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Notes -
Inter-generational responsibility
Sometimes I have these moments when I realize I've got a big hole in my mental models for other people. This came up a few weeks ago, but I didn't get around to posting about it because other stuff happened.
The hole in this case is inter-generational responsibility. To what extent are parents responsible for the actions of their kids, or kids responsible for the actions of their parents. And how much of that responsibility carries across multiple generations.
My answer has always been something like "kids are never responsible for the actions of older generations, and parents are mostly responsible for the actions of their kids while they are guardians of those kids, but most of that responsibility goes away when the child reaches adulthood". I thought this was close to most people's take, but I'm pretty certain its not. I had all the clues and information I needed to put this together sooner, I just didn't. So any comments that basically say "how are you so stupid that you only just now figured this out" my response is yeah yeah yeah, whatever, congrats on being so smart, I was busy noticing and caring about other things.
Evidence I had but didn't really put together:
Anyways, now that I am unmoored from my previous set of assumptions, I'm not really sure where to set anchor again. I'm curious what people here believe in terms of inter-generational responsibility, and what you think the general consensus is on inter-generational responsibility.
In partial defense of my original view and thinking it was standard ... the US legal system mostly seems to take the same viewpoint. Deviations by other countries legal systems is often something that is noticed and gets commented on. Like North Korea still doing full family punishments, or Singapore having a built in legal responsibility for kids to take care of their parents in old age, or the grown adult in Italy that sued his parents for not continuing to treat him like a kid.
But the political system doesn't so clearly take the same viewpoint. Welfare and social security are mainly paid for by the currently young and healthy to the current old and infirm. Debt is taken on by the federal government, and that debt will inevitably be paid off by the children of those alive today.
Thinking in terms of responsibility seems pointless to me. Ultimately, there are goals and actions that bring us closer to or farther from those goals. Saying "X is guilty, he chose to do something" doesn't get you closer to your goals. This type of thinking does make sense on a societal level, as a way to reduce independent actions that might hurt the tribe but it doesn't make sense for an individual. You punishing someone else can only help you indirectly, in a manipulative way. Like, if you "expose" a pedophile, your social status might increase slightly. But I don't like where this type of thinking leads to, so I don't do it.
So my solution is to simply think about guilt as little as possible and only under the context of "If other people think Y person is guilty, how will they behave?".
In your example, that means:
"The older generation worked under specific circumstances that made them act a certain way, it's too bad if their actions caused harm." and likewise for the younger generation.
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The weirdest people in the world talks a lot about this not in the context of inter-generational responsibility but as intra-kin-group responsibility, which of course overlaps quite a bit.
The book argues it’s a new and modern take that individuals are accountable at all as opposed to the idea of you getting beaten up because your cousin did something dumb, which was much more common historically.
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I think the assumption that is built into your thinking is that the only legitimate justification for proactive violence (that is, violence not in defense of self or others) is as punishment for an offense by the person targeted for violence. If we assume that, then it follows that the cases above consist of punishing people for the acts of other people. But not everyone holds that assumption, and I don't hold it myself.
Note: I am not necessarily defending the actions described below, but I am trying to articulate the alleged moral justification in the minds of the killers.
In Case 1, I assume you are referring to the story of Achan in Joshua 7. Notice how often this phrase occurs in the Bible: In this way you shall put evil away from you (some examples can be found here). That means that the execution is justified, not by punishing someone who committed a bad act, but by the desire to rid the tribe of certain genetic predispositions. It isn't bad acts that are being punished, but bad genes that are being extirpated. This also applies to the genocide of other tribes that have too many bad apples (e.g., the Midianites and Amalekites). It's not that the Amalekite infants have done anything wrong; it's that they are likely to infected with something akin to zombie-ism or orc-ism. That doesn't explain the killing of Achan's wife, but it explains the killing of his children.
The killing of the wives and children also has an enhanced deterrent effect. What good does it do to punish someone for crime in the first place? From a utilitarian standpoint, the benefit of punishing crime isn't the pain and loss of the offender as a positive good in itself; it is the deterrent effect. Killing the whole family enhances the deterrent, and thus has the same kind of justification as killing the offender himself, or even flogging him. From a utilitarian standpoint, IMO, it is indefensibly arbitrary to just punish the offender, when punishing people he cares about has a larger deterrent effect -- and when no immediate, intrinsic good comes from punishing anybody in the first place. (But I'm not a utilitarian).
