American conservatives faced with addressing the COVID-19 pandemic are grappling with the Trolley problem before our very eyes. The classic thought experiment in ethics involves a runaway trolley headed towards five people who will be killed on the track ahead. But you can throw a switch sending the trolley down a side track where only one person will be killed. What would you do?
As an American conservative, you save the trolley company.
A variation of the Trolley problem involves pushing a large stranger onto the tracks to stop the trolley, saving the five.
Molly Crockett once reflected in the Guardian why test subjects find pushing someone onto the tracks less acceptable:
Treating others as individuals with their own rights, wishes and needs, rather than simply objects to be used at will, is a key aspect of being a good social partner. And there is evidence that people strongly distrust those who use others as a means to an end. Our moral intuitions seem to accord with this principle.
Eric Levitz writes at New York magazine that the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party has proposed a plan to keep workers paid during the pandemic (and at home amidst Boris Johnson’s national lockdown announced Monday). They would cover 80 percent of workers’ salaries for the duration of the crisis and forbid companies that accept government funds from laying off workers. Budget, smudget, “even they recognize that social welfare must take precedence over budgetary concerns in the context of a historically sudden and deep economic crisis.”
By the contours of the Republican proposal in the U.S. Senate, American conservatives are looking out first for corporations and CEOs. Republicans would give the man who oversaw the Trump Foundation and Trump University oversight of a $500 billion-dollar corporate slush fund with no guarantees he wouldn’t use government funds to help “some of the greatest people,” including “politically connected corporations, GOP donors, and even President Trump’s private business.” There will be “incredible deals,” Trump claimed without evidence, that will “increase exponentially.”
They’d save the trolley company
Levitz explains the difference between the Tory and Republican plans:
Therefore, the gulf between the GOP’s response to the crisis and that of Britain’s Tories is not a product of public opinion or crass electoral concerns. Rather, it reflects the fact that the Republicans are not a normal conservative party, but a uniquely reactionary political formation. No other major party in the Western world rejects the concept of universal health care or disputes the reality of man-made climate change. The GOP is more adamantly opposed to the downward redistribution of resources, or any measure that tips the balance of power between workers and bosses in the former’s direction, than any center-right party in the developed world.
Donald Trump is already toying with ignoring medical advice and suggesting he might lift social distancing recommendations after 15 days to get the shuttered U.S. economy back up and running. The U.S. will “soon be open for business, very soon, a lot sooner than the three or four months that somebody was suggesting,” Trump said at Monday’s coronavirus briefing.
“We can’t let the cure be worse than the problem,” Trump said.
Trump will have support for that proposition.
An article in The Federalist Monday suggested (also without evidence) that damage to the economy would kill more people in the long run. The author cast contemplating sacrificing lives to save the economy as an almost Randian act of courage:
Of course, it sounds very callous to talk about considering the costs. It seems harsh to ask whether the nation might be better off letting a few hundred thousand people die. Probably for that reason, few have been willing to do so publicly thus far. Yet honestly facing reality is not callous, and refusing even to consider whether the present response constitutes an even greater evil than the one it intends to mitigate would be cowardly.
I’ve written often about the Midas cult’s worship of mammon. But it’s still stunning that people are so blinded by greed they would practice their idolatry in public and think themselves both mainstream and moral.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.