Author: Grimnir

A living culture adapts to the changing needs of its people. Syncretism and fragmentation occur organically wherever communities meet and part ways over time. Imperialism and colonization add a dimension of political and economic inequality to these interactions. A colonizer culture expands in order to plunder material resources. They maintain power by plundering cultural resources and forcibly exporting their own culture. Assimilation becomes a survival strategy for the colonized, and the colonizers reap the value of cultural icons of interest to their own people.

New Age spirituality often reproduces these dynamics. Religious icons, philosophical texts, and traditional clothing are manufactured and sold by colonizers to colonizers, exploiting the labor as well as the culture of the colonized. Literary and philosophical traditions are filtered through teachers like Helena Blavatsky who adopted an “Orientalist” aesthetic to make her spiritual system more exotic and mysterious. As concepts are lost in translation, the colonizer recipients are unable to learn and practice with respect even if they are interested in doing more than bathing in an aesthetic of “exotic” well-being.

Cultural appropriation includes two ethically compromised behaviors. Individuals in colonizer cultures perform cultural appropriation by adopting artifacts of a colonized culture as ornaments divorced from their original context and significance. Cultural appropriation continues when colonizers capitalize on that ornamentation by controlling the production and trade of exported artifacts, often exploiting the labor of colonized people to do so. The latter instance replicates the immoral exploitation of the working class by the owner class, but the former instance robs colonized people of equality and mutual respect.

Colonizers elevate the artifacts that they value but not the people who created them. Cultural appropriation reduces the value of the colonized by making it subject to the pleasures of the colonizers. Mutual respect requires understanding one another as equals, each holding intrinsic value and protected status as moral agents. Looting the material, intellectual, and philosophical culture of a people places colonization at the center of any interaction between individuals from the respective cultures. Culture then become another axis of identity that owners can use to divide the working class and prevent organization against the owner class who drive colonization and exploitation.

As discussed elsewhere some traditions place value on openness to converts and synthesis with complementary features of other traditions. Absent power dynamics, missionary traditions can form bridges between peoples and support adaptation to change. Cultural appropriation remains a risk with missionary traditions when historical and current power asymmetries poisoned peer relationships, but missionary traditions generally maintain a path for proper initiation under the right circumstances. When approaching with respect new members can join and found new branches of the tradition as interpreted through a new cultural lens.

While spirituality may be framed in terms of sentiment and feeling, philosophy often plays a crucial role in defining a tradition. The demand for unquestioning faith rarely appears outside of fringe movements. Most traditions offer an account of divinity, the universe, morality, and how one arrives at knowledge of those things. Reflection on mysteries and paradoxes abound but do not crowd out rationality. In some cases critical analysis serves as a requirement for faith as it requires one to engage fully with texts and concepts.

Through honest and respectful study, scholars may find ethically sound paths into missionary and even closed traditions. Nevertheless, study alone does not avoid the moral concerns of cultural appropriation. One can be a sincere scholar and still participate in colonizer networks of exploited value, and in practice a scholar might not have much agency over that participation. Buying “public domain” texts translated recently enough to copyright may indirectly feed a colonizer-owned publishing or distribution company. Decorating one’s academic office with sacred figures reproduced by the labor of the colonized and sold by the colonizer would constitute more direct participation.

Access and entry into a tradition is defined by the tradition and its lineage-holders. To approach with demands and expectations is to approach with the attitude of a colonizer. If one feels a sincere attraction toward a tradition, one should engage in respectful study in order to understand the tradition, its history, and its boundaries. Irrespective of the specific tradition, one should approach with humility and be open to honest wonder as well as critical discomfort. Colonization has spoiled much potential for organic conversation and synthesis, so we must heal those rifts by forsaking colonizer attitudes, approaching as aspirants rather than novitiates.

Navigating the ethical pitfalls of cultural appropriation requires approaching a tradition with respect and taking only what is freely given. When a tradition offers its deep philosophy, some who study it may find themselves persuaded by the arguments. The intellectual relationship with a tradition contrasts with shallow adoption of practices or rote repetition of summarized beliefs. Mimicry of outward appearance without understanding the underlying substance allows colonizers to redirect value from the colonized. Engagement with the fundamental premises requires deep understanding, humility, and respect.

