(lively music)
- Welcome to FODI Digital,
a weekend of online conversations
about dangerous realities
that surround us.
I'm Simon Longstaff, Executive Director of
the Ethics Center and co-founder
of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas.
Like many festivals from around the world,
voting was canceled.
Our government decision in the face of
the Coronavirus pandemic.
And so now we have a chance, today,
to pick up on some of the conversations
that would have been addressed
had that festival proceeded,
along with some new
material which takes account
of the COVID-19 pandemic itself.
In this session, we're
joined by three philosophers,
Matt Beard, Eleanor
Gordon-Smith, and Bryan Mukandi.
We'll be stepping back from
the day to day reality of
what we're dealing with
in order to analyze some
of the ethical dilemmas
that arise and particularly
the decisions we might make
and some of the unintended consequences.
Now owing to time
differences from speakers
around the globe, this
session has been pre-recorded
and it will then be
moderated in a live chat
with Ethics Center Fellow, Dr. Matt Beard.
- Good afternoon and
welcome to another session
of our digital conversations hosted
by the Festival of Dangerous Ideas.
I wanna begin by acknowledging
the traditional owners of
the land where I am, I'm on
Gadigal, the Eora Nation.
I acknowledge their unseated sovereignty
and custodianship of this land,
and also to acknowledge
the traditional owners
of wherever you're watching this from,
'cause this is a thoroughly global FODI
that we're experiencing at the moment,
during this interesting time.
And that's exactly what we're going
to be talking about now is
the ethical implications
of the current COVID-19
pandemic, which is peeled back.
Some of the ordinary
distractions that we face
in society that can
allow us to move through
without interrogating some of
the deeper ethical and
philosophical implications
of the way that we live our lives.
It's forced us to confront
some really brutal choices
around who to prioritize,
how to deal with limited resources,
and perhaps a little bit
about who we really are.
And that's precisely what
this session is about.
We wanna ask the questions
that sit behind the questions,
the really deep moral
and philosophical issues
that are at play here.
And joining me, to help
with this conversation
is Bryan Mukandi, a philosopher
and health researcher
from the University of Queensland,
and Eleanor Gordon-Smith,
philosopher, author,
and PhD candidate at Princeton University.
Welcome, thank you both
so much for joining me.
- Thank you for having us.
- Thank you for having us.
- So Bryan, I wanna start with you,
so you've got a background
in practicing medicine
in Sub Saharan Africa,
which is a pretty intense environment
I would imagine to think about
the practice of medicine.
What insights have you received from there
that you think might inform the way
in which you're thinking
about the current pandemic,
and how does the response
at least in Australia
and then if you think
about around the globe,
has that left you feeling, I don't know,
optimistic or pessimistic,
or has it colored your interpretation
in any way of how we're
going, morally speaking
as a society, what does it
tell you about humanity?
- Thanks, Matt, that's a great question.
I mean, so I was reflecting the other day
that my medical training
and my medical practice was
at the height of another pandemic, right?
So at the height of the
HIV and AIDS pandemic
and I was working the public health sector
where folks don't have
access to antiviral drugs
for the most part.
And I think the biggest thing for me there
was the recognition at that time
that the value of an African life
isn't the same as the
value of other lives.
So when 9/11 happened, for example,
I was genuinely surprised,
many of us were genuinely
surprised at the concern
about that level of lack of life,
of loss of life, sorry,
given the loss of life
that we're experiencing on a regular basis
that wasn't eliciting the
same kind of global response.
And in many ways this pandemic
has reinforced that for me.
I mean, I come from a
philosophical tradition
where humanity's a norm, it's a goal,
where one's existential
imperative is a lifelong quest
to achieve one's humanity and
that hasn't really changed.
How I feel about people though,
about the social structures
we've chosen for ourselves
or we've accepted, I mean,
that hasn't really changed either,
but in a negative rather
than in a positive sense.
- Eleanor, you're joining
us from New York State,
which is one of the hardest
hit areas in the U.S.,
which is one of the hardest,
if not the hardest hit
nation around the world,
dealing with the pandemic.
What's your experience like there
and if you look back home to Australia,
how do you compare, to add
something else to that question,
you actually chose not to
travel back to Australia
when things were heating up,
for kind of largely ethical reasons.
So can you talk us through that as well
in your decision making process?
- Yeah, for sure.
I mean, I don't wanna take
too much ethical credit.
Part of the decision for not coming home
was also purely pragmatic
and that I'm on a visa here
and it was a long way from obvious to me
that I would be able to
get back across the border
into the United States
in a few months time,
given what we know about
both this administration
and the way that crises like this one tend
to present opportunities for the hardening
of borders and the exclusion of people
who are thought to not belong.
