Against Sacrifice: An essay on risk and ethics

Copyright © 2021 Henry P Wynn

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Contents

Preface

Preface

This book arose out a thought I had at some risk conference, somewhere, when I realised that the unquestioning use of utility would lead to the sacrifice of some lives for others. The idea then was probably quite technical, such as whether early participants in clinical trials were at greater risk than latter entrants or that people were sacrificed today to save people tomorrow. It then just spread out in different directions mopping up even older concerns of mine such as blaming the victim and collateral damage. This essay is the result and it is a sad irony it has particular relevance to the COVID-19 and climate change crises. Not being a professional ethicist, it was hard work for me, although here and there I may pull rank in statistics and risk.

My soul sister and wife Jan Baldwin gets most of the thanks for her huge insight, continuous moral support and infinite patience. Peter Abell, friend and LSE co-Emeritus, from whom I have learned swathes of economic and political philosophy, also gets a big slice of gratitude.

This book is dedicated to my late brother Stephen Wynn whose phrase they are not doing their job, reflecting his single handed battles with regulators, inspires the last chapter.

Special thanks to Ros Byam Shaw for an early and very useful proofread.

1.

Not in peacetime

I see the Four-fold Man, The Humanity in deadly sleep

And its fallen Emanation, the Spectre and its cruel Shadow.

I see the Past, Present and Future existing all at once

Before me. O Divine Spirit, sustain me on thy wings,

That I may awake Albion from his long and cold repose;

For Bacon and Newton, sheath’d in dismal steel, their terrors hang

Like iron scourges over Albion: reasonings like vast serpents

Infold around my limbs, bruising my minute articulations.

I turn my eyes to the schools and universities of Europe

And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire,

Wash’d by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth

In heavy wreaths folds over every nation: cruel works

Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic

Moving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which,

Wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony and peace.

William Blake ¹

Commanders in wartime may have to make difficult decisions in which one group of soldiers is sacrificed to protect another, or a sacrifice may be made within a group, where some soldiers are killed and others survive. The objective is to defeat the enemy; in which case, such events and their dilemmas can be seen as part of a wider discussion about just or unjust wars, which may also include moral issues about attacks on civilians. My main purpose in this essay is to elaborate on the simple idea that, in the long-term strategic or day-to-day operational decision-making of organisations and governments in peacetime, the sacrifice of one group to save another is not legitimate or at least should have very strict limits. The style and moral basis of decision-making in wartime are fundamentally not applicable in peacetime.

Despite my emphasis on civil society, there is a chapter on drone warfare where the contrast with peacetime is visceral. Collateral damage, in a broad sense, occurs in both peace and war as a result of administrative action. I will show that, despite their inapplicability, the dubious and outdated moralities of war continue to cast shadows on civilian life. The concepts of proportionality, acceptability and necessity are prime examples.

I shall describe how – in modern, liberal, Western democracies – sacrifices are made and made routinely, often in secret, with no clear limits and with no proper representation of the sacrificed. Where there are committees or special bodies to discuss, advise or take decisions on matters that affect human life, they are often appointed and not elected, while their terms of reference may enshrine the notion of sacrifice in a covert way.

This is all about ethics, but there is insufficient ethical debate in public life about these matters. When analysed, the decision-making is often grounded on an outdated type of ethics – a nineteenth-century, utilitarian way of thinking that is given an additional boost from twentieth-century mathematical economics: utility, rational choice, profit and loss, cost-benefit analysis and so on. Mixed in with this are a few extra spices borrowed from the ethics of war. The celebrity chef of this unpalatable soup is Margaret Thatcher, with her often quoted phrase there must be winners and losers. It is usually the powerful who tell us there have to be trade-offs, just as they say we all have to make sacrifices in wartime.

The economists, in their own defence, will argue that we need not be too concerned because all these issues are well covered by areas such as welfare economics and theories of choice, and that a little more theory will sort it all out. By allowing better mathematical definitions of utility, choice and welfare, they will say that we can get a grip on topics such as inequality, which they may tell us is what we are really talking about. However, these experts never really mention the sacrificed and certainly do not side with them. They are brushed aside with euphemistic terms such as negative externalities. They will argue that the pursuit of profit, the generation of wealth, and the stabilisation of supply and demand may require both the maximisation of value and the optimisation of some technical and management processes. But in matters of sickness and health, and in the welfare of the young and old, such raw calculation naturally leads to sacrifice and, I shall argue, is fundamentally not valid and not acceptable.

At their most brutal, these utilitarian approaches lead to a direct translation of life into cash via the Orwellian concept of quality-of-life indices or quality-adjusted life years (QALYs). These have a foothold in universities under the banner of health economics. There are scores of postgraduate courses in this area in the UK, and many experts, some of whom act as advisors for the government. Health economics hopes to answer questions, or at least do the calculations to help others answer questions, such as who do we keep alive: a productive parent of thirty or a sick grandmother of ninety-two?

Modern ethical theory and its Cinderella sub-area, applied ethics, covers some of this ground, but the concept of sacrifice is rarely mentioned. In a review of twenty well-known books on ethics that I have to hand, none has the word sacrifice or the word victim in the index. But it stalks the pages. John Rawls, in particular, challenges the raw, utilitarian approach and advocates a maximin approach: maximise the position of the worst off.² At the other end of the avenue, Robert Nozick uses no sacrifice as a driving argument, but it is an entirely different concept of sacrifice to ours.³ He is concerned to say that the rich paying more tax is a sacrifice for them. He uses it to support a rightist view of ethics, which is so strident that it drives him in some logical way, with his libertarian comrades, towards the advocacy of a minimal state.

