I have heard it said that good sex can keep someone in a bad relationship; after reading and researching David Graeber’s Debt I think much the same can be said of good writing and bad ideas. This book has haunted me for the last few years; I need to exorcise this demon. When I decided to start writing essays, it was my first target, and yet after accumulating twenty thousand words of notes and months of research, I never even started the essay. This is my attempt to put a ghost to rest.
The following is an essay that I submitted to apply for several graduate courses.
Short of hitting themself quite hard in the head, a human cannot easily adjust their capacity for moral judgement. In contrast, some non-human ‘self adjusting’ agents, such as corporations, are able to alter their moral capacities. If removing their moral capacity allows them to escape the harsh sanctions that accompany moral responsibility, what is to stop corporations from doing so? At its simplest, my argument is that if we punish companies more severely when they are aware of the wrongful consequences of their actions - such as Instagram’s internal reporting about its harms on teen mental health (Wells, Horwitz, and Seetharaman 2021) - then their self-interested response will be to remove internal research into such topics.
Our choice of laundry liquids or clothes brands - that is, our individual consumer choices- cannot solve climate change or poverty. Similarly, we do not trust individuals’ ability to alter their own decision-making when it comes to issues such as discrimination during hiring. The typical progressive impulse in such situations is to impose centralised rule-making and authority: environmental protection laws, progressive taxation, and anti-discrimination legislation.