But, I'm not gonna say
that it didn't occur
to me fairly early on
when I started thinking
about the way that this virus would work
that healthcare in the
United States is not,
is not as accessible and it's not
as reliable as the kind of healthcare
that I had grown up within Australia
and it really did occur to me
that I might be in a position
where if I caught this,
I might go bankrupt as a result of it,
it would depend on my insurance
and that wasn't obvious
at the beginning of this crisis
and I thought quite seriously,
if I start getting a dry cough,
if I start getting symptoms,
do I get on a plane
and do I go home to Australia
where at least I know
how Medicare works and I know that I'll be
in contact with roughly
reliable healthcare.
And then I thought maybe I
should just go home preemptively,
so that if I get sick, I'll be in contact
with these kinds of institutions
and I thought about this
kind of semi-seriously
for about a day or two and then I realized
that there was just a kind of trump card
on top of any consideration of mine,
which was that if I traveled,
either with symptoms
or preemptively, there was
a very real chance that
what I would be doing is
transmitting that to someone else.
And while it's true that
there's no one person
who can make it the case
that this pandemic stops,
I didn't feel okay about
it being even possible
that someone's grandparent or parent died
because I had moved through an airport
when I didn't have to.
So I sort of felt like that
was an unanswerable ethical objection
to the prospect of going
home and decided that it
was basically not a
question of better outcomes,
but a question of what
was a permissible choice
and it was an impermissible choice for me
to go anywhere near JFK or LAX,
or the Sydney International Airport.
So I'm still here, I'm still here
in the land of the free
and the home of the brave.
Which leads me to the
second part of your question
which is what difference
do I think there is
between the way that the United States
has reacted to this and the
way that Australia has reacted.
I'm always a little
reticent to speculate about
the nature of America, partly
because it's just so diverse.
But I think that is, in itself,
an answer to your question.
So one thing that's been
really vivid in the way
that the United States is reacted to this,
is the fact that the States
is what it says on the tin,
the States are the States,
they're an array of states,
and that means that you have a
kind of patchwork arrangement,
not only of approaches
of the virus, but of
approaches to governance.
So you see this kind of
clash between the power
of the governor and the president,
and then you see clashes
between various governors,
and you see a kind of fractiousness
and fracturedness that you
just don't see in Australia.
And that kind of Division
I think is something
that we don't necessarily
have that much exposure to.
And it's very easy to forget
in the media presentations
that the United States that that is true
and I think also there's a kind of,
there's a very different
cultural expectation here
about the way that individual
freedom ought to work,
and this is something that I
found very kind of confusing
when I first moved here, was the lexicon
of individual freedom is
more than just lexicon,
it's the foundation.
And something very
interesting is occurring
where people seem to feel
like the reaction to a crisis
is itself an imposition in
a way that the crisis itself
maybe wasn't, attention is
going on how we're reacting
to the crisis rather than
on the crisis itself.
And that's leading people to have a
kind of somewhat entitled sense, I think,
to the fact that we
ought to be free of this,
and it's enough now,
and I need to know when
I can go back to work and I need to know
when I can get a manicure again.
I mean, there's a caricatures of course,
but they're caricatures
just based on reality.
And there's a kind of a not
wholly caricatured identity
in the United States according
to which your freedom
is in this case, quite
literally worth dying for.
- One of the things that
I keep coming back to,
which speaks to this question
around individual freedoms,
is this quote from the
feminist philosopher,
Carol Gilligan, who
championed this approach,
the ethics of can, she
talks about this idea that,
we live on a trampoline,
and whenever we move
it kind of affects everybody
else in the same way,
it makes other people wobble,
your activities cause
discomfort to others.
And one of the things that
this pandemic is crystallized
for me is this sense that,
this whole idea of this
atomized individual with riots
that cluster them off and
divide us from other people,
is kind of a losery, we
are radically dependent
on other people, we have
this interdependence
and these mutual obligations
that are just based on,
not even on morality but survival,
but certainly that inform
our kind of moral response.
And that got me thinking
about how difficult it can be
to muster that sense of mutual obligation.
In a society that does
just talk so heavily
about ourselves as individuals,
we've been conditioned
to think about ourselves
in almost exactly the
opposite way to the way
that this response requires us.
I do want to hear from both
of you, maybe Bryan first
and then Eleanor, on
just how you think about
that tension between what's needed,
and maybe the ways in
which you're conditioned.
Have I set this up in the right way?
Is it true we've been
conditioned in this way?
How do you think about this?
- It's really complex,
'cause on the one hand
I think you're absolutely right.