Race serves to divide the working class by bribing one group with privilege over the other. Membership in racial groups varies across history, widening and narrowing to serve the needs of the privileged group. Irish and Italian immigrants were granted membership into whiteness to maintain alignment against Black people during the Jim Crow era. Race is a condition inflicted on a people to make them vulnerable to the imperialist machinations of the owner class. Once one accepts that race is socially constructed, one must also accept that whiteness, the privileged identity group, is also socially constructed.

Even though whiteness is the privileged group, individuals who identify as white remain vulnerable to being denied whiteness. Just as previously distinct identity groups were admitted to whiteness, any identity group can be made into an Other and ejected from the privileged group. Any immutable characteristic can be totalized to define an identity group distinguished from the “default” whiteness. Even mutable characteristics can be leveraged as markers of degeneracy that disqualify one for the full privileges of whiteness. Any person born “white” might find themselves on the wrong side of privilege by choice or circumstance.

Across the diversity of identity groups and intersecting identities, the pattern of vulnerability remains. Conforming to the privileged group’s values and expectations may grant some share of advantage, perhaps limited by one’s ability to “pass” as the privileged identity. Such grants remain contingent on the perfection of one’s conformity and the convenience of the privileged group.

The only social grouping not vulnerable to being divested of privilege are the owner class. The owner class utilize whiteness and other divisive tools to maintain control over people and resources. Ultimately, as long as an individual retains enough wealth and influence to remain in the owner class, they are able to purchase any privilege. To align with the interests of the owner class is to abandon other identities for exploitation. Individuals who ascend to the owner class from a low-status identity group may face residual discrimination, but they leave behind fears of the martial class as long as they have wealth and its signifiers.

If one accepts these arguments, the working class vulnerability to discrimination becomes evident. While members of privileged identity groups may benefit temporarily by supporting the exploitative hierarchy, their own interests will be abandoned when they no longer intersect with the owner class. At such a time the owner class may redefine the social constructs that uphold privileged groups, and the workers now branded as degenerate take their place alongside the oppressed.

Even if the owner class extends privilege on a limited basis, workers who are so “elevated” do not share the long term interest of the owner class. As long as one can be deprived of those privileges, a worker’s interest is best aligned with their fellows, even across the boundaries of identity groups. Solidarity does not require forsaking identity, only recognizing that class conditions provide an avenue for trust across identities. Shared vulnerability to the owner class provides a basis for trust as long as one guards against the short term temptation to embrace the bribes of fragile privilege. The owner class relies on the success of those temptations to keep the workers divided against themselves.

When unpacking the dynamics of class struggle, one can easily despair at the success of the owner class’s strategies. Nurturing hope requires that one also study strategies the working class can use to turn the tide. The owner class maintains its position by dividing the working class against itself. As the working class closes those divides in order to retake its power, they have many ways to exert power they already possess.

All social institutions play a part in upholding class divisions or funneling value from the working class to the owner class. Workers contribute to their own exploitation because incentives are arranged to motivate it. Capitalism crowds out imagination of alternate worlds, so one may have no idea how any individual action can overcome these entrenched dynamics.

To transition from diagnosis to treatment, one must study the mechanics of social change. A student of history has the advantage in this pursuit, but the insights of psychology, sociology, and anthropology provide abstract models that avoid getting lost in the nuances of complex events. At minimum, one should understand how incentives influence motivation, how social bonds form, and how to communicate with empathy.

Distributed power structures sometimes appear slow to act because effort and direction spread evenly through the organization. Individuals must recognize a consensus, agree to align with it, and invest effort accordingly. Every individual’s decision has equal weight in such a dynamic. Hierarchical power structures appear to act more efficiently because direction concentrates at the top while effort spreads through the base. One person’s decision guides the effort of many people. The hierarchical dynamic works as long as everyone recognizes the leader’s decision as have more weight than their own.

Hierarchies collapse when the base ceases to recognize the authority of the peak. When the leader’s decision no longer outweighs the worker, the workers return to a distributed power structure that organically arises in communities of equals. Consensus becomes the basis for decisions, so the former leaders must accept their share of both effort and influence alongside everyone else. They have no choice other than to participate because their ability to exercise power depended only on the voluntary surrender of the workers will.

