Utilitarian calculations of risk are unethical and justify existentially genocidal violence.

In Carceral Humanitarianism (2017), I argue against utilitarian risk-benefit calculations as a principle of ethics. There, I argue that the utilitarian calculus used by both humanitarian aid organizations and so-called humanitarian military operations (with its surgical strikes and statistical modelling) reduces human life to statistical calculations of risk or benefit—and not just risk or benefit in the absolute, but rather risk or benefit as defined by the organization or government doing the calculations. Risks and benefits are always defined with certain goals in mind. They are never without context, and therefore purely “objective” or free from politics or bias. Thus, any utilitarian calculus assumes some good or goal beyond calculation such as pain or pleasure, suffering or quality of life. Even survival—life and death—are valued relative to particular goals that defy the calculations of risk-benefit analysis. In other words, employing risk-benefit and utilitarian calculations, requires making assumptions about end goals and values that defy those very calculations. It is not just that there are always factors beyond our control and variables we do not know, as the deadly coronavirus makes painfully clear, but also that risk-benefit and utilitarian calculations do not operate in a vacuum but necessarily make assumptions about the good.

In the West, risk-benefit analysis or utilitarian calculative reasoning has become the dominant mode of addressing social issues, economic issues, and health issues. For example, Doctors without Borders uses complex risk-benefit computer modeling to set policies about where to send medical aid (Neuman, 2016).Footnote 9 And too many hospitals dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic have had to resort to triage medicine that uses risk-benefit analysis to distribute scarce resources such as ICU beds, oxygen, and ventilators.

This type of calculative reasoning, however, treats human life as fungible and exchangeable, and thereby makes acceptable so-called collateral damage and death. The way risk-benefit analysis is used to calculate acceptable collateral damage in warfare is a prime example of the costs of calculable reason, where utilitarian arguments are used to justify acceptable levels of killing and death. The calculating machine at the heart of utilitarian risk-benefit analysis is dangerous when it makes individual lives fungible and exchangeable. This approach does not and cannot address the singularity of each living being.

Both humanitarian aid and “humanitarian” warfare operate according to logics of calculation. In fact, humanitarian warfare and humanitarian aid operate in tandem. In a sense, nation states create refugees by limiting citizenship, and then pay humanitarian aid organizations to take care of them. National sovereignty and its concomitant notion of citizenship are dependent upon so-called neutral humanitarian space, which occupies an ambiguous space on the outskirts, and borders of, host countries. Refugees are detained in camps and detention centers at the borders in supposedly neutral humanitarian space free from politics and war. Yet, this neutral humanitarian space, often guarded by state police and military, is far from independent of state sovereignty.

To the contrary, humanitarian space is coopted to maintain national sovereignty against the so-called threat of migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. In other words, within carceral humanitarianism, refugees operate as both a threat to national sovereignty, and the justification for shoring up borders.

The fact that the United States and the European Union pay other countries to keep refugees from crossing into their borders makes clear that the lives of these people can be bought and sold like so much cargo to be held in port or lost at sea. For example, the recent crisis in Belarus at the Polish border, where, according to migrants and refugees are being used as political pawns. According to the New York Times: “Europe has long paid other nations to keep refugees away from its borders… This gives countries on the European periphery the leverage, and incentive, to use those refugees as pawns” (see Fisher, 2021).Footnote 10

Policies that treat refugees as collateral damage or units of exchange, where some lives are more valuable than others as calculated through risk-benefit analysis, renders the lives of refugees fungible, and therefore, ultimately, disposable.

Statistical models that compute comparative valuations set out a hierarchy of life, human and otherwise, through which violence is justified, and some lives are valuable (in this case, citizens), while others are disposable (in this case, refugees). Yet, in any risk-benefit or utilitarian calculation, there is always a remainder that cannot be calculated—not just in the arithmetic sense, but also a remainder beyond calculation and beyond recognition.

There is always something we don’t know that is necessarily left out of any calculation. We are not masters of the world and therefore there are always factors beyond our knowledge and control. In addition, there are elements beyond our comprehension. It is not, then, just a matter of gathering all the relevant data, and that fact that we always fall short. There are elements that affect our calculations that we aren’t even aware of, that we can never know. There will always be something outside our comprehension affecting our calculations. Furthermore, human experience, and the experience of life itself, cannot be reduced to calculations or exchangeable units. There is always something about life that transcends even the most sophisticated mathematical calculations. We might call this the remainder left over when we attempt to translate ethics into politics or the singular into the universal. There is always something about the singularity of each living being that cannot be reduced to any system of exchange value.