I love that metaphor of the trampoline,
and I completely agree, and
there's idea for tonomy,
this idea of this autonomous
free liberal individual,
it just doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
But at the same time, on the other hand,
I mean I was thinking
about Eleanor talking about
the fractiousness in
fracturedness in the US.
I think that applies here too,
in some really interesting ways, right.
Here in Australia, so, yes,
we're all on this trampoline,
but the real estates
that you occupy on that trampoline
makes the world of difference.
And we have a kind of social structure,
social organization where
there's an investment
in occupying good real estate,
there's investment in
occupying this kind of position
that means that when something happens,
a natural disaster, a
fire, floods, a pandemic,
there's an investment
in being in a position
of being able to enact something like
that illusory autonomy, right.
And I mean, the two
quotations come to mind,
I think about Martin Luther King's idea
of an inextricable network of mutuality,
but he kind of, he raises this though,
he kinds of just has this sort of moment
where African Americans in a
particular kind of relationship
with white America.
So he acknowledges that
there's this mutuality,
there's this connection, but
the nature of this connection
is one that's really detrimental
to some groups of people
as opposed to others, right?
And I also think about Frantz Fanon
saying Hegel's dialectic of recognition.
This idea that our selfhood
emerges in relationship
with others, it's like it
falls apart in the colony
because in the colony
the white doesn't want
the colonized recognition,
they want their labor.
And so I think, while on the one hand,
COVID has shown us that
it's ideal of autonomy,
it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
It's in really interesting ways though,
I think it may, at least
for some groups of people,
legitimates this project
of striving towards
that kind of autonomy of occupying
the best possible real
estate on that trampoline,
as opposed to reconfiguring
the trampoline itself.
- Right, and we're going to
talk a little bit more about
that when we look at the
responses of consumers
in supermarkets, and the kind
of panic buying phenomenon,
so we'll come to that,
'cause I wanna hear Eleanor,
what's your read on this?
- It's a really good question.
It's a really good question.
And like Bryan, I think
it's a very complex one
and one that we're not
gonna compress either now
or in a pandemic writ launch.
One thing I think that is kind of a shame
for me living in the states
and seeing the way the states
is covered internationally,
is the way that the face
of a lot of the pressure to reopen
is construed in these kinds of
individual autonomous terms.
So I have a lot of family
and a lot of friends
who I think are really
genuinely very concerned
about my proximity to
New York at the moment
and they feel like crisis, real proper,
everyone's dead crisis,
like blood in the streets
type crisis, is right around the corner.
And my suspicion about
why they feel like that
is that they've seen these
videos of women hanging out
of cars at intersections blowing the horn
at medical workers or protesters walking
into government buildings,
people with the American
flag painted on their face,
holding banners about the
right to return to work.
And these people are both,
they're very individualistic face
of this movement and the
movement that they claim
to be espousing is very individualistic.
They're making claims about
people's individual rights
to get back to work and
they are doing so claiming
to speak as individuals.
But one of the things
that I think it's a shame
that obscures is that the
pressure to reopen America
comes from the fact that
it's a non accidental feature
of the US American system
and the US an economic system
that it wants people to be back at work
more than it wants them
to be safe and well,
and we encounter that from
the mouths of individuals
who present themselves as autonomous
in saying things like
the cure cannot be worse
than the disease, but the
pressure isn't just from rhetoric
or from individuals, it's from
the way the system is set up.
I mean, so you look at the
kinds of costs and debts
that Americans incur just for functioning.
Like if you get sick, that costs money
and that creates debt,
if you have a higher education system,
even one that is continuing
on zoom at the moment,
that costs money and that causes debt.
Both of these things coupled with just
the usual systems of credit
means that most Americans
are in eye watering amounts of debt,
and then debt has interest which means
that you're incentivized
to get back to work
as fast as possible and you
put people in a position
where it's not only rational but critical
to get back to earning
money because it costs money
to earn less.
I mean, this kind of the
way the system functions
is such that not only do you
create all these pressures,
you then coupled with this
narrative of individualism,
tell people that both
the source of the problem
and the nearest solution
is to be conceived
of in these individualistic
autonomous senses,
and that's only when we reinforced,
when we kind of circulate these images
of Americans protesting in the
way that they are right now,
but I think it's a real
shame when we do that
because we obscure the fact that even
these apparently
maniacally individual faces
are in fact the product of the same system
that crushes the rest of us.
- What's interesting about that is the way
in which the conversation
and the conversation
that's taking place in a
number of different nations
around the world, including
Australia around that there is
an economic reality around
when we need to reopen
and the fact that there
are trade offs to be made
between the costs of a lockdown
in terms of real human suffering
and the costs in terms of human suffering
of allowing COVID-19 to
spread at a higher rate
than it would with greater
lock downs imposed.
