Trading Pesk

Chill Uncategorized

Trade-offs and the philosophy thereof is something I’ve been thinking about lately. In their justified disdain for the trolley problem, liberals are almost completely incapable of dealing with the idea of real-world trade-offs. Not every choice is one that will inevitably harm someone(s), but in some situations this is in fact the case. In a pandemic and its response, many choices do in fact involve real, ineluctable harms to help and help to harm. Deny it all you want, but it’s like gravity: still present; the trade-offs still persist.

For instance: how many children is it worth harming so that older people might be protected from Covid? Or alternately, how many grandparents must be prevented from seeing their grandkids for years to protect the grandparents from Covid?

How long must kids remain out of school to prevent community spread, and how much future quality of life and earnings are we willing to sacrifice for that? How long should we wear masks and in what situations? How many businesses must we destroy to save how many people? How many women must we drive from the workplace permanently to save how many? You get the idea.

There are further second-order failure modes and consequences from these trade-offs, too. But the main lib strategy has been lying and denying rather than dealing with them honestly (and there are many more I could list easily). This has harmed the fight against the pandemic immensely and will continue to do so since trade-offs aren’t an idea many libs seems able to even understand, much less account for in their moral models of the world.