2.3 Justice Between Ethics and Politics

Justice requires continually renegotiating the relationship between ethics and politics, singular and universal, precisely because there is always something in excess, something beyond recognition. This remainder is the ethical imperative that should keep us awake at night. Rather than lead to inquietude or apathy, the excess beyond our recognition keeps us actively searching for better ways to approach justice without resting on moral rules or risk-benefit calculations or self-righteous principles. The remainder beyond calculation, beyond recognition, demands that we continue to question our own principles and policies, that we continue to examine our concepts of justice and fairness and equality.

An ethical politics is one in which justice demands the hyper-vigilance self-critical reflection on where any response—ethical or political—necessarily falls short. It is an ongoing task that cannot end with risk-benefit analysis. Despite the ethical insomnia and political vertigo caused by this interminable self-questioning, we must act—even leap. Although ultimately the gap between singularity and universality is impassible, the impossibility of achieving justice is no excuse for not attempting it every single day.

This tension between politics (which addresses itself to what can be seen, and to the universal, what can be shared), and ethics (which addressed itself to what cannot be seen, and to the singular, what cannot be shared) is the knot at the center of justice.

Justice is antithetical to utilitarian ethics insofar as individuals are not fungible units that can be exchanged. Utilitarianism relies on the calculability of pain, suffering, survival, or the quality of life itself. And the utilitarian calculus relies on determining thresholds that separate individuals into groups, whether it is those who are members of the moral community or the polis, and those who are not (for example animals), or those whose lives are worth saving and those whose lives are not.

At some point, however, this type of line-drawing inevitably becomes either political or arbitrary. Take debates over the basis for membership in the moral community. What are the criteria for membership? Intelligence, language, reason, sentience, the ability to suffer? And whatever we decide should be the criteria, where do we draw the line? For example, what counts as a language? Does the bees signal dance count? Or, as some argue, is it merely a code and not a language? What counts as intelligence? Peter Singer argues that great apes should be extended rights or admitted to the moral community based on their intelligence, which is greater than severely mentally disabled persons (see Singer, 1999; McMahan, 2009; Anstötz, 1993).Footnote 11 Some disability scholars such as Eva Kittay have argued against this comparison, insisting that human beings should be accorded special status regardless of their mental abilities (Kittay, 1998a, b, 2009).Footnote 12 The controversy over Singer’s argument demonstrates how utilitarian line-drawing is always a fraught endeavor that ultimately rests on an arbitrary cut off point.

For example, in Animal Liberation, Singer draws the line between calms and shellfish, who supposedly cannot feel pain (Singer, 1990, 173–4).Footnote 13 But what if we learn that shellfish can feel pain? In all these utilitarian endeavors, the liminal cases are unsettling because they reveal the arbitrariness of borders and the inadequacy of general classifications. This type of line-drawing or threshold not only ignores the singularity of each individual, but also poses an arbitrary or political dividing line as a natural border. The same is true of national borders used to keep migrants out.

We see something similar in covid triage medicine where triage protocols disadvantage whole classes of people. Old people, disabled people, cancer survivors. The coronavirus lays bare the fantasy of calculable criteria as an ethical way of life. Covid reveals gaping inequities in the length and quality of life caused by social and economic “pre-existing conditions.” Celebrities and politicians from Madonna to Andrew Cuomo called the coronavirus the “great equalizer.” In March 2020, Cuomo tweeted “This virus is the great equalizer.” In reality, covid is the great unequalizer… Footnote 14

The pandemic forces doctors and nurses to make impossible decisions about who is given the chance to live and who will die. But these decisions exist in the context of pre-existing conditions of poverty, racism, and unequal access to health care that skew any attempt at fair or reasonable calculation. In a fair and just world, there would be adequate resources available to everyone. Tragically, the real world is not so fair or just. And risk-benefit analysis and calculative reasoning become the justification for allowing some to die. When those calculations pose as justice or fairness, and when they allow us to feel certain, even righteous, in our decisions, then they risk a slippery slope that leads us to a place where any and all life can become disposable.

