Here’s an excerpt from my book-in-progress, Poverty: Who To Blame.
After “Don’t blame the victim,” the second-most obvious maxim for blame is, “Only blame the perpetrators.” Precisely who, though, are the “perpetrators”? Another deep criticism of my approach is that I blame too narrowly. Instead of concentrating blame on specific wrong-doers, we should blame large swaths of society – or even whole countries. To my ears, this echoes a blood-curdling passage from Deuteronomy:
If you hear it said about one of the towns the Lord your God is giving you to live in that troublemakers have arisen among you and have led the people of their town astray, saying, “Let us go and worship other gods” (gods you have not known), then you must inquire, probe and investigate it thoroughly. And if it is true and it has been proved that this detestable thing has been done among you, you must certainly put to the sword all who live in that town. You must destroy it completely, both its people and its livestock.[i]
While most moderns would deny any affinity, the Deuteronomic mentality is alive and well. In wartime, citing an offending government’s actions to rationalize collective punishment of its citizens is the default. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, so the people of Japan have only themselves to blame when we firebomb Tokyo. Hamas won’t make peace with Israel, so the inhabitants of the Gaza strip have only themselves to blame for the ongoing blockade. Israel won’t leave the West Bank, so Israeli citizens have only themselves to blame for terrorist attacks. Even in peacetime, though, collective blame occasionally surfaces. Many wish to exclude immigrants because of the crimes of a handful of people from the same country or religion. And in recent years, collective blame for “structural” or “institutional” racism and sexism has become common in progressive spaces – especially college campuses. The core idea is that a white male can’t hold himself blameless for racism and sexism merely because he personally is neither racist nor sexist.
Can an idea with such broad appeal really be wrong? What is telling is that barely anyone endorses all or even most appeals to collective blame. Those who invoke it do so selectively. Indeed, they normally invoke it nepotistically; when my cause or my group suffers, we are entitled to blame loosely. Historian Stephen Roberts once quipped: “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” Similarly, I contend that those who insist that “We are all guilty” dismiss almost as many forms of collective blame as I do. I just dismiss their carve-outs too.
[i] Deuteronomy 13:12-15. These are odd injunctions even in the context of fanatical religious intolerance. At least some adults in an entire town would have remained true to Yahweh; and what about townsfolk too young (or too senile) to detect apostasy? Later books of the Bible take these questions to heart, firmly switching from collective to individual responsibility:
Yet you ask, “Why does the son not share the guilt of his father?” Since the son has done what is just and right and has been careful to keep all my decrees, he will surely live. The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them. (Ezekiel 18:19-20)
READER COMMENTS
Aaron Stewart
Feb 11 2021 at 10:34am
Devil’s advocate: Suppose you want want to start a mining company to harvest natural resources in, say, Montana. Extracting minerals from deep underground tends to have negative environmental consequences. Before the state will let you mine, you must also agree to pay to clean up those externalities after you’ve mined. When you work out the numbers, you find that little profit is left over after the environmental clean-up. So, what you do is start your company, agreeing to the terms, extract the resources, make money hand over fist, and then when it’s time to pay for clean-up, your company conveniently declares bankruptcy. You walk away filthy rich.
There’s an analogy to be made here with the idea of the son inheriting the guilt of the father. If (plausibly) a parent is working largely to maximize the well-being of their children or their children’s children, an injunction against inherited guilt is a powerful tool for laundering the fruits (wealth, status) of ethically questionable dealings. Think of death as a semi-permeable membrane through which wealth and status may pass, but not guilt. That’s easily gameable.
Mark Z
Feb 11 2021 at 12:27pm
Why wouldn’t confiscating the stolen or fraudulently obtained wealth adequately eliminate the incentive to do this? What would punishment add?
The analogy seems unlikely in real human behavior. One would have to time one’s ill gotten gains such that one dies soon enough after obtaining them that one doesn’t suffer personal punishment.
Mark
Feb 11 2021 at 2:19pm
I don’t think this is unrealistic. Suppose someone’s grandfather was a big slave trader and left tons of money to their father. That wealth could not have been confiscated because slavery was legal at the time. Their father then took that money and built a successful family trust fund by investing in legitimate companies and leaves it to them. Now that wealth can’t be confiscated because it’s commingled with legitimate gains. Is the person who inherits all this money guilty on some level for his grandfather’s slave trading? I’d argue at least a little bit yes—and that gives the person at least some moral obligation to benefit others with his wealth. And this fact pattern or something like it is probably true for a large number of Americans.
