Dogmatic Slumber?
The ethics of CEO SleepOut
I’m surprised to see critics of the critics of the CEO SleepOut once more deploy the “the event has raised millions for charity” and “what have you ever done?” defences.
To be fair, “what have you ever done?” is less common, but is also pretty weird, because many of the more vocal critics of the event have done a tremendous amount of good, things like organising charities and community activism. I’ve done none of those things, but that shouldn’t affect the validity of the following comments.
An obvious response to the “the event has raised all this charity, it is crass and immoral to condemn it” defence is to point out the well-rehearsed objections to crude utilitarianism. The assumption would be that the event’s defenders are committed to a view by which ends simply trump means.
It is implausible that the events’ many thoughtful defenders hold that view. Why do they invite the suspicion that they suffer from some conceptual confusion by consistently defending the event based on its achievement of some end rather than affirming that, actually, the gathering itself is fine. For that really is the submerged point: CEO SleepOut isn’t so bad, or it’s perfectly fine, or it’s really cool.
Opposing positions (there is no debate) about CEO SleepOut are not actually divergent conceptual positions as much as they are disagreements about facts of the matter, even if some of those fact are values. Why is it necessary to evade that point? I think that is something worth thinking carefully about when we think about discord in South Africa generally.
Scenarios
Imagine a billionaire agreed to donate R10 to a charity of your choosing if you let him kick a homeless person. Would you permit it? What if it were R1 000? What if he agreed to donate R1 000 for each homeless person he kicked. How many homeless people would he have to kick to make the deal worthwhile. Kicking too few homeless people would hardly justify the pain and suffering he would cause, so you’d have to set a minimum number in order for the charitable sum to justify the KickFest 2016.
Or consider a charitable organisation that offered ongoing assistance on the condition that recipients wear a bright red C emblazoned on their shirts at all times, so donors can see tangible evidence of their largesse, which would hopefully encourage them to donate even more. By how much would the charity have to outperform schemes without a similar requirement to justify the programme?(If that sounds too crude, how about a disruptive charity app that took biometric markers from each recipient, who would then be virtually hunted and captured by millennials with iPhones?)
In each instance, some would consider the impairment to human dignity intolerable, whatever the total balance of good. Some might be open to a calculus of good versus harm that would possibly end up favouring the scheme, but I suspect most people would agree there are prima facie grounds for close investigation before endorsing either scheme as morally estimable.
Now imagine rich white South Africans held an annual apartheid-themed party to ‘appreciate how far we’ve come as a nation’. Suppose that if black guests wished to attend, they had to dress as waiters, only talk when spoken to, and deferentially call white guests baas and madam while serving them champagne. Suppose the Apartheid Ball raised hundreds of millions each year for a good cause. Would it be churlish to suggest an alternative theme?
If something does more good than harm, that might be a reason to permit that thing. Of course, if something could do as much good and do less harm, then it is morally legitimate to suggest replacing the original endeavour with the alternative, unless the harm is so trivial that bringing it up is just cheap point scoring.
There are differences in opinion about the good CEO SleepOut achieves, but those differences are not significant differences. The fundamental difference is about quantifying the harm.