That conversation has been
framed a lot around facing up
to reality that we have to
be realistic about this,
but what you're suggesting
here Eleanor is that actually
this is it not necessarily
something that is in being built
into reality, that this is
something that's hardwired
into the way that the world works,
that this is something
that has been created
and if we treat it as this fixed point
then we're missing out on
seeing what might be one
of the deeper issues at play here.
- Yeah, I think that's a really nice way
of putting the point.
There is one read on
this situation according
to which it is just a
matter of getting to grips
with reality that if we
don't go back to work,
the economy will collapse.
If we don't allow people
to return to earning money,
they won't have any money.
And there's one kind of level
of zoom, where that's true.
But that's true because
of what you're holding
fixed around it, and if you
zoom out one level further
to the layer where you're
asking the question,
why is it the case that
unless you return to work,
you won't be able to eat?
Why is it the case that
the economy will collapse,
unless we have people in the kinds of jobs
that have them in labor, all the time?
There's a one layer extra of
zooming out that I think we
can do when you no longer
hold fixed the things
that we are currently
holding fixed about how it is
that people ought to be able
to get food and get money
and stay safe and stay healthy.
And as long as we're kind
of treating as fixed,
the system that we currently operate in,
then of course it will
feel like natural realism,
that at a certain point,
we have to get back to work
in order to provide those goods.
But the fact that work is
what provides those goods,
is itself kind of worth
I think reconsidering
one of the things that this pandemic,
I think has at least made clear is that,
is that there are moments of
genuine choice to be had here
and there are moments of genuine clash
between the value systems
that we've previously,
maybe thought were co habitable.
And you see people getting on TV now,
like Glenn Beck said the other day,
that people like him are
more than prepared to die
for the economy, and at
least, at very least,
what this is forcing
us to do is to realize
that may not only be a choice right now,
but for a lot of people all along,
there kind of was the choice.
- I mean, there's two really
interesting things there.
The first thing that I think is Bryan,
that Glenn Beck is exactly
the kind of person who is
the least likely to actually
die for the economy.
And the second thing and I'd
love to hear your thoughts
on that, but the second thing is,
in the way that Eleanor has set this up,
when you zoom in in a particular way,
you see a series of fixed
choices and binary choices
that are made, that in fact
are being fiercely held
in place by a huge flurry of activity
if you just take it next level zoomed out.
And I think that's why
I get really frustrated
at the use of the trolley
dilemma as an analogy
for thinking about this.
Because when we teach the trolley dilemma
in undergraduate lectures, the first thing
that students wanna do is say,
well how did these
circumstances come to pass?
Why aren't there better safety
arrangements on the rails?
They point to a number
of very valid critique,
and our instinct is to say no, no,
you must just face the choice
that is in front of you
and test the principles.
But that's exactly what we
shouldn't be doing here,
we should be asking you how did
this situation come to pass,
what things are forcing
us into a binary choice
or making us think we have a
binary choice then we don't?
So, can I get your read
on the applicability
of trolley dilemmas in this context
and what we're assuming, in
order to think about things
in that way?
- Yeah, I mean absolutely, right.
So the things that Eleanor,
I was shaking my head,
like nodding vigorously.
I mean the question of
framing is so important here,
and the frames that we take
to be given that we accept,
set the parameters around,
they set the parameters for credible
and acceptable discourse
around the subject, right.
So once you buy into the
idea that there is the choice
is simply that this
individual either goes to work
and pays their bills
or the economy crashes.
There's a narrowing that that
kind of framing produces,
and it just stunts, not
just our imagination,
but our imaginative capacity
to think through the situation.
And it keeps us from, in medicine,
there's this recognition
that in order to understand
what's going on with a person.
Yes, you initially establish
what the presenting complaint
is but then you need
to dig into the history
of the presenting complaint.
How did this thing come into being?
Because a lack of understanding
about how the situation
came into being means
that you'll never arrive
at what the root cause of the problem is,
and if you don't know what the
root cause of the problem is,
then, at best, whatever treatment solution
you put forward is a gamble.
And this is an integral
part of medical training
and I find it really fascinating
that people who are trained
in some ways to think about
things in a temporal way,
also, acculturated in thinking about,
say for example, who gets the ventilator.
In this trolley problem
kind of a temporal,
what's happening in this
instance frame of thinking.
And there's this really
strange disjuncture
but I think that disjuncture
has to do with ethics,
with our effective investments.
Because, it is so much
easier to deal with,
in this instance, who should
I give this ventilator to,
than it is to have to
grapple with how did we get
to this problem?
Because the degrees of complexity.