Mark Z
Feb 11 2021 at 4:43pm
Whether they’re guilty in some deontological (or virtue ethics) sense is different from whether it’s beneficial for society to punish them. I think the latter is more plausible than the former. In the former sense, I would say it’s impossible for someone to be guilty of something that is beyond their control (that includes the actions of your ancestors). If benefitting from an act confers moral responsibility for it, then couldn’t one just as easily argue that the descendants of slaves owe the descendants of slave owners, because if it weren’t for slavery, the descendants of slaves are better off than they would’ve been if slavery had never happened and they instead lived in west Africa? (I’d also add that moral culpability for a crime is distinct from responsibility for compensating the victims of a crime; it’s one thing to say the descendants of a bank robber should give back the money; it’s another, imo much more severe, thing to say they should be incarcerated for their ancestors’ bank robbery).
An analogy: in scenario 1, A is poorer than B because A’s parents were denied opportunities that B’s had access to (maybe even denied by B’s parents). In scenario 2, A is poorer than B because A’s parents were degenerate drunks and gamblers who left A with no opportunities, while B’s parents were responsible and took advantage of opportunities available because B’s parents were unwilling to exploit them. In scenario 1, is A any more obligated to compensate B for the difference in outcome than in scenario 2? I’m not so sure, because the circumstances that led to the difference in outcome are equally beyond the control of A and B in both scenarios. If B’s parents (the original victims) were still alive in scenario 1, they may have a claim on some of A’s property, but I don’t really buy that one is owed what one would otherwise have if one’s parents hadn’t been victimized any more than what one would have if some other circumstance beyond one’s control had been different. Afterall, one no more chooses to have parents who are responsible or degenerate than one chooses to have parents who are thieves or victims of thieves.
Mark Z
Feb 11 2021 at 4:46pm
Ugh, I mixed up the character’s in my own analogy. I should be asking, “is B more obligated to compensate A…” Hopefully the point is clear.
Aaron Stewart
Feb 11 2021 at 3:17pm
You’re taking my analogy too narrowly. The analogy mentions intentional acts (by clearly conniving people) that result in a very clear transfer of tangible and traceable wealth because that makes for a clear analogy. The problem itself is much broader.
Take the complaint “men didn’t let women vote for a long time”. How do you confiscate that? Sure, some men thought women are too dumb to vote. There were also men that thought women should be allowed to vote, but didn’t have the power to change that. Both groups of men (arguably) benefitted. Now we have people saying that because of that (among other things) women should be given explicit advantages like, for example, preference in hiring decisions.
My (devil’s advocate) argument hinges on the question: Is it implausible that those men (back then) might have behaved differently (e.g. apply more pressure earlier to give women the vote) if they knew that their sons or their sons’ sons would suffer for it?
The point is that if the game we’re playing has an absorbing barrier (bankruptcy in the one case, death in the other), the rules provided a (potential) advantage for players that don’t specifically avoid the behaviors that the absorbing barrier covers for. Whereas, without the absorbing barrier, if you want to avoid having your wealth/status confiscated (or being otherwise punished), you have to specifically avoid behaviors that might plausibly be viewed negatively at some future time.
My answer to the above question is: No, I don’t think it’s implausible that allowing for collective guilt could push people to behave better in many cases. </devil’s_advocate> The problem is that while allowing for collective guilt might close one loophole, it creates bigger problems than it solves, and is even more gameable.
Mark Z
Feb 11 2021 at 5:10pm
In order for them to behave differently, for incentives to work that way, they have to know what they’re doing is wrong when they’re doing it. ‘Don’t do bad things because your ancestors will be punished’ isn’t useful unless it’s clear what kind of behavior is good or bad, and the perpetrators of historical ‘social’ injustices didn’t believe they were doing something wrong, and so would not expect their descendants to be punished even if they expected collective punishment to be meted out.
And even if there are theoretical circumstances where collective punishment improves incentive structures, I think it’s unreasonable, after the original crime was committed by a previous generation, to expect members of the later generation to accept guilt for it. Decimating a regiment for mutiny may work, but I would not blame an innocent soldier in the unit at all for fighting his punishers every step of the way.
Landon Oakes
Feb 11 2021 at 7:09pm
Is the heir of the ill-gotten gains guilty? If he knows or has reason to know that his inheritance is tainted, he would be guilty for keeping a stolen gift. If he is personally guilty for keeping a stolen gift, the problem of collective guilt does not arise. But if he is not personally guilty, then he shouldn’t be blamed, even if blaming the innocent would have a great deterrent effect on future potential bad actors.
That said, I think your reply to the devil is also correct. I would just add that there should be a very strong presumption against placing blame where it does not belong. Even if blaming the innocent had a huge deterrent effect and no significant side effects, blaming innocent people is intrinsically bad and shouldn’t be done.
zeke5123
Feb 11 2021 at 3:59pm
One response to your hypothetical is: Let’s assume your bad actor’s last name was Stewart. The Montana authorities authorities don’t really know who the bad actor’s kids are so they decide to confiscate wealth from everyone with the last name Stewart in Montana. Is that just?
