Wednesday 27 June 2018

Is this a moral judgement?

Consider the following moral judgement-
It is morally wrong to lie to parents that you’re taking their children away from them for 20 minutes to give them a bath, but then instead separate the children from their parents indefinitely, imprison the parents, and confine the children in giant holding facilities where they can no longer be contacted, as United States border agents are apparently now doing.
On examination, it is wholly foolish. Parents do not hand over their kids to strangers who evince a desire to 'bathe' them even for five minutes.

What is happening here, if there is any truth to the underlying allegations, is that either

1) certain border guards want to separate kids from a  specific type of parent for some reason of their own which may or may not be 'moral'. In this case, they are guilty of a justiciable wrong and have no defence of sovereign immunity. It is pointless to ponder the moral rightness or wrongness of their reason for acting as they did because the fact that they did so by their own choice and without any explicit order is sufficient to bring them to trial and, hopefully, such condign punishment as might serve to eliminate this obnoxious practice.

2) the guards don't want to do so but are being illegally constrained by their employer to a morally repugnant course of action. In this case, the original moral wrong is part of something wider of which the border guard too is a victim. Here the remedy lies in enabling borders guards to avail of statutory and administrative protection of their rights- in this case as 'whistle-blowers'.

Simply saying these people are morally wrong to act the way they do does not help anybody.  Moral judgements which have no conceptual tie to action can't claim to deal with real world wrongs at all. An example of a 'conceptual tie to action' rendering our moral judgements efficacious in righting real world wrongs is the work done by the Government Accountability Project which seeks to help border-guards and other such people maintain their moral integrity without being excessively and illegally penalised for doing so.

There is no great 'moral wrong' in telling a 'common knowledge' type white-lie which does more to soothe the child than mislead the parent.
There is a legal wrong, if a civil servant either tells this lie to make his own life easier or for some other purpose of his own. However, there may not be any moral wrong at all.

However, in this case, it seems that there is a moral wrong done, not by border guards, but some person or combination of persons not all of whom can be held legally accountable for their actions.

What is the nature of that wrong? It is one of inflicting avoidable suffering for no good purpose. This policy has no deterrent effect. On the contrary, it creates a perverse, adversely selective, incentive to enter the country with a minor. It can have no deontic or utilitarian justification. Further, it shows its sponsors as lacking a moral compass, or even basic common sense, and thus demoralises those who might otherwise support them.

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