happen.  In my opinion, that's the best we can hope to accomplish, and is therefore the only practical anti-war strategy. [Better Living Through Software] 11:59:24 AM    trackback []     Articulate []