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Distant rains fall on deaf ears here

By Mirko Bagaric - posted Wednesday, 19 January 2011


That's the clear message to emerge from the many (volunteer) willing hands and open wallets in response to the Queensland floods, in contrast to the indifference displayed towards the much graver flood in Brazil.

Nearly 600 people died in the Brazil floods which occurred at about the same time as Queensland was being washed out. By any measure, the Brazil floods were far worse than those in Queensland.

The people of both regions need and deserve assistance. Yet while the generosity of Australians has been overwhelming towards the Queensland flood victims, our response to the Brazil disaster has been mute.

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The contrast in the care factor towards the respective victims undermines a central plank of moral thinking and highlights key aspects of the human condition.

Lots of moral theories have done the rounds of universities over the past 2000 years. Yet they are all built on the bedrock that people are equal and entitled to identical amounts of concern and respect. The location in which a person is born or lives is merely a historical accident and morally irrelevant. There is supposedly no role for luck or selective compassion in our moral choices.

The reality is different. The crucial issue that ethicists in generations to come will continue to ask is how is it that the radar of moral concern of most people as individuals and collectively in the form of governments remains so spectacularly successful at ignoring the desperate pleas from people in distant places.

There are three fundamental failings that are imbedded in the moral thinking. The first is the doorstep phenomenon, which recognises that proximate suffering matters more to us than anonymous, distant suffering.

The occasional fleeting glimpse of desperate people in far off, normally developing, countries on the evening news typically evokes some sense of sympathy or guilt. Unfortunately we are too good at escaping these feelings. Morally, we need to be conditioned to hold on to them. The extent of another's suffering is not measured by our capacity to directly sense it, neither is the scope of our moral duties.

The generosity displayed by our response to the massive South Asia tsunami six years ago was a striking and welcome departure from our normal level of disinterest towards desperate foreigners. This, however, only serves to highlight the reality of the doorstep principle. Our wallets were forced open by the media bombardment of the tsunami that pushed the tragedy into our living rooms. They closed once the media focused on more "important" matters: cricket, local politics and Britney.

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The second basis upon which much of us (impliedly) deflect responsibility for preventable deaths and abject misery in other parts of the world is the acts and omissions doctrine. This is the principle that we are liable for only the consequences that we directly bring about, rather than the tragedies we fail to prevent.

This doctrine is unsound. While morality makes very few positive demands of us, there are occasions when acting morally requires us to do more than merely refraining from certain behaviour; there are times when we must actually do something.

Morality, defined exhaustively as a set of negative prohibitions, fails to explain why it would be morally repugnant not to save a child drowning in a puddle in order to avoid wetting our shoes.

The circumstances in which we are liable for our omissions are in fact demarcated by the maxim of positive duty, which says we must assist others in serious trouble, when assistance would immensely help them at minimal inconvenience to ourselves.

Our non-neighbours are included in this principle by virtue of the fact that there is no basis for ranking the interests of one person higher than another. An argument along the lines that "I am more important than you" is inherently discriminatory and morally vacuous.

The last reason is the most fundamental. Contemporary moral discourse is framed in the language of rights. We like rights. They are individualising claims and seem to give us a protective sphere. But rights are nonsense. They are an illustration of the fact that as a species we seem to be more greedy than smart or kind.

Despite the dazzling veneer of rights-based theories and their influence on present day moral and legal discourse, such theories cannot provide persuasive answers to central issues such as: What is the justification for rights? How can we distinguish real from fanciful rights? Which right takes priority in the event of conflicting rights? Such intractable difficulties stem from the fact that contemporary rights theories lack a coherent foundation.

Rights appeal to those who have a "me, me, me" approach to life. Hence, we just make up rights as we go along and give priority to whatever right happens to coincide with our self-interest.

The emptiness and absurdity of rights-based theories is highlighted by the fact that against this backdrop we have convinced ourselves that our right to keep our excess food outweighs the right to life of people in the developing world, who are dying daily in their thousands of malnutrition. It is only once we erase this indecent belief that world poverty will be history.

This can only occur if we abandon the notion of rights as the mainstay of moral discourse and make consequences the main moral building blocks. What matters most is maximising flourishing, not adding to the ever increasing catalogue of rights, that can only be enjoyed by many at the conversation level.

It is only once we abandon the doorstep phenomenon and the immorality of rights and adopt the maxim of positive duty that we will move towards a fairer world. But history suggests the human species can never do this.

Our wiring is too rigid, meaning that in the end we really only care about ourselves and those around us. If that's the case we need to accept that we are far less compassionate and principled than most of us believe.

We are probably incapable of universal compassion. In the end, we are a self-interested species which dishes out the occasional dose of compassion when it suits or when the media gives us the signal.

Still there is a message to be learned, other than to stop reading morality books; next time you want to move someone, try to make them feel sorry for you, don't bother trying to appeal to their sense of fairness.

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First published in The Australian on January 18, 2011.



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About the Author

Mirko Bagaric, BA LLB(Hons) LLM PhD (Monash), is a Croatian born Australian based author and lawyer who writes on law and moral and political philosophy. He is dean of law at Swinburne University and author of Australian Human Rights Law.

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