When the Ugliness of the Problem Sticks to the Solution
When the Ugliness of the Problem Sticks to the Solution
Let's call that the ugly problem fallacy 👮♂️
Sometimes people argue that we should defund the police. This is, I think, a terrible idea, but I understand where the desire comes from: the police are violent, and most of us don’t like violence. So — the argument might go — we should pick policies that punish violent organizations, like taking away their funding.
The obvious problem with this proposal is that the police are there precisely to reduce violence. Their presence is meant to discourage any non-police person or organization from using violence to achieve their ends. If someone mugs an old lady, or sets up a racket involving physical threats to business owners, then the police can intervene, use their legal right to violence to fight back the violent offender, and restore the peace. Most of the time, we don’t even reach the point of using violence: people know that police are around and will punish them, so society remains generally peaceful. Occasionally, though, somebody does something illegal anyway and the police must use force. Also occasionally, the police uses force when it is not justified.
If we decided collectively that those occasional displays of violence, whether legitimate or not, were unacceptable, and defunded the police, then we’d go back to old ladies being mugged and businesses having to pay “protection money” to the mafia. Violence would actually increase.
It seems plausible to me that there will always be some violence in society, unless society stops being recognizably human. So in a way, the occasional uses of violence by police might be the optimal outcome.1 I like to think as police being the institution into which orderly societies try to cram all the violence, so that there isn’t any left for everyone else.2
Unfortunately for police officers, that also means that their image will never be spotless. I, a person who has zero reason whatsoever to be afraid from the police, am uncomfortable in the presence of police officers. It is surely much worse for people who risk being unfairly targeted by police due to their appearance. Either way, the monopoly on violence that the police enjoys makes them tainted. Police will always be, in a sense, ugly.
This is an instance of a more general phenomenon I tentatively call the ugly problem fallacy.
The ugly problem fallacy goes like this:
There’s something unpleasant or disgusting — an “ugly problem” — in the world.
Solving this ugly problem, or at least mitigating it, would improve society and make it more beautiful. (I’m using the words “ugly” and “beautiful” in a very broad sense here.)
However, to solve the problem, someone will have to deal with the ugliness. For complex problems, they’ll have to deal with the unpleasant or disgusting situation on an ongoing basis, and the problem will never be fully solved.
Eventually, society associates the solution, and especially the people who are implementing it, with the original ugliness.
The solution becomes unfairly maligned, and people start arguing against it, not realizing that its absence would cause more of the original ugliness.
In the police example, the ugly thing is violence. Violence can sometimes be aesthetically appealing, but usually not: the vast majority of the time, it is something we try to avoid. Thus it is at the heart of other ugly problem fallacies, like overdone pacifism: because war is ugly, we might incorrectly conclude that we should get rid of standing armies and nuclear weapons. But if we did, it would open the door for any semi-ambitious thug to form a private army, or obtain private nuclear weapons, and become a terror-inspiring warlord. What could possibly stop him, if there is no military and no police?
Relatedly, I think the ugly problem fallacy also explains libertarianism. Government and bureaucracies are quite often unpleasant! So it can be tempting to get rid of them altogether — even though it seems likely that the coordination failures this would cause would make everything much worse. (Specifically, it might increase the number of sex offenders and murder rates, and attract agressive bears because no one is collecting waste anymore.)3
In this case, the ugliness at the core of the fallacy is a bit more abstract: it’s something like interpersonal conflict, or coordination problems. But it’s there. Think about it: why do so many of us hate politics? Ultimately, because politics is a solution to the ugly problem of disagreement between large groups of people.
More literally ugly is anything that has to do with refuse. Landfills feel ugly, and we instinctively want to not have them, even though modern waste management is actually really efficient and environment-friendly. Garbage collectors are one of the least prestigious jobs, even though they make life quite unpleasant when they go on strike. (Though not for the bears.)