Hierarchies purchase control at the cost of action. The leader directs the effort of others but spends their own effort only in the directing. If the workers cease cooperating, the leaders give orders to a void. Only the lack of trust and established social bonds among the workers prevent organizing strategic work stoppages to halt the capitalist economic engine. In such a general strike, workers would need to be confident that their networks of mutual aid can adequately fulfill their needs. They would need to be willing to give what they can to their networks to maintain reciprocity. The actions to take once trust is established are very simple and would be led and coordinated by the workers themselves. Building the networks of trust and mutual aid is the first and last strategy; it is required for all subsequent ventures, and it must be maintained through regular sharing and exchange.

As an imperialist political economy, capitalism expands to fill available space. Whatever it touches turns into a commodity in the network of owners and owned. The market model and theory of property eclipse older ideas and draw what was public into private hands. After generations of imperialism, imaging alternatives to commodity markets and private ownership becomes difficult if not impossible. When workers object to exploitation by the owner class, the owners point to the prevalence of the economic theory as proof of its success. Only capitalism can deliver the liberty, plenty, and prosperity that contemporary society has to offer, even if it only delivers those things to the owners. Alternative theories have been tried and collapsed into capitalism, serving as further proof of the theory.

Capitalism’s colonization works similarly to other totalizing theories. Concepts posited by the theory are read backward in time, forcing old arrangements into the mold of the new theory. Nuances are reduced to the model’s terms to erase traces of the changes wrought. In particular measuring value by quantities of currency allows the capitalist to subsume any exchange of goods or services into their market model. Once capitalism is entrenched, students learn history through the capitalist lens and as such often cannot imagine any alternate arrangements.

Progress through history is a key assumption of modernism and one that implicitly supports the captialist supremacy narrative. The conceit of many Modernist scholars is that human civilizations develops through a similar set of stages from nomadic hunter-gatherers to citizens of nation-states with complex economic, social, and technical institutions. This perspective, sometimes called “whig history”, reflects imperialist attitudes that drive the Modern era. Northwestern European society was hailed as the triumph of civilization, so “less advanced” societies would be served by accepting the values, technology, religion, and customs of Northwestern Europe, especially liberalism and its capitalist political economy. Whig history lends justification to “the white man’s burden” to bring the light of civilization to the world. As a component of political liberalism, capitalism then serves as the beacon toward which all developing economies should move.

The narrative of historical progress breaks down significantly under critical scrutiny. Scholars who have rejected the imperialist bias find that technology, customs, and politics change over time but not in a uniform direction. Post-modernists call into question the very framing of “direction” since it still assumes that some political orders or customs can be placed on an objective value hierarchy. Rejecting whig history, one can instead see capitalism as a movement in human civilization, one with both a beginning and an end. Capitalism is not the most robust economic theory possible, nor even the most robust theory to have been implemented. Where we do judge politics and customs, we should do so according to overarching moral principles not by comparison to any given “most advanced” society.

Ethics defines a few principles that bound morality. Among these is the axiom “ought implies can.” Moral responsibility ends where capability ends. This principle affirms that one is never expected to do the impossible even though our feelings of guilt or regret may indicate otherwise. One cannot demand and should forgive someone who fails to keep an obligation due to circumstances beyond their control.

Usually, “ought implies can” appears in arguments about the limit of moral responsibility. A person is morally obligated only to the extent fulfilling the obligation is possible. One may have a moral duty to pull someone away from a ledge before they fall, but one does not have a duty to fly into the air to rescue someone already falling. On the other hand, increased capability implies an correspondingly elevation of moral responsibility. The more one can do, the more one should do.

While ethicists generally agree that one is not obligated to accept harms to themselves in order to do good, luck egalitarians argue that people have an obligation to use their natural talents or accidental advantages to benefit others. Assuming that some people simply find themselves in advantaged situations or in possession of inborn talents, those people have an obligation to make themselves worthy of those gifts. By taking on that obligation, naturally advantaged people redistribute their good fortune, using it to help others. They become morally obligated to do so because of their capability and the circumstances that bestowed them.

As such, one might conclude that circumstance also informs capability from a moral perspective. Much like natural talents, an agent cannot control happening upon a situation in which some good needs to be done. If an agent sees an injured person while on a walk, and there does not appear to be any assistance on the way, the agent should act on the moral duty to prevent harm. If the agent recognizes that moral duty, they have an on-going obligation to watch for potential harms insofar as they are capable. Where multiple agents recognizing this duty are in the same situation, any one may abstain from intervening as long as at least one takes up the duty to prevent. Where one is alone, one must assume that duty oneself. Circumstance and ability may position an agent to be the sole possible candidate for accepting a moral duty. In such cases capability and circumstance bestow the obligation.

