Motus Mentis

There’s a been a fuss about President Trump’s plan to remove the Obama-era ban on elephant trophies. Bien-pensant liberals greeted the news with uncomplicated moral revulsion, along the following lines:

1) Elephants are marvelous, beautiful, intelligent animals.
2) Hunting marvelous, beautiful, intelligent animals is always morally wrong.

Therefore:

3) Supporting a policy that endorses, or merely fails to forbid, the hunting of elephants is morally wrong.

“But,” you might ask, “if hunting elephants is obviously and objectively evil, why would our President want to lift the existing ban?”

That’s an easy one. It requires no thinking at all, in fact; just an axiom:

1) Donald Trump is an evil man.

Q.E.D. The modern liberal mind is, as far as I can tell, content to leave it here. The process is the usual one:

1) Notice some unfairness or unpleasantness in the world.
2) Feel badly about it.
3) Blame somebody. (In this case, it’s First World males with … guns.)
4) Get the government to DO SOMETHING!!!
5) Relax; feel better.
6) Go to 1).

Does any of this seem to you somehow less than rigorous? Right, me too. Maybe there’s another way we could look at it. How about this:

1) Elephants are marvelous, beautiful, intelligent animals.
2) They live, however, in a place that is crowded with humans, and very poor.
3) There are powerful incentives for the locals to kill them. Elephants damage farmland, and their tusks and other body-parts fetch high prices on black markets.
4) First-world hunters with money to spend will pay a lot to bag an elephant. Between guide fees, trophy fees, and VAT, the price can be well over fifty thousand dollars. That’s a huge amount in a typical African economy.
5) This makes elephants a highly profitable asset, and strongly encourages the management of them as a sustainable resource.
6) If all First World nations were to ban the hunting of elephants, this economic incentive would be destroyed. (You can’t charge anything close to the same fees simply to go and look at them.)
7) When elephants are no longer a profitable resource, the incentives to preserve them as such go away.
8) Just sending money to the local governments to spend on elephant-preservation won’t do, due to corruption. To get poor Africans actually to manage elephants as a valuable and renewable resource requires an ongoing and direct economic incentive.
9) In the absence of such an incentive, elephants will simply be poached to extinction. It doesn’t matter if it’s illegal, or if it seems immoral to comfortable Western liberals. (This is Africa we’re talking about here, folks.)

Therefore:

9) As distasteful as it may be, allowing the hunting of elephants may in fact be the best, perhaps the only, way, to preserve their continued existence.
10) A trophy ban, simple and morally gratifying as it surely is, might well have the unintended consequence of hastening the extinction of these marvelous, beautiful, intelligent animals.

The problem, of course, is that 9) and 10) describe how things are in the actually existing world, as opposed to the neat little model of it that so many of us rely upon for our opinion-making. In that actually existing world, the consequences of our actions are usually complex and hard to predict — which makes moral clarity elusive, and so should counsel caution.

We’ll let James Burnahm have the last word:

THE GUILT OF THE LIBERAL causes him to feel obligated to try to do something about any and every social problem, to cure every social evil. This feeling, too, is non-rational: the liberal must try to cure the evil even if he has no knowledge of the suitable medicine or, for that matter, of the nature of the disease; he must do something about the social problem even when there is no objective reason to believe that what he does can solve the problem””when, in fact, it may well aggravate the problem instead of solving it.

… The harassed liberal is relentlessly driven by his Eumenidean guilt. It does not permit him to “let well enough alone’ or “stick to his own cabbage patch’ or decide that the trouble is “none of his business’; or to reflect that, though the evil is undoubtedly there and he is sincerely sorry for its victims, he doesn’t understand damn-all about it and even if he did he hasn’t got the brains and resources to fix it up. He may not know much, generally speaking he does not know much, about economics, but that lack in no way inhibits him from demanding that industry and government do this, that or the other to cure unemployment; he may not have a single serious idea about strategy and international affairs, but he will nevertheless join his fellow liberals in calling for grandiose measures concerning arms, alliances, bases, and colonies; he may have no acquaintance with the actual problems of mass education, but he will nevertheless insist on the most far-reaching reforms of the school system.

… The good intention””slum clearance, racial equality, better health, decolonization, high standard of living, peace””plus plenty of action is assumed to guarantee the goodness of the program; and the badness, one might add, of those reactionaries who are rash enough to question it.

— Suicide of the West, p 221.