Even worse than ordinary waste, there is excrement, which is so disgusting that I hesitate to even mention it in writing here. So I won’t discuss it further. I’m sure you can easily think of ugly problem fallacies in that area.
Historically, the ugly problem fallacy has caused the emergence of entire underclasses. The dalit are the lowest of the lowest in the traditional Indian caste system: they used to be called untouchables because they performed, or descended from people who performed, “impure” jobs, like “working with leather, disposing of dead animals, manual scavenging, or sanitation work.” Other societies had similar outcast groups. In Europe, executioners were shunned by society, their work seen as disreputable — not that this meant anyone thought capital punishment itself was a bad idea until quite recently.4
How distinct is the ugly problem fallacy from the concept of “necessary evil”?
Not very, I’ll readily admit. But I don’t like how “necessary evil” suggests an immediate, and strong, value judgment. The police aren’t evil. Politics isn’t evil. The dalit of India aren’t evil. Nor is any of them “ugly” in a direct sense. It is the problem they mitigate that is ugly, unpleasant, disgusting, evil. If the solution becomes called a “necessary evil,” then that is another instance of the ugly problem fallacy itself.
The other reason I think this fallacy is a useful concept is that it draws attention to the aesthetic dimension of societal problems. One of my pet hypotheses is that everything we do is influenced by aesthetics to a larger degree than we like to believe. People will adopt political positions, join groups, even make career choices based not on careful analysis, but on emotional, intuitive impressions — which often boil down to aesthetics.
I don’t think that’s necessarily bad; I wrote at length on how aesthetics is a powerful signal of goodness that can complement careful analysis. But relying only on aesthetic intuition can also lead us astray, as it does in many of the examples I’ve described above.
It’s worth noting in conclusion that the savviest victims of the ugly problem fallacy know exactly how to fight back. Political power has a long tradition of legitimizing itself with grandiose palaces, regalia, ceremonies, and so on. People from all over history have ascribed beautiful qualities to warriors, despite the association of warriors with violence. From the Iliad:
For a young man all is decorous when he is cut down in battle and torn with the sharp bronze, and lies there dead, and though dead still all that shows about him is beautiful.5
Beauty is incredibly flexible, and can, through some effort, be seen in almost anything.6 So if you can’t fully solve your ugly problem, aesthetics-maxing might be the best available move. As a bonus, it’ll also make the world a nicer place.
Assuming in this scenario that the police are well-trained, not corrupt, and properly overseen by a democratic government that answers to the people.
This ideal is of course not always attained. In at least some US states, police are undertrained. In Mexico, they’re corrupt. In China, they’re overseen by the Communist Party of China.
The other system I’m aware of to reduce violence in a society is a strong honor code. This is what criminal organizations use, since for obvious reasons they can’t rely on the state-backed monopoly on violence to resolve their disputes. My intuition is that honor codes are worse than police forces, but then I’m a law-abiding citizen of a strongly democratic country, so of course I would say that.
This is a reference to the Free Town Project, in which libertarians once tried to take over a New Hampshire town. It went badly. But at least it led to a book being published on the story, with one of the best titles I’ve ever seen: A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear.
And today, someone who is pro-capital punishment might reasonably point out that, although killing people is unpleasant and ugly, it causes less harm than it prevents. I disagree, but it’s true that arguments against capital punishment that are based on its ugliness are weak at best.
Quote found on Reddit. A more well-known version appears in Civilization IV:
It is entirely seemly for a young man killed in battle to lie mangled by the bronze spear. In his death all things appear fair.
Maybe not excrement though.
I understand the point here, and you can extend it in a lot of directions. Think about Mary Douglas' work on purity--that the things we consider unpure end up spreading their ugliness and impurity to human beings and institutions assigned to those things. So various kinds of negative associations hover over funeral directors, over executioners, over sanitation workers, exactly as you point out etc. and we come to have expectations about the personalities and affect of people in those roles--there is a sort of contagion from the ugliness of a problem or a task into the ways we imagine and relate to the people that have to handle the task, and a contagion that ends up hurting or corrupting them over time. (e.g., think of the things that people who are trying to moderate social media have to see in huge amounts every single working day.)