Collective action problems can arise when multiple agents who agree on the scope of moral duties all recognize an opportunity to enact their duty that can fulfilled by any one of them. If all agents involved wait for another to act, the situation may pass without fulfilling the duty. These issues can be mitigated if one also considers bias to action a component of moral duty. A moral duty defines an action to be performed, so the normative force of the obligation must likewise motivate an agent to respond to the duty with action unless another agent has already done so. In other words when an agent finds themselves looking for someone else to do something, they should then accept that the duty falls to them and take action.

European occult traditions often look backward in time for the keys to mystery. The ancient masters encoded secret knowledge for later discovery according to Theosophists and Hermetic magicians. Wicca merely revives the oldest religion according to Gardnerian witches. Whether one understands these claims as literal or metaphorical, they demonstrate a past-oriented attitude and aesthetic that shapes contemporary traditions and their values. The language of kings, queens, domains, and subjects enters ritual forms to frame the role of the High Priest and Priestess or the relationship between gods and humanity.

While royal imagery complements a pastoral aesthetic often associated with modern Paganism, it also calls forth class divides between a privileged elite and the common masses. The atavistic aesthetic may influence the perception of modern Paganism as exclusionary to communities of color, being rooted both in European mysticism and colonizer hierarchies. The regressive tendencies show up differently across modern Pagan traditions, but they are quite evident even in Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca. Even without emphasizing monarchial hierarchies, the cultural models typically applied to “Norse” and “Celtic” traditions still assume a stratified society, divided into warrior-druid-bard heroes and common artisans and farmers.

Framing modern Wicca as a revival of “the Old Religion” establishes a relationship to tradition usually associated with conservative politics. Conservative politics forms a contemporary cult of tradition, hewing to values of an imagined, idealized past that imposes duties of continuation on the present. A “traditional” approach to value reinforces historic injustice such as narrowly defined gender roles and resistance to gender identity and relationship styles that escape narrow confines.

Gardner identifies a focus on returning to nature as one of the essential elements of his witchcraft tradition. The values associated with this element of Gardnerian Wicca embrace a pastoral aesthetic. As an artistic movement, pastoralism frames the desire for simplicity and natural settings as a desire for a traditional life of clearly defined roles such as shepherd, wife, and king. Injunctions against the evils of technology and the modern world appear in Gardner’s writing, often alongside paeans to monarchy and a just, benevolent aristocracy.

While American Paganism contains strains of progressive politics, the duo-theist framework of the Wiccan Goddess and God expand rigid gender roles across polytheist pantheons. When any goddess is reducible to an abstract “Goddess” and every god is reducible to an abstract “God,” divine attributes are subsumed by attributes assigned as masculine and feminine. In addition to ignoring nonbinary gender identity and the transgender experience, the duo-theist framework aligns with culturally defined gender roles, the domain of tradition. In response to internal advocacy, contemporary Pagan traditions have begun to integrate more inclusive approaches to the God and Goddess of Wicca, but the oversight can be attributable to a framework internal to the tradition, not merely one shared by the broader culture.

Fortunately for the progressive, modern Paganism cannot be entirely reduced to its atavistic features. One must bring a critical lens to practice, tradition, and myth, but in so doing one begins a highly rewarding engagement with the path. Through the deconstruction of gender archetypes, political power, and social relationships, a modern Pagan can renew their tradition, affirming it as a dynamic and adaptive context rather than one merely recorded in a history book. When one establishes a coven as a peer community situated in an intersection of identities and related communities, witchcraft steps into the context of life as we live it today.

Racist tendencies that arise in conjunction with heritage-based traditions can be combated with the same critical lens. While only some lineages assert “heritage” as a gatekeeping measure, the dominant strains of “Celtic” and “Norse” Paganism alongside British Traditional Witchcraft have influenced the dominating whiteness of Pagan communities. Nevertheless, a white person investigating their heritage critically is invited to understand a “Celtic” or “Norse” identity and to recognize the very recent creation of white identity that subsumes other identities. Knowledge of pre-Christian people of Northern and Northwestern Europe remains limited because Roman expansion erased or consumed many traces of those cultures, laying the groundwork for a homogenization that Christianity would complete. In other words white people get an opportunity to recognize that imperialism took an identity from them as well, disrupting a continuity they had previously taken only from whiteness.

