Killing With Misrule

 Elon Musk was on X yesterday claiming that—contrary to widespread reporting—no one has actually died as a result of the Trump administration's humanitarian aid cuts. Now, I get why Elon would want to say this. Even a complete sociopath wouldn't want that on their conscience. And so, Elon does what any emotionally immature person would do—he just denies the truth, and constructs a more satisfying alternative reality in his head. And his control of the X platform means he can then promote this alternative reality to others. 

But regardless of what Elon needs to tell himself in order to sleep at night, it's just demonstrably false to say that no one has died as a result of the administration's policies. I'll cite one example from an area of work that I know well, from my previous job: Burma. When the Trump team's "stop-work" orders went out to USAID projects around the globe, a number of U.S.-funded hospitals serving Burmese refugees at the Thai-Burma border were forced to close. Reuters reports on one lung patient who died shortly thereafter as a result. 

That refugee's blood is on Elon's hands. Maybe he didn't pull the plug on their ventilator himself. He didn't put a gun to their head and pull the trigger personally. But their death is as much his responsibility as if he had. As the great moral thinker Mencius once asked: "Is there any difference between killing [a man] with a knife and killing him with misrule?" To which his interlocutor replies: "There is no difference." (D.C. Lau trans. throughout.)

Of course, one can say, "I didn't mean to"; or, "I didn't do it personally." But Mencius had an answer to that as well. Speaking to a King who has allowed his subjects to starve at a time of famine, he remonstrates with him: "you simply say, 'It is none of my doing. It is the fault of the harvest.' In what way is that different from killing a man by running him through, while saying all the time, 'It is none of my doing. It is the fault of the weapon.'" Once again—the implied answer to this Socratic questioning is: "There is no difference."

The Trump administration is killing people with misrule. They are killing people all around the world. And Elon Musk simply asserting otherwise will not change this fact. 

Of course, one can still argue that there is a real difference between sins of omission and sins of commission. Killing someone, and simply letting them die by withholding life-saving aid that is within one's power to grant, are not precisely the same thing (pace Peter Singer). The Trump administration's ethic with respect to foreign aid, then, could be summed up with a line from Arthur Hugh Clough's "Latest Decalogue"—"Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive/ Officiously to keep alive." (Though let it be known that Clough was satirizing the cruel complacency of this view, not endorsing it!)

Clough's purpose in the poem was to skewer the smug hypocrisy of nineteenth century bourgeois civilization and its tacit embrace of what would eventually come to be known as social Darwinism. In place of the clear moral commandments of the original Decalogue, Clough wrote that his bourgeois capitalist age had substituted the callous doctrines of the Malthusian political economists. He ends the poem with one of their clichés: "tradition/ Sanctions the keenest competition." 

One can imagine Musk embracing the same view. Modern tech libertarianism is essentially the teaching of the 19th century social Darwinists updated for the AI age. 

But let it be known that what Musk and the rest of Trump's goons did in this case was even worse than that. It was even worse than a mere sin of omission or callousness. It was worse than simply "not striv[ing...] to keep alive"—bad as that alone is. Because what they actually did was to pull aid not only from strangers, or from people who had never received aid in the first place—but from people who had placed themselves in a position of reliance on the U.S. government, based on implicit faith that it would keep its word. 

This gives those beneficiaries a special right to expect that aid to continue. Contract law reflects this. In general, to be sure, people don't have a remedy at law to hold someone to the promise of a gratuitous gift. People may have no legal "right" to a gift—and U.S. foreign aid is, for the most part, rendered gratis in this way. But courts have long made an exception to this general principle in equity, for when someone has placed themselves in a position of disadvantage based on a reasonable reliance on someone's ongoing promise of support. 

This equitable principle reflects a basic moral intuition: depriving someone of support after they have made themselves reliant on that support in a reasonable expectation of its continuance, is something worse than merely not giving that aid in the first place. What Musk and the rest of his team did in cutting off foreign aid overnight was something even worse than merely "not striving[ing... ] to keep alive." What they did was to cut off life-saving aid to people who had reasonably trusted and depended on the U.S. government's word. That is the element of their action that elevates it from mere nonfeasance to a sin of commission. 

There is vanishingly little moral daylight, then, between Musk ordering someone to shut off someone's life-saving medical treatment, and sticking a knife in their gut himself. As Mencius's line of questioning revealed—between killing someone with a sword, and killing them with "misrule": "There is no difference."