Just deserts
Thursday, April 9 2009
I’m not a regular Daily Kos reader, but yesterday I clicked through from NOW! Blog to The Conservative Argument Against Universal Health Care. One item on that list caught my eye:
Just desserts
Related to the previous argument, the “just desserts” argument says that people deserve what they get. [...] By this argument, the outcome of a person’s life is caused by proximal factors (internal factors like character and judgment); less important to outcomes are distal factors (external factors like the structure of society and public policy). By laying the fact that they are uninsured on their own shoulders, conservatives can argue that ” It’s their own fault”.
A minor point: the phrase is more accurately “just deserts“, where “desert” is a word meaning “what one deserves”. Anyway, I’m not convinced of the provenance of this document, though the Kossack in question says it came from The Vanguard.Org. You can find a similar argument used as a straw man in this document from AMSA (.pdf).
Even if not a bonafide conservative talking point, this basic idea is pervasive enough to be trouble. Formally, it’s called the Doctrine of Retribution: the notion that the world is a fundamentally just place, and bad people will be punished. That may well be true, but somehow it gets distorted to also mean that every person who suffers deserves it – i.e., you’re uninsured because it’s your own fault. This fallacy informs a lot of prejudice and bigotry: you may know it as the idea that black people are poor only because they lack work ethic, or women get raped only if they’re “asking for it” by how they dress. Now we see it being applied to health care…
Like many conservative tropes, this one is drawn from a highly selective reading of the (Hebrew/Christian) Bible: suffering is punishment from God, visited only on those who deserve it. In fact, the progress from the doctrine of retribution to a more compassionate, more sophisticated understanding of human suffering is a major arc of the Bible; by the end of the Christian version, Jesus and Paul erase any notion of retribution as an ordering principle for the universe.
I learned all of this not from church – though I do go – but from “Intro to the Old Testament”, taught by Professor Priest (seriously), a man so old he might have learned the subject matter by first-hand experience. And while teaching us the Doctrine of Retribution, Dr. Priest mentioned that this idea had been the crux of a minor controversy “recently”, and that George Will had written on behalf of his son, who has Down Syndrome. George Will has taken a beating lately for being something of a liar, but I decided he might at one time have been a reasonable man; it took me all morning, but I finally found his column* buried in the Lexis-Nexis archives. ‘Recently’ was a lot further back than I expected: 1985.
In the column, Will quotes a Department of Education official who was arguing against funding education services for mentally handicapped people:
“They (the handicapped) falsely assume that the lottery of life has penalized them at random. This is not so. Nothing comes to an individual that he has not, at some point in his development, summoned. Each of us is responsible for his life situation.” And, “There is no injustice in the universe. As unfair as it may seem, a person’s external circumstances do fit his level of inner spiritual development. . . .”
Bear in mind that this is a Reagan Administration official that Will is quoting; he writes as a conservative, arguing against her mindless prejudice. Will was vehemently opposed to the “just desserts” argument, especially as a rationale for public policy, in part because he has a son with Down Syndrome; of course, Will’s son has done nothing to deserve whatever hardship comes with that condition.
George Will might disagree, but I think something very similar is happening in the health care debate. Going back to the Kos posting: the latent implication of “just desserts” is that “sick people deserve what they get” – whether that’s adequate health care and a fulfilling life, or a slow and painful death. This prejudice might have been unacceptable in 1985 – the official was forced to resign – but it’s still alive and all-too-common today.
The question of the moment, of course, is whether sick people deserve health care. The “just desserts” argument says they “deserve whatever they get”, thus blaming the sick for sins they did not commit in a world that does not exist. And though most people would not admit as much, I think too many believe in “just desserts” at some level. A person who believes the sick deserve sickness is not someone who can ever support a universal health care system – but only because his opposition is premised on a false understanding of the world.
People want the world to be a just place; it’s hard for them to accept the idea that bad (or good) things happen to the undeserving. It’s much easier for them to assume – if only subconsciously – that sick people have done something to deserve their illness. This is the basic premise behind a lot of faith and spiritualist healing, plus a great many products masquerading as “alternative medicine”. You also see it in arguments that claim – more or less – our health care system would work if only all the fat people would stop being lazy and lose all that weight. If you’re sick, this is why some people make you feel like a ‘leper’; they think you did something to deserve your disease.**
We should recognize this premise for what it is – cruel prejudice against sick people – and do what we can to refute it. George Will and I disagree as to what this means for health care reform, but we might agree that health care reform is problematic enough without “crackpot metaphysics about the perfect justice of the universe”. It’s a massive mistake to base social policy on the assumption that all bad things happen only to people who deserve them.
To me, the fact that bad things happen to good people is an argument for a universal system of health care. It’s not the only argument, and not the best, but it’s among the many good reasons to support universal health care. There are defensible reasons for conservatives to oppose universal health care; the bigotry that sick people deserve their illness is not among them.
(Cake photo from Cake Wrecks)
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