Pagans of non-English European heritage living in North America should investigate their ancestry to learn about the excluding and plastic nature of whiteness. To understand that French, Irish, German, and Polish people were deemed apart from the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant mainstream and oppressed accordingly is to understand the auto-colonization of European peoples by whiteness. A white Pagan should learn these lessons to build empathy with disadvantaged identity groups as we find them in our current context, to recognize the privilege foisted upon them by the erasure of their ancestry, and to find common cause in remedying systemic social injustice.

Philosopher Tim van Gelder argues that metaphors for the mind reflect popular technological paradigms. During the latter 20th century, computing metaphors dominate philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Functionalist explanations of the mental states mirror the binary logic of Alan Turing’s machines. Sigmund Freud’s analysis of subconscious influence on speech and action resembles the need to relieve excess pressure in a steam engine. While technological models assist in reasoning about more abstract phenomena, the phenomenon remains logically prior to the model. One should be careful when drawing conclusions from the framing metaphor since the metaphor need not conform perfectly to serve as an explanatory device.

Modern witchcraft and New Age lore often focus on an undefined “energy” that can be gathered, directed, and released in service of operational magic. Descriptions of energy work often recall the dynamics of electric current. For instance, excess energy requires “grounding” when a ritual is complete or else the discharge may be dangerous. Beyond these phenomenological descriptions, the energy remains undefined.

In Yoga traditions control over breathing assists with directing focus and developing meditative concentration. The word for breath, “prana,” indicates both the physical breath and a more subtle current that carries vitality through the body. Traditional Chinese Medicine recognizes a similar concept designated with the word for breath, “qi.” The similarity should be unsurprising since the Silk Road connects these traditions, and they compare well with New Age “energy” due to its appropriation from those cultures. These concepts reference an observable phenomenon to anchor imagination of a subtle phenomenon.

While metaphors are useful for making the abstract concrete, conclusions cannot reliably follow from the metaphor alone. Breath and electricity behave according to observable physical principles, but one cannot infer the behavior of a more subtle “energy” from the behavior of electricity. Imagining the breath as a flow of electric current can stabilize and focus awareness, but these metaphors describe an experience using imagery. They are not sensory descriptions of a magical power.

Setting aside the metaphors, all of these models do seem to refer to the same phenomenon. During meditation one can settle into a feeling of expanded awareness where the immediate sensory environment transforms into something “inside” the mind rather than “outside” the body. The expanded awareness can be focused on specific sensations to unpack the arising, presenting, and passing of sense experience. The flow of breath or electricity can be used to describe intentional direction and focus of the expanded awareness. Chaos magicians describe reaching a state like this one when directing intention toward a sigil, training one’s awareness to the sigil and the outcome it encodes.

While one should not rely on this technique to spin straw into gold, expanded awareness is foundational for the cultivation of mindfulness in both Buddhism and Yoga. Being able to release passing tensions and focus on the task at hand can make a mundane task soothing. Gathering resolve through expanded awareness shines light on habits we want to break. The metaphors should help us achieve the state of consciousness by giving us a mental map, a technique for cultivating it. They do not need to convey metaphysical or ontological facts about the world to serve this function, so inference from the model should be limited to practical application.

John Rawls described society as “a cooperative venture for mutual advantage.” There is a value proposition underlying the formation of an organized community and submitting to its laws. While an individual loses freedom, they receive a wealth of opportunities to cooperate with others to secure more resources than any of them could secure alone. The freedom of the individual outside of community is a meager freedom that promises no security, but community allows a person to get everything they need for themselves by participating in formal and informal support networks. Given that people are generally born into their communities rather than forsake primal independence to join, the value proposition should be understood as framing what community does for people and what people do for community.

The value proposition also provides a motivation for obeying a community’s laws. Law makes up the fabric of society, defining the rights and duties of citizens to the community, and of the community to the citizens. Knowing those duties and knowing that they will be enforced by the collective power of the community defines a space in which cooperation can take place. All individuals involved can be secure in what the law promises, and they can form cooperative agreements within the framework of law.

The benefit of law only follows when all individuals in the community follow the law. Citizens then have motivation to obey the law and abide by the consequences when they do not. Even the most cynical perspective can recognize that the law provides more advantage than disadvantage. The value of predictability alone motivates a self-interested preference for obedience to the loss of security in a lawless society.

