Dead Kids Matter More Than Navigating Bureaucratic Hurdles Concerning Gay Flags

Recounting a frustrating anecdote (Now unpaywalled)

(Note: this article would normally have been paywalled but I decided to make it free. So if you like these kinds of articles, I’d recommend becoming a paid subscriber!)

My faith in human excellence has never been particularly high—at least not since I learned most people are willing to pay for animals to be tortured in cages. But recently, it perhaps sunk even further, during a meeting at my college in Oxford. It illustrated the breathtaking extent to which people prioritize the issues popular with their ingroup over what genuinely matters—to which people are morally blind to issues not popular with their social group. It demonstrates a thesis I’ve long held, which is that those who crow most zealously about their profound concern for global injustice are mostly indifferent to the kinds of injustice that aren’t fashionable or in vogue. Let me tell you about it.

The incident in question occurred during a general meeting, with the purpose of discussing certain bureaucratic affairs. It involved voting on various motions. One of them, the only one that motivated me to show up in the first place, was the charity levee.

At the beginning of the year, the college raised something like twelve pounds from every student (technically people could opt out, but few did). Now, at this meeting at the end of the year, we voted on how to allocate it. Anyone could nominate a charity, which we’d then vote on.

There were two rounds of voting. In the first round, people voted simply yes or no on each charity. Only the charities that breached some threshold in the first round made it through to the second round. Then, in the second round, people had something like 10 points that they could allocate across the remaining charities. Each charity would end up with a portion of the charitable levee based on what portion of the final allocated points they were given.

I nominated the malaria consortium. A friend of mine nominated the shrimp welfare project. The other two charities were conservation charities. This worried me, because by my lights, it’s much better to light money on fire than to give it to conservation charities.

Before voting in the first round, there wasn’t any discussion of the different charities. Despite the fact that we were about to decide how roughly 2,000 pounds—the equivalent of almost 3,000 dollars—were spent, no one seemed to think this merited any serious reflection. Instead, people voted haphazardly without pausing to think. The first round of voting was over in just a few minutes.

Sadly, the shrimp welfare project got voted out. The other three charities remained. Then, once again without one ounce of deliberation, the next round of voting began. I think the Malaria Consortium got about 40% of the final tally while the conservationist charities together got 60%.

In total, the whole affair lasted less than ten minutes. That was the level of carefulness with which we approached spending a sum of money nearly large enough to save a person’s life. That was the level of care taken to deciding how we’d allocate thousands of pounds. We treated this—a monumentally important decision, with a Whole Entire Human Life in the balance—with less care than we’d treat ordering off a dinner menu. Though life and death were on the line, though far-away children’s lives could be saved by this action, we treated it with profound and morally abhorrent callousness.

When one performs an actions with consequences for other people, it is helpful to ask whether they could justify their actions to those other people. Could we? Could we justify spending less than five minutes deliberating about how to spend thousands of pounds—pounds that could have prevented large numbers of cases of malaria? What would be our excuse? Why did no one seem to think the topic merited any serious discussion? Why did no one appreciate the gravity of the situation? Why did no one care?

Now, I do count myself blameworthy in this. In hindsight, I should have said something like “wait, shouldn’t we discuss the various charities before deciding.” I didn’t do this because I was not the one running the meeting, and I didn’t quite realize what was going on until after the voting had started. But clearly I behaved badly. In fact, while this is not the sort of activity for which I will ever face even meager social sanction, I think I behaved extraordinarily badly—much worse than typical instances of socially-legible wrongdoing like being rude to a waiter or making fun of the disabled. I was not willing to risk a bit of social awkwardness to improve how thousands of pounds were spent. This was, I think, a sin, and while my blameworthiness is somewhat shielded by how quickly it all happened, it is still considerable.

Even more enraging was what happened after the voting. After we haphazardly allocated thousands of pounds without stopping to think—as if the lives of the people affected meant nothing—we spent an entire hour discussing the situation regarding whether the gay flag would be hung up! Apparently there was some complicated bureaucratic situation where someone with authority didn’t want it hung up outside of pride month, worrying that it would be a figleaf for broader inaction. Thus, though most of the people at the meeting supported it being hung up, this was hard to implement.

It was not that people were unwilling to carefully deliberate on subject of significant moral import. They spend nearly an hour discussing a labyrinthine situation involving a gay flag. The truth was more unsettling: they simply didn’t regard the expenditure of charitable funds as very important. A gay flag being hung up at the college—that was important! But allocating thousands of pounds, preventing hundreds of malaria cases was all but irrelevant in these people’s minds.

Even if you are of the opinion that hanging up the gay flag is quite important, it is hard to imagine that it is more important than hanging up even one malaria net. If you do think this, then all else equal, were it to be free and technologically feasible, you should support turning anti-malarial bednets into pride flags. Given that it costs only about $7 to put up a net, the money allocated could have put up hundreds of anti-malarial bednets. It is not prudent to spend hundreds of times longer discussing B than A, when A is hundreds of times more important than B.

Were the people voting just morally callous that would have been one thing. Plenty of people are morally callous. But what is most frustrating is that they seem to have endless zeal to address moral issues that are in vogue, fashionable, and trendy. Gay flags are social-justice-coded, and so people care deeply about that situation. But the poor, sick children wasting away in foreign lands are not trendy. Addressing this ongoing catastrophe is far more important than erecting a grand shibboleth that does little more than signal. But few care.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m probably in favor of the pride flag being hung up. It seems like a good idea and could make gay kids feel more welcome. But the idea that this should be given the overwhelming majority of our mental energy—all while we ignore the far-away children wasting away from disease—is about as repugnant a notion as can be conceived. It is just one more point in favor of the thesis that the woke tend only to be concerned about injustice when it falls neatly along social justice lines. Mere deaths from starvation, poverty, and disease are ignored.

I’m worried that people will miss the reason why I am complaining about the flag being put up, so let me make my complaint clear. My complaint is not that I think it’s absurd to spend an hour talking about so minor an issue (although I expect such protracted discussion to mostly be a waste of time, people can discuss whatever they want). My complaint is that the fact that they spent so long discussing the gay flag shows they were willing to spend time thinking about a problem when they cared about it. The problem—the thing that was so dispiriting—was that how to allocate thousands of pounds across different charities, including ones preventing kids from dying of disease, wasn’t something that anyone cared about very much.

There’s a line from The Great Gatsby that I thought of after this whole affair:

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

We all act, to far too great a degree, like careless people, smashing up things and creatures. Few of us treat our everyday decisions with the moral seriousness they deserve, even when the stakes are very high. While this was a particularly egregious example, it was not especially unique—certainly not in kind.

Ultimately, to the people voting callously on how to allocate thousands of pounds and not bothering to reflect before voting, their actions will not negative effect them. The only people who will be made worse off from the decision are distant—their cries will go unheard. But such an episode does illustrate just how indifferent to the lives we can be. We are all more monstrous and beastly than we commonly think.