Death comes to the Barefoot

I don’t always agree with the Barefoot Bum, but there are few philosophy bloggers whose writing is as lucid and uncompromising, and that’s something I can get with. In a response to some posts on communism by dbzero, he puts forward a possible defense of communism – or more specifically of the USSR and the PRC – that uses a balance sheet approach.

To what degree are the people who died under Stalin or Mao (especially Mao) offset by those that were saved? Compared to both societies before their revolutions, what was the improvement in material standards of living and medical care, both of which profoundly expect both life expectancy and quality of life?

While these questions are valid, this defense will not work well for one simple reason. While balance sheets do have a useful role in judging success and failure, but they are notoriously difficult to use when human lives are involved. This is not because human life is invaluable, but for precisely the opposite reason – because we do place a concrete value on individual human lives, even if we can’t articulate the precise amount of that value.

This can be seen in peoples’ responses to the death of a child versus the death of an old person; nearly everybody would agree that the loss of a child is the greater loss (including old people, of course). Balance sheets run into difficulties not because human lives are valuable, but because that sense of value is subjective. Nobody will agree on how much a human life should be valued at, partly because we’re afraid that this will expose our express belief that human life is invaluable (and therefore sacrosanct) as a sham. Nobody wants to be the first to shout the emperor has no clothes in this particular instance. (Possible exception: Peter Singer, who’s practically made a career out of it.)

How might we deal with this problem, especially in the company of people such Massimo Pigliucci’s repugnant dinner companions? Well, one could argue that any excess mortality in the service of political goals is unacceptable – but then that lands all of us in the same boat, and also overlooks the fact that heroic sacrifice for the fatherland / motherland / country of choice often makes such excess mortality voluntary (as well as being widely respected). Excess mortality alone makes for good headlines, but is not in and of itself a measure of culpability – which is presumably what we’re after in this case.

I propose that we must subdivide excess mortality into three distinct types. This will enable us to avoid comparing apples with oranges, although we may in fact find that the line between apple and orange is a little blurred. The three types are deliberate, incidental and accidental and I’ll explain the distinctions in my next blog post when I stop blogging about Batman R.I.P.