Qualified immunity to knowledge

One of the great things about having kids—I use “great” in in the sense of Oz the Great and Terrible—is that you have to explain, calmly and clearly despite the stakes and emotions involved, all these rules about being a human that you just internalized along the way.

This is surprisingly tricky because as anyone who’s ever tried to explain morality has realized, you can either describe clear rules or you can have rules that fit actual circumstances, but not both. If you’re always giving an answer that boils down to “it depends”, then you’re really not teaching; you’re just telling the learner they need to figure it out themselves. Which is a sort of lesson, and true, but not helpful. The answer really is almost always “it depends”, and it makes one long for the days when moral instruction meant pointing at the Ten Commandments and slapping the child at unpredictable intervals.

All kidding aside, though, I think the good-faith focus on “it depends” has probably gone too far, because too much “it depends” just leads to paralysis without even guiding better choices.

This brings me to my point: it seems like collectively at the moment, we’ve adopted a sort of qualified immunity* approach to learning the lessons of history.

You say that giving a single person enormous power leads to corruption and abuses of that power? Well, I don’t want to follow that lesson through to its conclusion. What if that person is a really good guy? (Somehow it’s always a guy.) What if he’s independently wealthy already and therefore, like, less likely to be corrupt? What about if the abuses of power are against people I dislike? Is there some way I could decline to learn this lesson?

You say that having brutal, unaccountable police forces leads to abuses while not significantly deterring crime? Well, what if those police forces are enforcing immigration laws instead of domestic laws?

You say that when gambling is legal, people do more of it, and lose their money, and it corrupts the activities that are being gambled on because some people try to manipulate the outcomes? This has happened in every instance so far? Well, what if we call it a prediction market instead of gambling? What if we make it easier, and portable, and open it up to every imaginable outcome? What if we separate cash from the process and let people win and lose vast sums electronically?

The gambling one is perhaps the most blatant. I don’t know if I’m just becoming a grumpy old man (recently halfway to 90!) but these sorts of examples are grabbing my attention more and more. And in each case I have to wonder: do the details alter the fundamental lesson, or do they just give us enough of a cover so that we can make the same mistakes all over again? I’m sure I’m not immune from this phenomenon myself (the games on my phone always distract me…well, what if I try a different game?) but Matthew 7:3 and all that.

This line of thinking has been prompted by recent arguments with my dad about the limits of knowledge, but more about that next week.

* Qualified immunity is the principle that government employees can’t be prosecuted for wrongdoing unless courts have previously determined that this specific wrongdoing violates specific “clearly established” constitutional rights. The principle arose in the 1980s but more recently has been broadly applied to police, with the effect of blocking legal action against them unless their wrongdoing was previously identified and declared unconstitutional. A (slightly) facetious example is an officer who was securing a crime scene and stole some money from the premises couldn’t be prosecuted unless the courts have previously said you can’t steal those denominations of bills on a Tuesday.