Harm by Individuals, Harm by Systems

What makes a particular action a sin? A simple definition might be that it violates one of the two great commandments to love God and love our neighbor. Violations of the first great commandment are harder to see (if my heart is full of hatred for God, how could you tell?), but violations of the second are typically easier. If I do something to harm another person, it’s interpersonal. It’s out there in the world.

Of course this doesn’t capture everything that gets labeled a sin. Why is it a sin for me to drink coffee? I’m not harming someone else. You might say that this must mean that it’s harming my relationship with God because he said not to. This interpretation makes the first great commandment a catchall for any sin where there isn’t harm to another person. They’re wrong because God said so, not because they actually cause harm (making them kind of like the legal idea of malum prohibitum, where an act is wrong because it’s prohibited, not because it’s immoral). Or you could also argue that things like drinking coffee are wrong because they’re doing harm to me, and the second great commandment says I need to love myself too. But I think this boils down to the same line of reasoning. We would call an action self-harming if it’s labeled a sin and it doesn’t clearly harm another person. The old euphemism of calling masturbation “self-abuse” used in some Church talks and publications springs to mind as an example.

In any case, in this post, I’m mostly just thinking about sins that violate the second great commandment, where one person causes harm to another. Our discussion of these sins in the Church typically focuses on the person committing the sin rather than the person harmed by it. I think it makes sense, because harming another person is an action that we can choose to do or not, so we’re at fault if we do it, while being the victim of someone else’s actions isn’t blameworthy. (Of course in some Church rhetoric, the question of who gets harmed gets turned backward, like for example in discussions of rhetoric, where male viewers feel like female clothing choosers are attacking them, rather than the way Jesus had it, where the blame falls on lustful viewers.)

But here’s the question: what if there are sins that have victim without any corresponding person doing the harming? For example, what if someone with diabetes dies because they can no longer afford insulin after the companies that produce it have suddenly and dramatically increased the price? There’s clear harm. But who’s to blame? A company’s salesperson who communicated the new price to the person? A company’s executives? Its shareholders? The head of the government agency that regulates drugs? Middle managers in the agency? The politician who appointed the head of the agency? The voters who elected the politician?

Or consider a less dramatic example. What if your ISP bill gets messed up and you’re double charged? What if you have to chat with an infuriating chatbot for 30 minutes before it agrees to pass you along to a human, and then you’re passed around a labyrinthine organization of call centers before you can get to someone who can fix it? It’s far less dramatic harm, but it’s still harm. Who sinned, that your interaction with the ISP is so painful, the front-line workers or the executives or the shareholders or the regulators or the voters?

And of course if I move beyond the developed world, there are all kinds of questions about complex causes of harm to people. If someone in a less developed country can’t get clean drinking water, who’s at fault? There are just endless historical and ongoing causes for some countries being poorer than others, before we even get into thinking about differences in access to clean water within a country.

Note: This next paragraph spoils The Good Place, so if you haven’t watched it and don’t want it spoiled, just skip ahead to the following paragraph.

If you’ve watched The Good Place, you remember that the characters discover that it’s for exactly this reason that nobody has made it to the good place in centuries. The world has gotten so complicated that every action has blameworthy elements, through the myriad intricate connections between all of us through all our complex social systems.

In my last post, I used recycling as an example of a secular good to draw a comparison with spiritual goods. I’d like to go back to that comparison here to make another point. Individual recycling is all well and good, but you’ve probably seen discussion of the idea that the good that we can do with it in terms of reducing harm to the environment and global warming is minuscule in comparison with the good we might do if we could make changes to big systems, to corporations and governments. If I recycle all my aluminum cans, that’s great, and if many people do so, that’s better, but if the same group of people can push Amazon or Walmart to recycle just a little bit more or use slightly more efficient packaging, the effect will dwarf our individual efforts.

Along the same lines, if our goal is to reduce the total harm done to people, then it might make more sense to focus on fixing big harmful systems than to focus on individually doing less bad stuff. If we can prod our elected officials to make the process of getting a driver’s license in our state or country just one percent less needlessly painful, think of all the hours of life people will have back! Or, to pick an example that will immediately feel more political, if we live in the US and we can prod our elected officials to pass Medicare for All, think of all the needless medical suffering that will be alleviated!

So why don’t GAs get into the question of fixing systems that cause harm? Like I said above, I think it’s at least partly that their goal is to push people to be better, to do less sinning, so their focus will always be on the doers of sin rather than the victims of sin. Also, as the universal healthcare example shows, getting into fixing systems will quickly feel political. I think this is especially the case because GAs are generally politically conservative, and they prefer to think of people living in some ideal world without complex systems that might be harming them, where all problems can be solved if they pull harder on either their spiritual or their economic bootstraps. For example, here’s Ezra Taft Benson’s famous line about getting people out of slums:

The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ takes the slums out of people, and then they take themselves out of the slums. The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature.

I wonder if there isn’t also just a difference in how much we value this life versus the next. How likely is it that after we die, we’ll end up in a next life where we’ll be happier if we learned in this life to be less sinful? GAs, of course, consider this a certainty. I, as a heretic, think the probability is well under 50%. So it’s not surprising that someone like me would be more concerned, by comparison, with harm done to people in this life, whatever its cause.

I’m not sure exactly my point here. I guess I just wanted to say that I think I understand GAs’ focus on individual doers of harm rather than on systems. But if they did change their minds and want to focus on reduction of harm, regardless of whether the harm is done by an individual or a complex system, they’d probably do better by focusing on ways that big complex systems could be made better. I do think it’s praiseworthy that the Church directs humanitarian aid to people in need, but it could do far, far more, not to mention GAs could encourage members to consider harm-causing systems when we vote and spend money.