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Last updated: Fri, Sep 13, 2024
Everyone knows about pain, illness, and disabilty. We don't want them for ourselves or for those we care about. That puts it in the general class of bad things happening to good people. The idea that we can control our fates in this respect then becomes attractive.
Why do bad things happen to good people? I would answer, "Why wouldn't they?" We are all told that we control our own destinies and we are all told that we are responsible for them. Most of us would agree that these propositions are true, with varied limitations and exceptions. The two poles on this question, I would argue, are fundamental to the differences between American conservatives and liberals. (I would also argue that the positions of the two camps both miss the mark. My argument.)
The desire to feel safe from such calamities emerges as beliefs that we can fend them off by our behavior. This idea is true but with limitations. You can't protect yourself from every accident, and you certainly can't avoid genetic or developmental abnormalities.
To the extent that we can prevent or avoid personal disasters, we bear responsilibity for them in some sense.
The belief that we can avoid pain and disablement is comforting and it is true within limits. Ideas float around in our culture about this that are in no way supported by empirical knowledge. They are most clearly expressed, I think, in doctrines that are cultivated in some branches of American Christianity. One of these is the belief that our happiness in the world is determined by our adherence to the will of God. This belief neatly wraps up the hegemony of the sect's god, the correctness of their moral beliefs, and the status of the individual. There are other less clear embodiments of the same idea.