I mean, I struggle
between on the one hand,
people who have been marginalized
by an economic system,
who feel that they have to risk
their health to go to work,
I struggled to think
about what responsibility,
the distribution of responsibility,
who's responsible for that?
Is it the states that's responsible,
is it the legislature that's responsible
or are those people responsible by virtue
of having affirmed a certain kind of idea
of what society ought to look like
over a long period of time?
But if you decide to just
think about the instance,
you don't have to worry
about all of that, right,
you don't have to grapple
with the reality of the fact
that our current situation
is a world of our making
through a series of choices
that we've all collectively made
that we're all implicated
to certain degrees.
And it's just a lot easier
if you can come up with
a nice simple frame
that can apportion blame or responsibility
or benefits in non complex ways.
- One of the things that
that makes me think about,
I was doing a radio interview,
and someone kind of texts in this point
when we were talking about
some of the trade offs
that need to be made that said that,
which frustrated me, it's
always young people who have
to make these sacrifices,
young people are having
to suffer through a lockdown
to protect the elderly,
young people have had
to go to war to fight
for the elderly is to
preserve the status quo
and things like that, and
whilst I have some sympathy
for that kind of class
politics of a different kind,
what it made me think about
was just how that flattens
out the reality that actually
the same young people
who had to go off and go to war,
and now the elderly people
who are being talked about
as potentially being denied ventilators,
and when we think about
these things that you say
in this kind of a temporal,
like these timeless kind of way
that this is just a
moment that's in a vacuum,
divorced from the history of these people,
it makes it so much
easier to make a choice,
but it also takes away so much.
It might be important about that choice,
and that got me thinking about
one of the big discussions
that we're having around QALY,
quality adjusted life years
where we think about what is
the quality of someone's life
going forward and how much quality of life
are they going to get, and
use that to make an assessment
on who should get resources.
But it's future facing,
it's about how much time
that person has left, it doesn't ask,
what kind of quality of
life has this person enjoyed
to this point, what kinds
of benefits, privileges,
injustices might they have experienced
that really should inform our response
to what they need in
this particular moment.
Is that the way that you're
thinking about this Bryan?
- Yeah, absolutely.
And I'm troubled by the baked in values.
There's a baked in value,
there's an unformed assumption
that economic productivity, longevity,
they're assumptions about what constitutes
a life worth living, there's
inherent ableism in that,
and there's just a whole lot of,
there's a series of brutalities
that go unchallenged
in that way, right.
The ability to come up
with some numerical figure
that somehow is supposed
to correlate with the value
of a life, or the value of
someone continuing to live
is such a horrendously brutal thing.
It's so incredibly brutal.
But when that gets passed
in the language of economics
or of business, and when
that gets kind of painted
in terms of pragmatics,
and the necessity for society
as a whole to carry on,
it keeps us from having to confront
just the violence and the
brutality of our society
and the violence and the brutality
that we're willing to put up with,
and against the issue of responsibility.
I wonder sometimes if
there's a tacit acceptance
of things like QALYs, even
by people who don't know
about QALYs per se, but
I wonder if there isn't
this tacit acceptance in our society
of kind of really harsh
brutal econometrics,
because we want to outsource
brutality towards each other
in some ways and to sterilize it.
- Eleanor, I keep thinking
these conversations
with the person who's
listening and saying, yes,
this is all a very interesting
and important conversation
to have, but the brutal reality is this.
We have to make a choice
here around at what point
we think about the
lives that will be saved
by continuing a lockdown versus the range
of different real sufferings.
Let's set aside the
economic ones for a second.
The real sufferings in
terms of increased rates
of domestic violence that might occur
as a result of lock downs, joblessness,
mental health issues, and
potential loss of life
through those kinds of issues
and we do, we do need to make
strike a balancing act here,
we do as gross and unpleasant
as it might be to think about,
we do have to put a price or
put a balancing on human lives,
even if we're just pricing
them against one another,
and this debate about
what it reveals in terms
of deeper underpins just exactly
the way I've set this up,
maybe is actually
distracting from the reality.
Rousseau talked about
philosophers and said,
"Barbara's philosopher, read
me your book on a battlefield,
"show me how this actually manifests
"and the real choices
that we have to make."
What would you say to
someone who just said,
let's get to the pragmatics though here,
we do have to make some balancing acts?
- Yeah, it's a good question.
I think about that
listener or reader a lot,
partially because I am
that listener or reader,
I'm not blind to the
fact that this is causing
an untold amount of suffering,
and that what we're asking
people to do by staying home,
in each other's names,
is a non trivial ask.