The pandemic has made painfully clear the limitations of risk-benefit analysis and calculative reasoning. Doctors and nurses report being traumatized when forced to decide who will get life saving resources. Face-to-face with patients, risk-benefit calculations are not as straight forward as the mathematical or statistical modelling suggests.

A group of research physicians at the University of California, describes the problem:

Utilitarian approaches to ethical problems often appear to be more practical than many alternatives: we can know what the right course of action is by calculating whichever choice will produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Part of the appeal of utilitarian ethics is that it seems like it should “work.” In the real world, however, performing the relevant calculations can be far from easy. This is especially true in crisis situations. It may be impossible to collect the data needed as input for the calculations, it may be difficult or impossible to create the decision rules (predicting prognosis or comparing outcomes) that constitute the calculations, the calculator may be impaired by any number of different factors (moral distress, fatigue, internal and external pressures, etc.) or non-utilitarian moral constraints (such as superseding egalitarian policies, or even exponentially increasing crisis severity) can make utilitarian approaches infeasible. (Fedyk et al., 2020)Footnote 15

2.4 The “Lessor of Evils”

Rather than an ethical solution, utilitarian risk-benefit analysis in a triage medicine is a “lesser of the evils” approach. In fact, as I discovered doing research for Carceral Humanitarianism, when discussing both humanitarian aid and warfare, experts described risk-benefit and collateral damage calculations as the “lessor of the evils” (Oliver, 2017). Some even see these policies of assessing collateral damage as preventing the worst evil by preventing massacre, genocide, and mass death. But as Hannah Arendt reminds us, “Those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they still chose evil” (Arendt, 2003, 30).Footnote 16

In Carceral Humanitarianism, I consider the question of “the worst” violence. There, I argue that contemporary logics of proportionality employed by both humanitarian aid organization and humanitarian military operations are designed to mitigate and control violence and death to avoid the worst violence and death, according to calculations of the “lessor of evils.” Thus, we must ask what is the “most evil,” or the worst evil. We may think of genocide as the worst evil, and, in the West, “the worst” is often shorthand for the “final solution” and the Holocaust. Since the end of World War II, and the Cold War, “the worst” has become associated with the possibility of nuclear war, even the destruction of the entire planet.

What if the worst is a result of the logic of calculation taken to the extreme at the expense of all other worldviews? What if the worst is when this calculable way of thinking is used to justify massacre, genocide, and mass death? When lives become fungible and exchange, then we risk “the worst.” Insofar as contemporary so-called “humanitarian” warfare operates according to the logic of utilitarian calculations of collateral damage that make some lives disposable, it too risks “the worst.”

The worst goes beyond literal killing and signals the erasure a way of seeing the world—or we might as well say a world itself—by covering it over with another worldview. In this regard, comparative models that reduce life to units to be exchanged or plugged into equations operate according to a world-destroying genocidal logic. This is to say, when “the worst” becomes part of the economy of “lessor of evils,” life and death are reduced to a logic of calculation that makes them fungible; one life is weighed against another. Which is the lesser evil: One thousand four hundred and twenty-two refugees who died in the Mediterranean Sea in 2020 or the cost to citizens of the European Union of providing safe passage to refugees? Which is the lesser evil: killing one civilian infant or killing three soldiers in a surgical strike? Which is the lessor evil: a 50-year-old diabetic and mother of two with covid dying because she doesn’t have access to a ventilator, or a widowed and otherwise healthy 70-year-old man dying without access to a ventilator? Etc. Etc.

What is an acceptable death? The death as collateral damage? To be calculable, each life must be reducible to a common denominator and exchangeable. Each life becomes a unit in an equation, a risk factor.

Yet, as the examples I just mentioned suggest, these decisions as to which is worse—or which is the lesser of the evils—are always made by privileging one context over another. Citizenship over foreign nations. Civilians over military. Diabetes over motherhood. How do we weigh one life against another? How do we decide whose life is worth more? Whose life is worth more and whose life is expendable as collateral damage? Which factors are deemed relevant, and which are not? Which goals are deemed worthy, and which are not? Ultimately, utilitarian calculus cannot give us the answers to these questions.