Case 2 is unique in this list. This is the only case where the killing is not a state action. But in warfare, whether between clans or nations, your duty to kill enemy combatants, and perhaps even noncombatants, is not justified by the fact that you are punishing them for some offense they committed. On the contrary, they may be right good fellows through and through. Killing in warfare (or clan warfare) is not punishment at all; it falls under a different heading.
In Case 3, for example in the Glencoe massacre, I presume the real justification was to cement the power of William of Orange, which might otherwise have been on shaky ground. This action was widely condemned, but not universally condemned, and William felt he could get away with it so it must have been plausibly justified in his culture. When I see something like this, I don't ask, "Wow, how could they be so crazy?". I ask, "Wow, what makes that moral convention adaptive for national survival?" What I take away from events like this is how important it was to the survival of feudal nations for the King to have strong moral authority. Without that, national defense would be a tragedy of the commons.
Case 4 is, in my opinion, the one that is truly based on a notion collective punishment.
How could people be so crazy?What is adaptive about that? What is adaptive about that is that, if you manage to convince enough people that the targeted class (the bourgeoise, white people, Jews, whatever) is the root of all evil, then, like Lenin, Hitler, and Mao, you and your constituents can self-righteously steal the property of large numbers of people who have done nothing wrong. The push for reparations is nothing but a pretext for banditry -- the same as in Marxism and Nazi antisemitism.This seems wrong in context. SOP in societies where the law of slavery made it a possibility (which OT Israel very much was) was to enslave the women and children of the vanquished tribe. Killing them is salting the earth of Carthage or melting down Ned Stark's Valyrian steel greatsword - it is needless destruction of newly-acquired war booty to make a point (probably mostly to your own side) about how destructive your vengeance can be.
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Case 3 I’m pretty sure is most common in Chinese dynasties.
Agreed - massacring relatives who might pose a threat is very widespread, but Chinese law was unusual in legitimating clan extermination for cases of real or imagined high treason. I seem to recall this was the fate of the sequence of imperial in-laws that dominated most of the Eastern Han (which makes you wonder why families kept putting that much energy into attaining that position).
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I’m pretty sure your view is commonly held among Americans. At least when asked explicitly.
In practice, though, there’s a reputation ecosystem. Parents get credit when they raise respectable adults and flak when they prop up the prison population. By self-selecting into neighborhoods with “good schools,” they find other parents who will give and receive such kudos. And, like all fashion status games, no one says it out loud.
Think of the expectations. Did your grandparents try to give generous gifts? Your mother-in-law judge your home’s readiness for guests? Your coworkers brag about their kids’ weddings? They want to seem successful, even tasteful, and fear being seen as trashy. Responsibility for other generations is enforced by social pressure rather than law.
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I think this is generally true, and is what most people would believe in the US.
Of your evidence, 1-3 are pretty similar. There's two options here. The first is that killing someone's entire family is seen as the ultimate sort of punishment. This isn't really about a 2-year-old child being responsible for the behaviors of their parents, its their parents being perceived as so terrible that there's justification in inflicting the most heinous retaliation on them. The second possibility is more pragmatic: if you think their family is likely to want revenge, then killing off all of them makes sense so you don't have to watch over your back. This is especially true in feudal states where a deposed ruler's children could come back as pretenders.
For the fourth point on reparations, this is just blatant racial spoils laundered through historical grievance and narrative. It uses slavery as its primary justification, but that's mostly for convenience since leftist media has spent so much time and effort making US slavery look like one of the biggest crimes ever committed, possibly worse than even the Holocaust. In practice, though, demanding reparations just for that is untenable since the vast majority of the US population is not descended from slaveholders (didn't live in the South, not rich enough, immigrated after the Civil War, etc.). So while people pushing reparations use slavery as their primary marketing material, they quickly shift motte-and-bailey style to things like "institutionalized racism" when people ask questions like "why should I have to pay for this?".
In short, none of your 4 points really needs to have much to do with generational guilt.
I've seen this argument made a few times online. One example being Twitter tankies defending the murder of the Romanov children. Another one is (predominantly Jewish) essays defending the divine command to utterly eradicate the Amalekites by pointing out that Saul's initial sparing of the Amalekite king Agag — for which failure to follow God's command Saul was stripped of his kingship — led to Agag's eventual descendant Haman attempting to wipe out the Jews in turn.
"You gotta end the bloodline and prevent any revenge killing."
