Law & Society Blog

Given Hanno’s post directly below, it is particularly appropriate to examine the question to what extent we ought to mourn the victims of the 9/11 attacks, relative to those who die from many of the causes mentioned in the chart in Hanno’s post.

In response to this post of mine on the anniversity of the 9/11 attacks, Alex Gregory of Atopian commented that I seemed to be writing as though the lives of the 9/11 victims mattered more than the lives of others who have died from other more common causes (e.g. cancer, car accidents). In order to do justice to Alex’s remarks, I’ll quote him in full:

Sometimes academic discussion about these things can seem alienated and innapropriate, and I certainly don’t mean to downplay the idea that many people did lose their lives, which is certainly a very bad thing.

However, with those two caveats noted, I have the impression that you’re a consequentialist kind of person. If that is the case, then why do you mourn these people more than the greater number who have died from cancer, or heart disease, or car accidents, and so on?

That, as I say, is not to say that 9/11 wasn’t a very bad event. It’s just that what was bad about it is surely the badness /for those people who lost their lives/ (and those who thereby lost a loved one). But equally, there are more people who experience equal badness from other causes. Why the disproportionality?

First, Alex is right that my views in ethics are broadly consequentialist in character. Furthermore, it seems clear enough that one need not even be a consequentialist in order to think that, all else equal, every death is equally morally bad, regardless of its cause. The deaths of those on 9/11, tragic as they surely were, were in themselves no worse than many other deaths. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is at least some reason to think that those deaths deserve more of our attention than at least some other deaths, for example deaths resulting from car accidents, not because the deaths are in themselves worse, but because their cause differs from other causes in certain important ways (I will not deal with deaths from cancer in this post, because it is, I think, a much more difficult and complex case than that of car accident deaths).

In some sense we as a society choose to subject ourselves to a certain amount of risk when we allow people to drive, and we as individuals subject ourselves to a certain amount of risk every time we get in a car. We know that so long as people are driving in the numbers that they do, a certain number of people will die as a result of car accidents. We can do much to mitigate the risks (e.g. build safer cars, strictly enforce drunk driving laws, etc.), and we should certainly do all these things unless the costs are prohibitive, but we cannot eliminate the risks entirely. We accept this risk because the benefits that the overwhelming majority of us obtain from being able to get to where we need to go by driving outweigh the very high costs that wind up being imposed on the unfortunate victims of car crashes (and, of course, their loved ones). Given the severe costs suffered by those unlucky individuals, the only justification for allowing anyone to drive at all is that such a policy provides smaller benefits to a much greater number of people, enough to outweigh the costs. This requires that we accept that, at least in some way and to some extent, benefits can be aggregated across persons and weighed (this sort of case is a significant problem for those, like Scanlon, who reject aggregation entirely, and want all justification of actions and policies to be individualistic). The cause of the deaths that occur in car accidents, then, tragic as those deaths surely are, is one that society plans for and accepts as the cost of allowing the majority the benefits provided by driving.

The cause of the deaths on 9/11, on the other hand, was not a danger that our society chose to subject itself to in order to gain benefits. Some might argue that the danger should be considered at least foreseen as a result of our government’s policies in the Middle East, and that therefore the risk was imposed on us by our government. First, this would not make the case exactly analogous to the driving case, since the 9/11 attacks required deliberate action on the part of agents that was surely not justified, no matter how unjust we think U.S. Middle East policy is (and surely it is unjust). Second, even if our government did impose foreseeable risks on us, and failed to do all they could to protect us from those risks, and even if most of us do gain some benefits as a result of U.S. Middle East policy (e.g. cheaper gas), many of us think that we should not be pursuing those benefits or taking on the associated risks at all (we might think this for purely prudential reasons, or for moral reasons; it does not matter for my purposes). But I doubt that very many people think that we should disallow driving entirely in order to avoid any deaths from car accidents (though we should, I think, endorse a significant reduction in driving for environmental and economic reasons).

Because of this difference in the cause of the two types of deaths, I think it is much more important, as a political and social matter, to remind ourselves of the deaths on 9/11, and to have a public debate over how to prevent further such deaths, than it is to remind ourselves of the deaths of car accident victims. This is not because the lives of the 9/11 victims mattered more; surely they did not. But the need to avoid further such deaths in the future is great, while there is no such need to avoid future deaths from car accidents (it would be wonderful if we could, but we can’t without giving up the ability to drive).

Finally, let me acknowledge a significant omission in my original post to which Alex responded. I mentioned the deaths of those who died in the World Trade Center, but neglected to mention the now greater number of American soldiers that have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the much greater number of Iraqi and Afghani civilians who have died as a result of our nation’s military actions in those countries. Their deaths fall into the same category as those who died on 9/11 (at the very least all those who have died in Iraq fall into this category, for surely neither we in the U.S. nor the Iraqis are better off as a result of the war there), and deserved to be mentioned right along side them.

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