And I think one of the
ways that moral theorizing
in the last little while
has really failed us,
is by failing to engage with the scenarios
like precisely this one
where there is no option
that is not immense tragedy,
and QALYs, and a lot of
the systems that we have
for making these kinds of decisions,
I think can sometimes,
maybe accidentally create
in us the system, or
rather the expectation
that we will be able to make
these decisions in a way
that leaves no moral remainder,
in a way where we will
have done the best thing that
we could in the circumstances
and because it was the best
thing that we could have done
in the circumstances, it
must have been a good thing.
But I don't think that's true.
I think there's plenty of
cases where the best thing
we can do in a situation
is a wrenching, appalling moral violation,
not least of ourselves,
not least of having to make
that decision, I think that's a really big
and systematic problem with
the way that we've done ethics
for the last little while.
I think this is one of these cases,
the choices that we face
are all bad choices.
I wanna be a little bit
slow though to accept
the choice between this kind
of loss or that kind of loss,
or reopening or human
lives, partly because
as a variety of
epidemiologist pointed out,
at the moment, it's a choice
between a loss of a lot of life
and loss of economic value
or lost a lot of life,
and a loss of economic value,
and a loss of a vast amount of life.
So what will happen if we
reopen is not only where
we punitively get the economy
going, although we may not,
but we'll do so in a way, which
also kills a lot of people,
because that's how virus works.
So it's not fully clear that we'll be able
to avoid either of these harms entirely.
That said, what can we
do in these situations,
how can we think about the
choices that we have to make?
The biggest thing I think for me,
and I hope this is in any way useful,
is to reflect on the fact that the way
that we've been forced into a position
where we have no options but tragedy,
is itself worth examining.
If we find ourselves in a situation where
the sets of values that we
feel are non negotiable,
themselves turn out to be incompatible,
well then we need to ask
really serious questions
about those systems of values,
and we're being put in a
position where all our options
are ghoulish, and that
should tell us something
about what the list of
options was to start with.
- When you talk about
reflecting on the kind
of the tragedy and the
stuckness of a situation
where you're forced between bad options,
I immediately think of me
desperately bouncing from chemists
to chemists trying to find
children's paracetamol
while my one year old
daughter was teething
and finding them sold out everywhere,
and thinking about that kind
of panic buying response,
and at a certain point
thinking, well, what would I do
if I suddenly came across a treasure trove
of children's paracetamol?
Do I, being forced into this game
where we are now competing for resources
because enough people are
doing it, do I play that game
or do I kind of in a moralized way,
stand back and say no, this
is the wrong thing to do,
I will take on the my share,
knowing that that might leave
me deprived further down the line?
So when we think about it,
the kind of panic buying responsive
that we saw from ordinary
people at the beginning of this,
what did that tell us about ourselves?
For me that was a moment to really reckon
and say what does it tell
us that in the first sniff
of a crisis, the first thing
that we did was take care
of us and ours, that that was,
and I say we although
not everyone participated
in that kind of behavior,
but what does that say to us about the way
in which we've set up the society?
We've talked a little bit about kind of
the individualism already,
I just want to think about
in that moment of crisis,
that first response,
and what you were thinking about Eleanor
when you started to see
that kind of come to pass.
- Yeah in certain states,
so that's the land that
brought us Black Friday sales,
did not hold back when
it came to panic buying.
What did it reveal about us?
Less I think then it revealed
about our circumstance.
Here's what I think it revealed about us.
We were afraid, and we didn't feel secure,
and we didn't trust either us
or the government around us
to provide for us in the moment of crises
where we would most
need both those things.
I think it proves that more
than anything particularly deep
about our innate nature,
which I know people argue about a lot,
does this reveal that we're
kind of mentally selfish?
Well yes, but then people
also drove themselves
to food banks, and it
revealed other things
about kindness and solidarity,
and all the nice things as well,
I think more than that it revealed
that something that we
kind of already know,
which is that the right
configuration of circumstances
can push ordinary people to behavior
in profoundly selfish
and possibly evil ways.
And we know that, we know
that a lot of exercises
of bad behavior are perfectly ordinary,
and what happens when people
are frightened, and insecure
and more than what I
think it told us about us,
I think it told us
something really disquieting
about the faith that
we had in our systems,
which was that unless we
did this, unless we went out
and kind of did this end of day's,
treading on each others
necks for a can of beans,
I don't know why every one,
I've been saying this for weeks,
I don't even like beans, I don't know why
I bought so many beans,
everyone just transformed
into people who really
liked beans all of a sudden.
But it told us that we
were willing do that.
In fact, we thought it is
necessary that we do that
because we were so unsure of the fact
that other people, and or the government,
and or the system would
be able to provide for us
if we didn't do this kind of
absurd other sacrificing thing.
I think we were entirely wrong.
- Bryan, what's your read on this?
