Socratic Form Microscopy

Second Order Effects of Unjust Policies

by Zach Jacobi in Ethics, Philosophy, Quick Fix

In some parts of the Brazilian Amazon, indigenous groups still practice infanticide. Children are killed for being disabled, for being twins, or for being born to single mothers. This is undoubtedly a piece of cultural technology that existed to optimize resource distribution under harsh conditions.

Infanticide can be legally practiced because these tribes aren’t bound by Brazilian law. Under legislation, indigenous tribes are bound by the laws in proportion to how much they interact with the state. Remote Amazonian groups have a waiver from all Brazilian laws.

Reformers, led mostly by disabled indigenous people who’ve escaped infanticide and evangelicals, are trying to change this. They are pushing for a law that will outlaw infanticide, register pregnancies and birth outcomes, and punish people who don’t report infanticide.

Now I know that I have in the past written about using the outside view in cases like these. Historically, outsiders deciding they know what is best for indigenous people has not ended particularly well. In general, this argues for avoiding meddling in cases like this. Despite that, if I lived in Brazil, I would support this law.

When thinking about public policies, it’s important to think about the precedents they set. Opposing a policy like this, even when you have very good reasons, sends a message to the vast majority of the population, a population that views infanticide as wrong (and not just wrong, but a special evil). It says: “we don’t care about what is right or wrong, we’re moral relativists who think anything goes if it’s someone’s culture.”

There are several things to unpack here. First, there are the direct effects on the credibility of the people defending infanticide. When you’re advocating for something that most people view as clearly wrong, something so beyond the pale that you have no realistic chance of ever convincing anyone, you’re going to see some resistance to the next issue you take up, even if it isn’t beyond the pale. If the same academics defending infanticide turn around and try and convince people to accept human rights for trans people, they’ll find themselves with limited credibility.

Critically, this doesn’t happen with a cause where it’s actually possible to convince people that you are standing up for what is right. Gay rights campaigners haven’t been cut out of the general cultural conversation. On the contrary, they’ve been able to parlay some of their success and credibility from being ahead of the curve to help in related issues, like trans rights.

There’s no (non-apocalyptic) future where the people of Brazil eventually wake up okay with infanticide and laud the campaigners who stood up for it. But the people of Brazil are likely to wake up in the near future and decide they can’t ever trust the morals of academics who advocated for infanticide.

Second, it’s worth thinking about how people’s experience of justice colours their view of the government. When the government permits what is (to many) a great evil, people lose faith in the government’s ability to be just. This inhibits the government’s traditional role as solver of collective action problems.

We can actually see this manifest several ways in current North American politics, on both the right and the left.

On the left, there are many people who are justifiably mistrustful of the government, because of its historical or ongoing discrimination against them or people who look like them. This is why the government can credibly lock up white granola-crowd parents for failing to treat their children with medically approved medicines, but can’t when the parents are indigenous. It’s also why many people of colour don’t feel comfortable going to the police when they see or experience violence.

In both cases, historical injustices hamstring the government’s ability to achieve outcomes that it might otherwise be able to achieve if it had more credibly delivered justice in the past.

On the right, I suspect that some amount of skepticism of government comes from legalized abortion. The right is notoriously mistrustful of the government and I wonder if this is because it cannot believe that a government that permits abortion can do anything good. Here this hurts the government’s ability to pursue the sort of redistributive policies that would help the worst off.

In the case of abortion, the very real and pressing need for some women to access it is enough for me to view it as net positive, despite its negative effect on some people’s ability to trust the government to solve coordination problems.

Discrimination causes harms on its own and isn’t even justified on its own “merits”. It’s effect on peoples’ perceptions of justice are just another reason it should be fought against.

In the case of Brazil, we’re faced with an act that is negative (infanticide) with several plausible alternatives (e.g. adoption) that allow the cultural purpose to be served without undermining justice. While the historical record of these types of interventions in indigenous cultures should give us pause, this is counterbalanced by the real harms justice faces as long as infanticide is allowed to continue. Given this, I think the correct and utilitarian thing to do is to support the reformers’ effort to outlaw infanticide.


Tags: ethics, political philosophy, social conservatism, tradeoffs are hard, utilitarianism