If there is sacrifice of life without representation, then our government should not be surprised if the family and friends of the sacrificed take some kind of political action. It is surely understandable for people to ask Why me? or Why my grandmother?. In wartime, refusals to be sacrificed in the face of the enemy have led to soldiers being shot for cowardice. We do not shoot people in peacetime, at least not in the UK. However, life can be made difficult for the refuseniks when they appear to go against the public good.

The decisions that governments have to take are becoming more and more complex, with the cost of error probably greater than at any previous time in history. Consider the list: climate change, terrorism, pandemics, species diversity, weapons of mass destruction and many more. In addition to coping with these global phenomena, governments are held responsible for the domestic economy, health, education, transport, defence, and law and order. Who would be a politician? They are caught between the demands of a sceptical public and the modern corporate bulldozers of globalisation. Faced with this, it is hardly surprising that they surround themselves with civil servants, experts, advisors, working parties, commissions (in the UK these are sometimes royal), boards, agencies and regulatory authorities. The UK is running short of three-letter acronyms and initialisms. At one time, the name FSA referred to both the Financial Services Authority and the Food Standards Agency. (Try to work out the difference between an agency and an authority.)

What are the rules? Person or body A appoints person B to committee C, which has terms of reference D. If we joined the A, B, C and D on a big chart and hung it on the wall, we would have an interesting snapshot of modern Britain. We could create a whole network to see who is on more than one node, and inspect it for diversity. Lay is an interesting word. Originally meaning non-clerical, it has come to mean non-professional or Joe Public. If the definition is not too murky, then we could invent a lay index, such as the percentage of lay people on a committee. Interesting patterns might emerge, and we could even study the system dynamically over time as members of committees come and go. We should add all the more permanent arm’s length bodies (ALBs), which in the UK number over 450, spend £20 billion a year of public funds, and have only a skeleton level of accountability, which is something that concerns a number of select committees of Parliament.⁴ What happened to the good old QUANGO (the quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation), when did a QUANGO change into an ALB, and what is the lay index for ALBs? And so on. This would be a nice topic for a master’s dissertation or PhD thesis, if it hasn’t already been written.

But the complex geometry of public life takes a more human and urgent quality if we pin a red flag to any committee on our chart where decisions are taken that affect life and death, and which may lead to the sacrifice of one group of people for the benefit of another. Every week in some group, somewhere, ethical positions are taken, where the word ethics may seldom be used and the word sacrifice never. One can respect the seriousness, the professional expertise and the responsibility shown, but not the secrecy, the lack of public debate and the sometimes-only-cursory accountability. One might call this fog-like reticence the cowardice of the politicians. I shall discuss secrecy later.

We need to be very careful about such committees. Their possible existence has been used by libertarians to attack the state. Here is a statement by Sarah Palin:

Government healthcare will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome [sic] will have to stand in front of Obama’s death panel so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their level of productivity in society, whether they are worthy of healthcare. Such a system is downright evil.⁵

After that, President Obama removed anything that smacked of a death committee from Obamacare. An extreme version of the death-panel accusation would be one that hinted at some kind of back-door euthanasia. There is a danger that, unless we bring these debates into the foreground, the very existence of secret committees making decisions about life and death will be used by enemies of the public sector to discredit it. During the COVID-19 crisis, the UK government, for a long time, refused to publish the membership of the now famous Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) committee.

But what is this cowardice and fear that stops the sunlight of debate penetrating the administrative fog? How many times do we hear phrases such as these are tough decisions, there are limited resources and see that taxpayers money is well spent? This is the voice of a patronising authority that claims it knows best, but at the same time exhibits a false confidence or even a deep insecurity. This insecurity surely comes not from the decisions themselves but from fear of the spotlight, whence in some far-off corner the sacrificed will rise up and ask, Why me?. It is the voice of the vaccination-damaged child, the multiple sclerosis victim in pain denied the expensive drug, the old person denied intensive care facilities, the flood victim who sees the big expenditure going on compensation for airport runways and new roads, and the nurse or care worker in a pandemic without adequate personal protective equipment (PPE).

Another defence employed by the committee members and professorial advisors is the language of probability and risk. I feel doubly anxious about this because I am a professional statistician. The defence is as follows. Everyone has an equal chance of being the victim, so the system is fair. However, probability is no place to hide the sacrificed. The fact that the identities of the victims are not known before the event does not mean we should not call them victims after the event (apologies for the double negative). If there are victims, there is sacrifice. Wartime commanders know this. When they send soldiers into a dangerous operation, they estimate that some may die, even though they do not know in advance who they will be. The fact that they do not know does not – or should not – make the decision any easier for the commander or make the mission feel less dangerous for the front-line participants.

This essay is about the wild frontier of ethics, rather than the safe suburbs of utilitarianism, marginal utility, rational choice theory, etc. Reading ethics can be exhilarating in the same way that some might find reading religious texts exhilarating. But on the other hand, the material is often rich with theory rather than example, or uses only simplistic, artificial examples, so that some of the excitement is lost.

Taking scarcity and rationing as fixed constraints leads to the notion of hard choices. We do not like the term, nor the fact that politicians try to hide behind it. These are often not hard choices in some preordained way, rather they are forced choices. The politicians set the financial parameters and then do the