A second response — your example actually isn’t what happened with say slavery. Often, the legal government (i.e., Montana) tells the person that environmental clean up is in fact not needed. Over time, it starts to become obvious that failing to perform the environmental clean up is considered wrong. Should we then go back and take wealth from the miner’s great grandkids to pay for the environmental harm that was permitted at the time? Indeed, the great grandkids may not have even benefited from the wealth in any meaningful sense. Would you still impose the cost?
I think the reason why in the second case is we understand that we need some degree of stability. To steal from Tom Sowell, it would be great if we could know all and adjust the scales like God at judgement day, but God doesn’t have to worry about the impact the day after judgement day. Another point is that we are not God — it is really hard to tease out today who (and how much) benefited from slavery in the 1800s. Indeed, it isn’t obvious who today was harmed by slave (besides the fact that absent slavery the world is likely richer).
AMT
Feb 11 2021 at 12:20pm
Aaron Stewart makes a very good point above. I also love the Stephen Roberts quote.
TL/DR: There is an alternative moral argument against inaction/indifference, which can argue for the same actions as collective guilt.
…
I’ll just add that one of the objections you will need to counter is the “if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” idea. Basically people say we need to go out of our way to actively reduce racism/sexism, rather than be indifferent. Now I don’t think that being indifferent is enough to justify an accusation of racism or sexism, but there is still a strong moral argument against total inaction/indifference.
E.g. you have no legal obligation to stop at the side of a highway to pick up someone screaming for help, running from an axe-wielding maniac chasing them 200 yards away, but I think morally you do. If you don’t, you’re not a murderer, or necessarily complicit in the murder, but especially if there is basically zero risk or inconvenience to you versus the benefits to the person you save, you’d be a monster if you just looked the other way. So you can view it purely in terms of justice rather than collective guilt.
It will of course get extremely complicated and difficult to determine just how far people ought to go out of their way in all the various circumstances of life to actively reduce racism or sexism, but I can see a strong moral argument for something above zero, at least in some situations. (Yes, I’ll be very conservative here. And maybe it’s practically impossible to come up with many real-world concrete examples or rules, I don’t know.) So, we can’t call someone racist or sexist simply for being indifferent, but they could still be morally corrupt in some situations.
I don’t think that these groups using the argument selectively and dismissing other forms of collective blame really does much to disprove this moral argument, because it’s not exactly “collective blame” (I would just say “morality,” or maybe utilitarianism, but I’m not a philosopher), though I agree some people conflate them. Plus, people being inconsistent in the application of an argument doesn’t necessarily make it wrong. When an alcoholic parent admonishes their children not to drink to excess, I would say their hypocrisy makes their advice correct, and their actions incorrect.
Mark Z
Feb 11 2021 at 5:38pm
“if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” seems orthogonal to collective guilt, unless the obligation to be “part of the solution” is specific to certain groups because of crimes “they” committed, but then that moral asymmetry would still need to be explained. I’d add that the selective use of the “if you’re not part of the problem…” argument is often reflective of an underlying assumption of collective guilt, in that it’s mostly asserted we have to be ‘part of the solution’ to alleged injustices committed by some group against another group, but rarely to help people in ways that don’t fall along salient group lines (e.g., I never hear ‘what have you done to fight malaria/cancer/drunk driving today’). I don’t think a coherent application of the principle of positive moral responsibilities need look anything like collective guilt.
BC
Feb 11 2021 at 1:03pm
The popularity of collective guilt seems to be another example of concentrated vs. disperse benefits and costs. For example, if one tries to blame a specific person for a specific incidence of racism, then that person will have a concentrated interest in defending himself, e.g., he will try very hard to show that he was not racist in the incident in question. That results in a high burden of proof. Indeed, it’s very hard to prove specific incidents of racism nowadays, say in any specific hiring, promotion, or college admissions decision, and (most) people are reluctant to accuse individuals of racism in specific incidents without strong evidence. On the other hand, blame for “systemic” racism is dispersed among many people, no one of which is truly held personally responsible. Then, such collective guilt claims face a lower burden of proof, are more readily accepted and, hence, more easily asserted. Collective guilt accusations aren’t personal.
Thomas Hutcheson
Feb 11 2021 at 1:13pm
Models in which collective “guilt” appy seem very straightforwardly useful. Take housing segregation that results from just an epsilon of possibly unconscious distaste for living near a minority person occurring in each transaction. If we correctly understand that “everybody” is guilty rather than look for evil bankers or real estate agents or easily identified racists/homophobes/xenophobes, etc., we will have a better chance of finding how to correct the problem.
nobody.really
Feb 11 2021 at 2:06pm
What if we view blame not as an explanatory variable, but as a tool of implementation?
