The system is structured in such a way that those who make no effort to know can remain in blissful ignorance, and those who do make an effort will find it very difficult to discover the truth. How is it possible to avoid stealing when the global economic system is ceaselessly stealing on my behalf and without my knowledge? It doesn’t matter if you judge actions by their consequences (it is wrong to steal because it makes the victims miserable) or whether you believe in categorical duties that should be followed irrespective of consequences (it is wrong to steal because God said so). The problem is that it has become extremely complicated to grasp what we are actually doing.
The commandment not to steal was formulated in the days when stealing meant physically taking with your own hand something that did not belong to you. Yet today, the really important arguments about theft concern completely different scenarios. Suppose I invest $10,000 in shares of a big petrochemical corporation, which provides me with an annual 5 per cent return on my investment. The corporation is highly profitable because it does not pay for externalities. It dumps toxic waste into a nearby river without caring about the damage to the regional water supply, to the public’s health, or to the local wildlife. It uses its wealth to enlist a legion of lawyers who protect it against any demand for compensation. It also retains lobbyists who block any attempt to legislate stronger environmental regulations.
Can we accuse the corporation of ‘stealing a river’? And what about me personally? I never break into anyone’s house or snatch dollar bills from anyone’s purse. I am not aware how this particular corporation is generating its profits. I barely remember that part of my portfolio is invested in it. So am I guilty of theft? How can we act morally when we have no way of knowing all the relevant facts?
One can try to evade the problem by adopting a ‘morality of intentions’. What’s important is what I intend, not what I actually do or the outcome of what I do. However, in a world in which everything is interconnected, the supreme moral imperative becomes the imperative to know. The greatest crimes in modern history resulted not just from hatred and greed, but even more so from ignorance and indifference. Charming English ladies financed the Atlantic slave trade by buying shares and bonds in the London stock exchange, without ever setting foot in either Africa or the Caribbean. They then sweetened their four o’clock tea with snow-white sugar cubes produced in hellish plantations – about which they knew nothing.
In Germany in the late 1930s, the local post-office manager might be an upright citizen looking after the welfare of his employees, and personally helping people in distress to find missing parcels. He was always the first one to arrive at work and the last one to leave, and even in snowstorms made sure that the post came on time. Alas, his efficient and hospitable post office was a vital cell in the nerve system of the Nazi state. It was speeding along racist propaganda, recruitment orders to the Wehrmacht, and stern orders to the local SS branch. There is something amiss with the intentions of those who do not make a sincere effort to know.
But what counts as ‘a sincere effort to know’? Should postmasters in every country open the mail they are delivering, and resign or revolt if they discover government propaganda? It is easy to look back with absolute moral certainty at Nazi Germany of the 1930s – because we know where the chain of causes and effects led. But without the benefit of hindsight, moral certainty might be beyond our reach. The bitter truth is that the world has simply become too complicated for our hunter-gatherer brains.
Most of the injustices in the contemporary world result from large-scale structural biases rather than from individual prejudices, and our hunter-gatherer brains did not evolve to detect structural biases. We are all complicit in at least some such biases, and we just don’t have the time and energy to discover them all. Writing this book brought the lesson home to me on a personal level. When discussing global issues, I am always in danger of privileging the viewpoint of the global elite over that of various disadvantaged groups. The global elite commands the conversation, so it is impossible to miss its views. Disadvantaged groups, in contrast, are routinely silenced, so it is easy to forget about them – not out of deliberate malice, but out of sheer ignorance.
For example, I know absolutely nothing about the unique views and problems of aboriginal Tasmanians. Indeed, I know so little that in a previous book I assumed aboriginal Tasmanians don’t exist any more, because they were all wiped out by European settlers. In fact there are thousands of people alive today who trace their ancestry back to the aboriginal population of Tasmania, and they struggle with many unique problems – one of which is that their very existence is frequently denied, not least by learned scholars.
Even if you personally belong to a disadvantaged group, and therefore have a deep first-hand understanding of its viewpoint, that does not mean you understand the viewpoint of all other such groups. For each group and subgroup faces a different maze of glass ceilings, double standards, coded insults and institutional discrimination. A thirty-year-old African American man has thirty years’ experience of what it means to be an African American man. But he has no experience of what it means to be an African American woman, a Bulgarian Roma, a blind Russian or a Chinese lesbian.