The moral circle was first talked about by Stoic philosopher Hierocles in 2AD and is defined as the number and type of entities you give moral consideration. In the context of Right Thing Right Now, Holiday talks lots about justice and who justice applies to in society. Which of the people in your city are afforded the same rights as you? Do these rights on paper get applied in practice equally?
In Canada it’s widely documented that First Nations are overrepresented in our prison system and while some of that comes from violent prisoner’s claiming Indigenous status for an easier time in prison the lived reality of my First Nations friends is that they get pulled over and asked why they drive a fancy car because they’re “Indians”. You’d be hard pressed to say that the rights on paper are equally applied to First Nations and Caucasian people1. In the US (and I’m sure in Canada) the same can be said for how laws are applied to people of African descent vs European descent.
So my big question as I read this was, how do we expand the areas of moral concern in society so that justice can be equally applied to all?
Confounding variables for expanding moral circles
Holiday says that all the injustice in the world gives us ample opportunity to struggle to increase the rights of others2. Yet when we look around the world today we see a lot of contraction of the rights afforded to people in our countries. Women lost rights with abortion bans and now are coming close to death because of the lack of rights. Canada claims to protect the rights of temporary foreign workers yet abuse is documented. To throw salt in the wound in many cases temporary foreign workers are good enough to work here, but have few paths to permanent citizenship. They have trouble leaving abusive jobs because they’d loose their VISA. All of this amounts to modern day slavery in Canada where employers have all the power to treat workers as they want and workers have to take the abuse.
Timed with this we’ve seen increasing income inequality and thus scarcity for anyone not in the top income brackets. We know that people deal with scarcity by tunneling, focusing on only the immediate things they need3. When we’re scraping by for basic needs, it’s easy to view any perceived advantage being given to a group we don’t consider ourselves part of as resources being taken away from ourselves. When we’re in scarcity our moral circle decreases and we only worry about justice for ourselves excluding all others.
The advantages given to others don’t have to be real, as we often see middle-aged white dudes complaining about diversity initiatives which merely make a small step towards leveling the playing field from tipped 99% towards white dudes to only 70% towards white dudes.
Expanding the circle
If we want to expand our circles of moral concern (justice in Holiday’s terms) then we need to decrease scarcity for everyone. In Canada that means expanding health care affordability and increasing social supports.
Back in 2017 Canada was spending around $50k annually to care for someone living on the streets, yet we balk at the idea of giving someone on the edge of homelessness $12k yearly as far too much money for someone. The reality is that if we gave everyone on income assistance three times as much assistance and they were able to stay in homes thus not suffer the long term health issues attributed to homelessness we’d be saving almost $20k yearly per person we are able to keep of the streets.
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If we let someone get into scarcity and then jail it costs over $100k a year to house them in the US. Given those numbers it would be cheaper to give the families of everyone incarcerated $50k yearly if it kept them out of crime.
This is one big reason I advocate for universal basic income. Many studies have been done and most people use the money to get better jobs and relieve the scarcity in their lives. Very few use it to just not work and do dumb stuff. So if we made sure, via UBI, that everyone had enough I expect we’d see justice expanding because people wouldn’t feel like they’re fighting tooth and nail for everything in their lives.
What can you do
If you want to see justice expand for everyone then you need to put some skin in the game. You can’t simply argue for the right cause, you have to act4. When the going gets tough remember that when you disengage from a cause because it’s too hard we empower the other side to keep going because they see they can exhaust us5. If you think that your small effort in the face of big problems isn’t making an impact, know that the single person you touched with your effort was happy to see you make the effort and you made a difference in their day6.
We should be judged not by how we treat those with more power than ourselves, but by how we treat those that are powerless in the face of us.
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