Let’s apply some economics here–analyzing incentives. Perhaps people identify the policy they wish to see implemented, and then identify strategies for implementing that policy. Mostly these policies involve creating incentives for doing things that the group wants, and avoiding the things that the group does not want.
If I’m an Israeli prime minister, I want Palestinians to stop killing Israelis. I doubt I will be able to identify the specific individuals involved, or capture them if I do. So I create a policy of group punishment.
Maybe I’m a general in the army of Rome or Genghis Kahn. I want to stop desertions in the ranks–and I haven’t found a way to do so. So instead I adopt a policy that if I find that anyone has deserted, I will execute one tenth of all the remaining soldiers in that unit.
Maybe I’m a Chinese official. I want emigrants to stop saying nasty things about life in China. So when Chinese emigrants say nasty things, I punish their family members back in China.
To justify this action, I “blame” those I punish for being complicit in the unwanted behavior. But if you imagine that the blame explains the punishment, you really miss the point. The point is social control; blame is the after-the-fact rationalization.
John Alcorn
Feb 11 2021 at 10:13pm
Collective punishment for individual wrongdoings can be intra-temporal (contemporaneous) — punishing current Xs when an X commits a wrong — or inter-temporal (inter-generational) — punishing future Xs after an X commits a wrong.
Collective punishment cuts several ways. Let me mention three:
1) Collective punishment reduces the incentive of every X to refrain from wrongdoing. The probability that an X will incur punishment depends largely on whether other Xs commit wrongs.
2) Collective punishment gives an incentive to every X to prevent other Xs from engaging in wrongdoing.
3) Collective punishment kindles righteous indignation against authorities. It makes innocent Xs resent authorities who mete out collective punishment. Resentment reduces compliance with authorities and increases solidarity among Xs.
The distinction between contemporaneous collective punishment and inter-generational collective punishment has implications for incentives. Collective punishment of future Xs can shape behavior of present Xs if and only if present Xs (a) believe that future Xs will be punished for behaviors by present Xs and (b) wish to protect future Xs. We may also wonder: Does contemporaneous collective punishment kindle greater resentment than does inter-generational collective punishment?
Jens
Feb 12 2021 at 4:04am
Two basic remarks:
There is a difference between being killed and having to pay. (In a few exceptional cases this might not be the case, but i ignore that in the best Caplaneske common sense).
Personal guilt and a rule of laws property regime are two different things. In many legal systems there is no need for personal guilt (on the side of the enriched person) in order to be able to sue for unjust enrichment (I did not come up with the term, goes back to roman law). I don’t mean to say that reparations fall under unjust enrichment. I just would like to point out analogously that the element of “personal guilt” is not necessary for unjust enrichment. Unjust enrichment often has something to do with the fact that a formal legal transaction that transfers an asset – almost in the sense of an illocutionary act – is formally sseparated from another legal obligation, which is the actual reason for the transfer of this asset. If the latter transaction becomes invalid, the question arises what happens to the former. No need for personal guilt.
Phil H
Feb 12 2021 at 6:23am
There are some fairly widely-accepted forms of collective guilt.
Membership of an illegal organization. In the USA, that would normally be a gang, or a known crime syndicate.
Corporate crimes. In the UK, the crime of corporate murder exists, and executives can go to prison for it.
Duty-of-care relationships. If you’re a doctor in a hospital that fails in its duty of care to a patient, you can be punished for it (civilly rather than criminally).
War crimes.
I mean, I think BC’s argument is mostly quite good, that real badness should be established before blame is assigned. But collective guilt isn’t a no-no. It just needs to be thought through more carefully. As do most things!
Thomas Hutcheson
Feb 12 2021 at 7:03am
In some models “collective guilt” makes a lot of sense. Take the model of housing segregation in which each transactor has a epsilon of preference for living next to someone from his own group. Depending on specification this can lead to total segregation. If we think the outcome is bad then “everyone” is collectively guilty. If instead we insist in finding individual guilty parties – evil bankers, racist real estate agent, or government-imposed redlining — we will be less likely to find a better outcome.
Radford Neal
Feb 12 2021 at 11:38am
You example isn’t working for me…
“each transactor has a epsilon of preference for living next to someone from his own group” … “If we think the outcome is bad” …
Why would we think this outcome is bad if it is in accord with everyone’s preferences?
I think historical instances of housing segregation that we think are bad have additional characteristics – like one group having appropriated all the good land.
Andrew_FL
Feb 13 2021 at 10:41am
The idea that the citizens are morally responsible for the actions of their government is simply the logical extension of Democracy. If the people choose policy, then the people are morally responsible for it.
Frank
Feb 14 2021 at 8:55pm
All people, or a mere majority, if that?
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