I don’t know about you but occasionally when I read something, particularly in a newspaper editorial, it brings me up short and it’s difficult for me to devote much attention to the rest. Although I mostly agree with this morning’s editorial in the New York Times on healthcare reform, that’s how this sentence affected me:
Health care reform is vitally important both to cover tens of millions of uninsured Americans — a moral imperative — and to bring down the relentlessly rising costs of care.
I think it must be that I don’t understand the argument that healthcare insurance is a moral imperative. That’s the case for two reasons. First, healthcare insurance isn’t healthcare. Does it really do any good to provide insurance if there’s no care available? It would seem to me that making healthcare more plentiful would be the greater priority. Second, where I come from “Thou shalt not kill” means “Thou shalt not kill Chinese people, English people, etc.” rather than just “Thou shalt not kill Americans”. That’s how I would understand a moral imperative.
If there’s a moral imperative to insure doesn’t “Thou shalt insure” mean we must insure everybody? Since that’s manifestly impossible, I don’t see how it can be a moral imperative.
I can understand the argument that, in a wealthy country like the United States and make no mistake the United States is still a wealthy country despite our present economic woes, we wish to extend the benefits of healthcare to all of our citizens. That’s analogous to the view of Social Security. But moral imperative? I don’t get it.
Perhaps someone could explain it to me.
Oh, it’s quite simple, really. The article claims that it’s a moral imperative for the same reason that the stimulus was claimed to be the biggest crisis since the Great Depression and if we don’t pass it now the economy will utterly implode, or more to the point, for the same reason health care is often claimed to be a right: because the argument works, and their goal is not to win the argument with logic and debate and by bringing the audience to freely given and informed consent, but to win the argument.
Fundamentally, when you are trying to sell people on a position, you can take one of two approaches: either you can patiently explain all the facts and tradeoffs involved, make the case for why your position is the best possible approach given all of that, and attempt to bring the audience willingly to see your position as best; or you can appeal to surface emotions, or threats, or facile arguments that sound good but are logically inconsistent. Of course, the latter is much easier to do, and in cases where an audience is pre-disposed to some particular position, even easier still. So if you frame something as a “right,” people will be more likely to be for it simply because our culture still says that rights are a good in and of themselves, and privileged above all other claims. So you can call health care a right just by saying it is, as Obama did during one of the debates, which gives that position an immediate moral authority that must be refuted by the other side. And McCain, in that same debate, was reduced by the format to saying that health care is not a right. But McCain, even could he have argued what a right was and that therefore health care is clearly not a right (and I doubt he has any conception of rights that would have equipped him to make that argument), was not in a position, due to format, to actually make that argument. Worse still, when politics is a matter of surface emotion, as it often is in the US given our peculiar system of governance, “when you’re explaining, you’re losing.” In other words, the very question was set up so as to produce a no-win situation for the position against health care as a right.
The article you mention takes the same tack. People understand that a moral imperative is something that must be done because it is the correct thing to do. They often don’t understand why that is so, and most people don’t want to take the time to ask the kind of questions that you asked about that statement. Given that, more people will be swayed to the argument that the government should provide health insurance, or a single payer system, or whatever, by the term “moral imperative” than against it by your questions. If all that one cares about is winning, then really it doesn’t matter if the arguments are valid or logically sound or reasonable or even sane. All that matters is how many votes (or in this case, percentage points in a poll) they swing to your side.
Of course, I wouldn’t put it past either side to try rigged polls, either, simply to create or destroy a sense of inevitability. Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost our civic sense, part of which is that the point of public debate is not to win the debate, but to come to the best possible policy conclusions. I suspect that this is almost entirely because of our winner take all, first past the post voting system, which essentially mandates a two party system, and the adversarial and hyperpartisan atmosphere it engenders. Regardless, since we have no civic sense, and are thus easily divided into emotional mobs chanting “yes” or “no,” depending on which mob we’re in and the situation at hand, throwing out phrases like “moral imperative” in utterly inappropriate situations can still be quite effective.
But I’m reasonably sure, all that said, that you were being rhetorical, rather than literal, so I’ll stop now.
No, actually, I was asking a real question. I really don’t understand the argument that there’s a moral imperative to provide healthcare insurance and I was hoping someone would try to explain the argument to me.
I’ve got a ridiculous amount of formal training in ethics and morals: years and years worth. I don’t understand the argument and I’d like to have it explained to me.
The answer, of course, is that there is no moral imperative to health care insurance, and the Times is not making an argument that there is. They are making an assertion. The reason they are making the assertion of a moral imperative is to forestall having to make a utilitarian argument, which they must assume (and I would agree) would be the weaker argument: weaker in the sense that they would have to make an argument, where claims have evidence to support them, and weaker in the sense that they would almost certainly lose the argument once made.
It’s clear (particularly given the claim made and the absence of evidence offered) that the Times has no intention of defending the claim with an argument, so they leave it to their opponents to refute their claim, as you are doing here. And since the Times controls the forum, they know that (at least in that place) there will be no effective refutation.
That’s it; that’s all there is. It’s a shame that rhetoric, logic, and ethics are no longer taught, but there it is.