As Self-Immolations Approach 100, Some Tibetans Are Asking, Is It Worth
It?
It reads like a Monty Python skit -- You picture a chorus of
peasants bellowing in unison, “O yes, totally!” What renders it so darkly comical is that those who
actually paid the ultimate sacrifice are not available to be polled.
Yet let us dwell on this. We are reminded of the notorious remark by Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright during a 60 Minutes interview in 1996, in
answer to a question pointing to reports of half a million Iraqi children
having died as a result of U.S. sanctions (“that's more children than died in
Hiroshima”): She said: "We
think the price is worth it,"
and was roundly skewered for this. But the sly interviewer had put the words into her
mouth, by the formulation of her question (“Is the price worth it?”). The ‘question’ thus formulated is akin to that interrogatory classic,
“Have you stopped beating your wife?”
It is a paradox:
so stated, the defense of the Iraq sanctions seems heartless and
outrageous; yet this does not
entail that the policy itself was evil or misguided. (If you think it does, then you should be equally incensed
at our harsh sanctions against Iran, which have been in place for years, with
few people paying attention -- indeed, with the Republicans pretending that the
current administration has been negligently doing nothing.)
So what are we to make of this? There is a real issue here, beyond the matter of insidious
reporters and gormless headline-writers. The dilemma arises ever and everywhere, in political
life. A measure is proposed that
will advance the nation’s goals or benefit society as a whole -- but always, somebody’s ox is going to be gored. Every policy has its costs
and benefits, so that “Is it worth it?” is -- logically, and rhetoric aside --
perfectly valid. Yet the moment it
is framed in that way, if you support the policy, you seem unfeeling towards
the owner of the gored ox.
And if those gored fall into the class of Designated Tearjerkers, no
rational solution is democratically possible.
Thus, some rational policy questions would include the
following. To respond to
them publically is politically impossible; I feel sure I shall be accounted heartless, merely for
posing them (with no bias whatsoever as to possible answers):
Is it “worth it” to provide
millions in taxpayer-funded lifetime medical care for (i) a brain-dead patient;
(2) a homeless lunatic; (3) a
lifer in Federal prison; (4) your
unemployed or elderly neighbor next door. Who, relative to your own neighbors, might be you
yourself.
Is it “worth it” to require
extremely costly and time-consuming airport security for every flight, on the
off-chance that you might forestall a terrorist from blowing up the plane. (Consider two classes of cases: (i) You yourself are on that
plane. (ii) Donald Trump, your
boss, and your mother-in-law are on that plane; you yourself took the train.)
A woman wishes to abort her
fetus. Is it “worth it”?
The problem is, there is no accepted eudaemonic calculus ,
no characteristica universalis, that
-- even supposing that the public were uniformly so selfless as to bow to its
conclusions, whatever they might turn out to be -- no set of weighted values
that applies (“Calculemus!”) uniformly and across-the-board, to all (or even
any) such cases. The problem is a moral one, but
in some respects even an algebraic
problem.
Lexical footnote:
The antiseptic-technocratic equivalent of the demotic “Was
it worth it” is the notion of acceptable risk : generally calculated by those who are
not themselves in immediate danger.
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