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In brutally authoritarian regimes in historically Christian societies- including historically quite recent ones, eg Francoist Spain- this took the form of removing children from dissident homes and placing them with regime loyalists. I think historically pagan societies like North Korea just have fewer qualms about killing children when faced with the same situations.
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These don't strictly require any actual moral culpability. Pragmatists and cynics could elect to enact these measures out of a sense of vengeance, pour les encourager les autres, or simply using responsibility as a pretext.
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Honestly rather than arrive at a surface-level verdict one way or the other, I find it both more useful and more accurate to speak more broadly and say that opinions and values about inter-generational responsibility are more grounded in culture rather than a rationalist conclusion based on axiomatic principles.
For example, the modern United States has for a long time been one of the most significantly individualistic societies of all time. Many of us do indeed carry an attitude of 18-21 as being a hard border of personal self-responsibility and somewhat related to primacy of a conjugal bond over all other relationships, and the somewhat non-sequitur that parents have a strong and longer-lasting responsibility for their kids than vice versa. However, many other cultures do indeed view family units as having their own collective sense of honor, of responsibility, and of continuity.
As an aside, I find that the whole collectivized Social Security setup isn't really related to any actual American principles but rather was just a convenient kick-it-down-the-road approach. Well, okay fine, that's not entirely true. You might find somewhat interesting the Social Security Administration's own short history, which notably traces the true beginnings of this kind of collectivization to Civil War pensions -- which to me reflects a tacit admission that the State more broadly was somewhat responsible for so many people dying unnaturally, undermining traditional self-sufficiency. Then later, you had the forces of urbanization, more mobile workforces, longer life expectancy, and basic "nuclear family" stuff. But the main Social Security idea was originally one more similar to regular "insurance" against sudden unpredictable bad things, and as time passed on the system only got bigger and bigger and the principle debt burden shifted earlier and earlier. In fact some early participants were explicitly given kick-backs in acknowledgment that they might not have participated long enough to get vested.
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I think that the responsibility of parents towards their children doesn’t go away when those children reach the age of 18 or 21 or whenever. Parents have the responsibility to act for the benefit of their descendants forever, but that responsibility gets more fuzzy and less strong(there’s nothing wrong with kicking your thirty year old out of the house on the basis of ‘you should have a job by now’- although at 16 there would be- and I think it’s in the interest of the thirty year old to be kicked out in that case).
I also think children and grandchildren have the responsibility to care for their parents, especially in their dotage, to not waste parental resources, to listen to their parents advice and not bring shame to the family, etc. It seems entirely reasonable to blame parents for shitty parenting leading to shitty behavior in their adult children.
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Treating people as individuals is one of those secret sauce things that the modern Anglosphere takes for granted but which isn't that common globally or historically and which is part of what makes modern society work.
In terms of establishing democracy and capitalism, individualism has been great. And clearly more clannish attitudes haven't stopped birth rate declines elsewhere (looking at you Southern Europe, nobody's having kids when you live with your momma until you're 32). That said, I think a little intergenerational responsibility can be a good thing. Sam Kriss' excellent feature describes elderly retirees in Florida 'absconding from their duty as old people, which is too be a link between the past and the future'. I think old people sticking around to care for children and give them a sense of belonging is something tragic to lose, of course, that requires the young people to stick around too, which can't be taken for granted any more.
I skimmed the piece. I read the first few paragraphs, already starting to doze. Then I got to this line:
So guy goes to the Villages, already having made up his mind, and then just riffs on his own confirmation bias for 10 dreary pages.
I guess it's well-written, if you like that sort of Atlantic Monthly/New Yorker style. But it comes off as that most self-righteous and common form of virtue signal – the worry that someone, somewhere might actually be happy.
The Villages is a pretty interesting place from the perspective of urban development, and contains a lot of the things that liberals say that they want. We need more interesting experiments like it, and less sneering from depressed would-be novelists.
I've got a young child and my parents live interstate in the Australian equivalent of a Floridian retirement community.
We're fortunate to have the resources between us to enable visits back-and-forth with minimal stress, but I do definitely feel that it makes it hard to ensure the grandkids have as deep a bond with their grandparents as I'd ideally like. Also in my case my parents moved away a few years ago before grandkids were 'on the table', and as an unfathomably young parent in my demographic of 29 years old, that has to be somewhat increasingly common these days. I'm pretty sure if grandchildren were an ongoing concern prior to the move that it would have been enough to change the plans.
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