Again, thinking about you
background in delivering medicine
and practicing medicine
in Sub Saharan Africa
and in a very different
circumstance to the ones in which
we are going, whoa be it, that this pasta
is not available in my supermarket.
What was your read on
some of the responses
on a kind of consumer
and market based level?
- I mean, here I disagree with Eleanor.
Irene Watson, legal scholar,
in her book, "Raw Law"
she a Nunga word.
I think it's more Dhabi for colonialism,
and there's an image she
paints of colonialism
as this voracious, voracious monster,
this voracious animal that
just devours and consumes.
And I just find that so incredible apt.
I think it's telling that
for some groups in Australia,
the relationship between, quote
unquote mainstream society,
and some communities is
one that's best classed
as this voracious consuming animal.
This devouring thing.
As a sub Saharan Africa,
the quality of life I enjoy
today as an Australian citizen,
is inextricably linked to the poverty
and deprivation, and the suffering
that a lot continent sub Saharan Africans,
and a whole bunch of people
around the world experience,
those two things aren't linked.
Sorry, those two things are
intimately intertwined, right?
There's a lot of posturing
in terms of our response
to climate crisis around why China needs
to do something first,
but the fact is the
Chinese industrial work,
manufacturing work, goes
into provide that we,
in the Western world, consume,
there's a sense in which we are,
we are ferocious, we devour,
and the rush to buy toilet paper
as though when the
zombie apocalypse comes,
the most needful thing is toilet paper.
I mean, this isn't a gastroenterit virus,
it's not like everybody's going
to be on the toilet, but little things,
baking powder, toilet paper,
tins of tomatoes and tomato paste.
People were hoarding and panic
buying non-essential goods,
and I don't think it
was because the idea was
this non essential good
is going to run out
and I'm not going to make
brownies or cupcakes,
or whatever, and my life
is going to come to an end,
I think we have a voracious appetite,
I think we have a veracious
consuming, devouring appetite,
I think we have a particular relationship
to the environment and to
others, and I think this pandemic
has just shone a light on who we are,
as opposed to be like to pretend we are
and the image of ourselves
we like to project.
- On that question of what
we think we are versus
what we actually are, I'm
gonna ask both of you, Bryan,
you first, how we make
decisions in reality versus
how we think we make decisions.
So Bryan, you've thought a
lot about the way in which
we quote unquote think in the context
of a pandemic, and are using
philosopher, Hannah Arendt
and her idea of what
actually constitutes thinking
as a way of suggesting
that maybe we're not doing
as much thinking as we think.
Can you elaborate a little bit on that?
- Yeah, I mean.
So Arendt makes this
really useful distinction
between the algorithmic processes,
what she calls the cliches,
the devices that stands in for thought
that we normally go by.
The assumptions, the conventional wisdom
that we normally operate on,
and she separates that from those moments
in which we undertake that
really difficult labor
that forces us to stop
that's sometimes paralyzing
of grappling with a question
in a sustained and deep way.
And our answers is like.
Thought is difficult, thought is painful,
thought isn't something
that we'd like to do,
hence the cliches, right?
Hence the recourse to conventional wisdom.
I think what she leaves out
is our effective investments,
'cause I think those drive us
our drive's not desires,
those drive to a great extent.
But you know, and I think about the work
of Katherine Sophia Bell,
who wrote a book called,
"Arendt and the Negro Question"
and a lot of that work is
showing the ways in which,
when it comes to the thing,
when it came to the
things that Arendt herself
was effectively invested,
she failed to think
in the way that she
proposed we ought to think,
which in an interesting kind
of way reinforces this idea
that thinking is really difficult.
And I'm a big fan of Eleanor's book,
despite all of our recourse
to reason and rationality
and reasonableness in the
best of circumstances,
we are driven more often than not,
not by reason not by thought.
And that's in the best of circumstances.
And I know it's asking
a lot to expect people
to undertake that kind
of difficult thinking
at a moment of crisis, but
the cost of us not doing that,
it is so unlikely that, yeah,
there's an air with restriction
starting to be lifted now
that maybe we're on the
other side of this pandemic.
Actually, I don't think
so, but even if we are,
there's another one
coming, and another one,
and some other disaster.
Given the social organization,
given our relationship
to the planet, given our
relationship to others.
And if we don't take this moment to think,
what's going to happen
the next time round?
- I know Bryan's very
generously plugged your book,
something reasonable, in which you outline
some really big decisions that people make
and what he found is in
each and every one of them,
this idea that we are
these very rational people
who weigh costs and benefits,
we think about principles
and thinking these kind of abstractions,
actually doesn't play out
the ways in which people
make choices aren't necessarily
obvious even to themselves,
let alone to the rest of us.
