This is conceived as an informal and spontaneous annex to my more extensive blog, Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon.

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Discord Invitation

9th October 2015

Link

The 'baby box' for unwanted South Korean newborns - BBC News →

Some time ago (in June 2012) I posted a link to an article about a “baby box” in Germany in The Baby Box Returns to Europe, and now I see that a “baby box” has been in operation for several years in South Korea.

In that earlier post I reviewed the moral hazard argument that giving people the easy way out of a dilemma increases the likelihood that an increasing number will take the easy way out, while failure to offer an easy way out often results in social consequences that are more destructive than social accommodation. But purists are offended by accommodation, and campaign against any relaxation of standards they are sure are the harbingers of decadence.

This can be illustrated by a couple of lines from one of Blake’s most famous poems, Auguries of Innocence:

The Whore & Gambler by the State
Licencd build that Nations Fate

Is it better to license whores and gamblers, and thus exercise a measure of control and regulation, or it is better to try to run a “law and order” state, with stern penalties and exemplary justice for those who are caught? The choice would seem to be one between laxity and hypocrisy. Which vice do you prefer?

In other posts I have suggested that every civilization has problems that are intrinsic to the structure of that civilization – e.g., industrial accidents are intrinsic to industrial-technological civilization – and when a civilization expires or is supplanted by another civilization, the old problems aren’t solved or resolved, but simply vanish, while new problems intrinsic to the new form of civilization then take the place of these vanished former problems. Another example I have given of this is that of the Investiture Controversy, which was important for medieval European civilization, but essentially vanished when medieval civilization gave way to a modernism.

This line of thought is what I had in mind when I recently wrote on Twitter:

“Perhaps new social problems will emerge from novel selection pressures, and some old problems will become irrelevant.”

…which was a response to Dr. Jim Pass:

“Will humankind replicate its social problems in new #space environments, or will humankind construct social systems that minimize them?”

Dr. Pass responded to my comment:

“We can definitely expect social/cultural change in any social system, so problems will transform, disappear, emerge…”

With which I completely agree, and I added:

“A social problem set and an aspirational solution set define a permutation of civilization; both change with social change.”

A subset of the set of social problems and the aspirational solution set is the set of moral problems and their aspirational solution set, i.e., the ethical systems formulated within civilizations. The moral dimension of civilization is defined by its moral problem set and its aspirational moral solution set.

We see exactly this in the debate over the moral legitimacy of the use of a baby box, the licensing of whores and gamblers, and a whole range of social problems intrinsic to civilization – and, I might note, especially prevalent in highly urbanized civilizations. There is an intrinsic moral problem that is recognized, and an aspirational solution, but the aspirational solution makes demands upon individuals that are greater than most individuals will willingly bear. Other solutions and “work arounds” are found. But the problem doesn’t go away, because human beings never become “perfect” in the sense defined by the aspriational solution set. 

I will note that this line of reasoning is closely related to the argument I made in The Waiting Gambit, which is the deployment of an impossible aspirational solution as a rationalization and justification for waiting rather than acting. A vital civilization acts rather than waits, so that the idea of waiting for the utopian moment in which the people of a civilization are finally worthy of that civilization is a perversion of the idea of civilization. 

Tagged: South Koreababy boxmoral hazardutopiaperfectionThe Waiting Gambitcivilization