Shroud-waving is a terrible basis for public policy. We all know this. We know that hard cases make bad law. Being a victim of a terrible crime or a rare disease or a freak accident does not make you an expert on policy-making. Being the relative of a victim does not give you a unique ability to understand a contentious issue. On the contrary, it makes you uniquely susceptible to action bias and much less able than the average person to soberly evaluate trade-offs.
There are times when it is especially important to point this out, but they are the very moments when emotions are running at their hottest and the speaker of blunt truths is most likely to be accused of being heartless. It is an intimidating atmosphere and it is intended to be. That is how the emotional blackmail works. Whichever liberty millions of people are expected to give up seems small when compared to the horror that the victim has suffered. Who would want to add to their pain? For that reason, the immediate trigger for this article will go unmentioned. The point is general anyway.
“If it saves one life, it will be worth it.” This is the frequent refrain of the campaigning victim seeking to make something good out of something bad. It is an understandable impulse, but the statement is not true. Or at least it is not necessarily true. It depends on what “it” is. Invoking the hypothetical life that could be saved — not will, but merely could — distracts us from thinking too much about “it”.
It also depends on how much a life is worth. The immediate response, especially when tempers are running high, is to say that life is priceless, but this is not true either. It is certainly not the view of the government when it has to distribute scarce resources. The Department for Transport values a life at £1.5 million (in 2010 prices) although it confusingly values a prevented fatality at the slightly higher rate of £1.8 million (in 2016 prices). The Department of Health does things differently, putting a value on a quality-adjusted year of life at £60,000, but the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence will only authorise treatments if they provide a quality-adjusted year life for less than £30,000.
Are these figures somewhat arbitrary? Of course they are. But the fact remains that life is not priceless except in some cosmic sense. If the government or any rational philanthropist had the choice between spending £100 billion and letting one person die, they would let them die — not least because there are countless ways in which they could save more lives with the same amount of money. This is inarguable. And yet you would not want to look that person in the eye and say it to their face.
Therein lies the power of shroud-waving. It is a clichéd piece of armchair anthropology but it is nonetheless true that our brains have not evolved to cope with reading every day about the worst things that happen on a planet of eight billion souls. The empathy of the small tribe does not mix with the power of a vast state. It can be difficult to put things in perspective and think about more than one thing at a time.
If my child had died on a rollercoaster, I would never want to see another rollercoaster. I might even think that they should be banned, and I could convincingly claim that a ban would save a life sooner or later. If so, I should be gently ignored. If I was a recovering alcoholic or a problem gambler, I might feel uncomfortable walking past a pub or seeing a bookmaker’s advertisement. My mild discomfort might inspire me to campaign against these things and I could easily find a campaign group to support me. Again, I should be ignored.
It should be possible to have the utmost sympathy for the victims of horrible tragedies while acknowledging that they are the last people to ask for rational and balanced policy solutions. We can be more scornful of activists who seek to weaponise other people’s grief. The most illiberal and occasionally preposterous ideas can be sprung on the public through emotional manipulation. That way lies the road to hell.