How does that make you
think about the decisions
that we're facing and
the decisions that we,
and I say we as individuals,
but also we as societies
and our political leadership,
are making decisions now?
- Yeah, I think one of
the things that was,
that's kind of puzzling for me right now,
is that a lot of the work in that book
and a lot of the writing that went into it
was about coming to have
quite a lot of sympathy
for and understanding of the
ways that people make decisions
in kind of what we traditionally
regard as irrational ways.
I ultimately make the case
that they're not irrational
after all, but broadly speaking,
the aim was to say, no,
let's be softer and kinder about the fact
that the way we will make
these decisions often involves
a vast amount of their own
ethics, their feelings,
their sense of self, who they trust,
all these other kinds
of very human elements.
And the book and my relationship
to it was very optimistic,
I think, and kind of like
warm and fuzzy broadly.
And one of the problems that
I'm having right now is that
the face of irrationality
is a lot less forgivable
right now, and the ways in which we allow
these things to, for one of a better word,
contaminate our decision making processes,
are no longer dismissible on the grounds
that they have effects on people,
that there are the
people that affected is,
the ways that these kinds
of failures to think
in this renting conception
are doing untold damage
to people's lives.
And I think it's something
I'm really struggling with
right now is how to strike
a balance between expecting,
even demanding considerably
better of people
in a way that we conceive of other people
the systems we're in, and the
ways that we ought to govern
and be governed and
simultaneously be forgiving of
and understanding of the
fact that this is happening
in a distinctly non ideal environment,
and that what people are
up to, psychologically
and systemically in the middle of a crisis
and the literally life threatening crisis,
it's a difficult question.
I mean, if I could,
it's an echoing of a point
that we've made a lot
but I think that's because
it's probably a good one,
I hope it's a good one,
which is to kind of agree
with what Bryan just said
about the way that this kind
of panic buying indicates
something about us.
I think that's right,
I mean the only thing
that I mean to deny there
is that it reveals something
about who we are as a
fundamental of nature,
rather that it reveals
something about who we are
in a very deep way but who
we are inside this system
with this culture and this history.
And I think similarly, the
ways that we are failing
to think well right now represent
some significant failures,
both in the way that we think of threats
and the way we think of value
and, perhaps most important,
the way we think of each other.
And I think sometimes we can
be really quick to psychologize
these things and to regard
them as something natural
and something that is the function of
our poor little lizard
brains that just crawled off
the Savanna yesterday
and wired in these ways
that can be neuro
scientifically understood,
and I think, just like the panic buying,
reflects something about a very
long tendril leaving history
about the way that we relate to goods,
the earth and commerce similarly,
the ways that we're being
irrational right now,
represent the current face of the ways
that we've been misunderstanding
and misusing all three of those
things for a very long time,
just as much.
- Bryan's got one last point.
- I completely, completely,
completely agree.
I'm shocked by the ethics though,
again the question of responsibility.
Helena has this wonderful
book where she talks about
the ways in which our stance is one,
we are disposition is one
that we've allowed ourselves
to become habituated to over time.
So I mean I completely
agree that the issue isn't,
say for example, original
sin or human nature
or anything like that, I
think the issue is the choices
that we repeatedly make over time,
the kind of ways of relating
to others and to the world
that we've habituated ourselves to.
And I guess the question then.
And I'm stuck on this question
of responsibility, right.
At what point are we all
forced to take responsibility
for what we've assented to?
At what point are we forced
to take responsibility
for the political system,
the economic system,
that we have participated
in and given our sin to
and have perpetuated ourselves to?
And, yeah, I don't have
an answer for that,
but I'm troubled by my
responsibility for the situation.
- And that brings us to the
end of the time that we have.
You might have tuned into
this conversation hoping
to get some quick ethically
prescribed answers
to some difficult decisions
that you're making,
but really what hopefully
you've walked away with is,
is asking, why is it that
you feel that you need
that immediate and
quick ready made answer,
and what have we
constructed in our thinking
and the world around us, that's
made us thinking that way?
We haven't talked about
this pandemic as though
it were an economic or a medical crisis,
but it is just as much a moral crisis,
and so we need to get to the
bottom of what these ideas
and assumptions about morality are
if we're gonna get through it,
not just with human
beings alive and thriving,
but with our humanity in tact.
Eleanor and Bryan, thank
you so much for joining me
and thank you for you for
tuning in and listening
to this conversation.
There are a number more
throughout today and tomorrow
that I hope you join into.
I'm Matt Beard, a fellow
at the ethics center,
and thank you so much for
joining this conversation.
- Thanks for joining us, the next session
is political correctness,
which is being held at 2:45pm
this afternoon, Australian
Eastern Standard Time.
The Festival of dangerous
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