1) The problem I have is that first you are assuming a function for the police that isn't necessarily the reason why we have police in the first place--police as we know them are a very modern institution that appear in the 19th Century for the first time and while they definitely were thought to have a role in maintaining public order, it was mostly about keeping types or classes people perceived to be disorderly out of respectable neighborhoods, often using spectacular or exemplary violence. (e.g., not neutrally about suppressing violence by individuals in a democratic society, but instead something more like a directed and semi-authorized vigilantism; lynching is the most extreme variant here, and notably that was semi-sanctioned by local authorities and police in the first third of the 20th Century in much of the U.S). When I look at any group of workers or any institution and say "we have this idea about this institution or those people", I tend first to think that idea is derived from historical associations, from deeper roots.
2) But that leads to the second problem that lurks under a fair amount of calls for defunding police, which is that the circumstance you frame as the normal point of reference in your first footnote isn't really the global 'normal' of police *at all*. Not really even in most liberal democracies--it's mixing up "this is notionally what ought to be" with "this is what actually is". So in some sense when you imagine police as using spectacular or exemplary violence in order to suppress violence--a kind of "you don't want to do that, trust me, because here's what's going to happen if you do", you imagine a police force with control, precision and instrumental self-consciousness that *doesn't exist*.
3) I think you also therefore discount quite a few other things that act on or suppress violence. You mention honor-directed cultures, which often look to manage or handle violence via the threat of reciprocity. (Think in its most extreme forms of feud in medieval Norse societies, or the Hatfields and McCoys--a system that is in some sense game-theoretic in how it manages or cathects violence.) But think more generally on the role of 'culture' here. Do most citizens in liberal democracies require witnessing or even thinking about the possibility of police violence in order to suppress their own violence? Any society where policing is the only thing between order and chaos--the proverbial 'thin blue line'--is a society that would crumble into chaos pretty quickly, because you can't possibly have enough police (or have spectacular enough performances of the ugly suppression of an ugly problem) to maintain order. Most of the time, people are maintaining order on their own, as a result of the habitus of particular social classes, particular communities, particular religious doctrines, particular conceptions of the self and self-control, etc. So where does that all come from? Where is it enacted? How do liberal democratic individuals actually encounter the ugliness of violence (and avoid it) when police are not around? I don't think it's usually about fear-of-police or even fear-of-police-like-authority-figures.
4) There's a complicated conversation among early modern European historians about just how prevalent spectacular public violence was (e.g., public torture, public executions, etc.)--it at least seems to have been less common than is often thought, and crowds less unanimously approving of it--but I think you could at least say that if that was a different sort of staging of ugliness intended to suppress ugly behavior, it really didn't work.
5) There are a fair number of smaller-scale societies in human history that haven't had police, incarceration *or* the threat of reciprocal honor-driven violence that nevertheless haven't been especially prone to violence. There may be ways to deal with at least some ugly problems that do not require a specialized class of people who act as our surrogates and thus take on the ugliness of the problem on our behalf, as our martyrs.
although the whole idea of "defund the police" illustrates your point, it actually wasn't an idea really promoted by people who used the slogan. It was just a REALLY poorly worded slogan. What most people wanted was a reallocation of resources spent on the police so that in certain circumstances (dealing with the mentally ill, for example) some expertise rather than weapons could be deployed. And also allocate resources to better train the cops in how to deal with people they thought of as "other" and thus less worthy of a restrained response.
I don't think ANYONE really wanted to eliminate cops. Who would you report your stolen car to? Who would respond to your 911 call as someone actively tried to break into your house?
I think the "ugly problem fallacy" does indeed exist. But it feels like you kind of set up a straw man to make the point. Your other examples work better.