When the laws are arranged to systematically disadvantage a group, members of that group will not experience the same sense of protection as members of the privileged group. In such a case breaking the law has no connection with forfeiting security. One who already lacks that security must then evaluate upholding on the basis of expected gains agar mere avoidance of consequences.

In addition, one must always consider two paths: obtaining a benefit within the boundaries of the law or obtaining a benefit outside of those limits. If breaking the law offers a greater benefit or a benefit that one could not obtain through lawful means, breaking the law becomes a pragmatic option. Where obtaining a benefit lawfully is made impossible due to systematic disadvantage stemming from the arrangement or enforcement of the law, the motivation for individuals from disadvantaged groups to obey the law becomes thin.

Where privilege bounds economic success, the ability to secure basic needs will differ across advantaged and disadvantaged identity groups. Members of the advantaged group may look at their peers and elders and reasonably believe that they can secure their living by conforming to expectations. No degree of conformity and obedience protects a systemically disadvantaged group because their group identity alone is nonconforming. Gains can be erased when the advantaged group decide to raid what they perceive as undeserved rewards, as happened at Rosewood and other race riots.

In that light the consequences of property crime become equivocal across legal and illegal acquisition. In either case one’s gains might be taken at a later time. If the illegal path presents a shorter and more certain path than the alternative, property crime becomes a rational choice. Where past injustices disrupt generational wealth for disadvantaged groups, property crime may also serve as a means of reparations, a restoration of unjust takings.

In liberal democracies police officers work to apprehend perpetrators of petty theft or the drug trade while ignoring wage theft undertaken by managers against workers. Unwarranted taking is a criminal matter only when the working class takes from the owner class. Public money pays for police officers to apprehend shoplifters, and members of disadvantaged groups provide ready scapegoats. When the owner class steals from the working class, the only remedy lies in expensive civil courts, giving the owner class the advantage of wealth. Confronted with these asymmetries, members of disadvantaged groups do not enjoy the protection of the law at all. One loses no security by breaking the law if one is unable to rely on its protection.

You take a walk around your block and see a cloud of black smoke. When you find the source, you see flames licking the walls and roof of a house. A window is open on the second floor, and coils of cinder-flecked smoke writhe into the air. Someone is leaning out of the window and calling for help. They want to jump, but need someone to catch them.

No sirens or flashing lights appear to be approaching. The person pleads with you to stand under the window and just try to catch them. They tell you that the door to the room is too hot to touch. Shingles fall off the roof around the window.
What do you do? What should you do? Firefighters appear to be nowhere near. If they are not nearby, the person could pass out from the smoke, unable to jump to safety before the fire truck arrives. No one else is nearby, and all you have to do is stand under the window, break the person’s fall, and help them get away from the burning house.

If it is clear to you that helping the person is the right thing to do, you should be likewise ready to respond to calls for social justice, to investigate systemic bias, and to remedy injustice directly. In Buddhist philosophy the simile of the house of fire demonstrates the motive to help all people achieve liberation. Underlying the simile is an assumption that one is morally required to answer calls for aid, to put oneself at risk to save another in distress.

Social injustice has inflicted physical, psychological, and social damage in all societies. Class warfare is not an imagined future. The present day exploitation and destruction of working people and the world they inhabit is owner class warfare against the working class. Our world is burning, we are buried in debt and desperation, and we are divided and suspicious of one another. We need to heal, not ignore, the diversity of traumas wrought on us by capitalism, by the owner class, by the martial class. Escape for ourselves only is not enough. The house is on fire, and a lot of people need rescue.

If one supports a law or government policy, one can be presumed to support the associated consequences. It is not clear why one would desire a certain law to go into effect if they did not desire its consequences to follow. Expressing dissatisfaction with unexpected consequences could be consistent with support for a policy, as when one’s support wavers when once unexpected but undesirable effects come to light. Nevertheless, desire for expected outcomes can be readily inferred from desire for the policy that will cause them.

Capital punishment provides a straightforward example of support for both a law and its consequences. If one supports capital punishment, one then supports the resulting deaths. One may believe that those people justly convicted and sentenced deserve to die, or one may believe that the ultimate consequence is an acceptable cost for deterring others from crime. Without such an attitude toward death, one’s support for capital punishment would be incoherent. While it would be consistent for a supporter of capital punishment to desire that no one is mistakenly executed, they have nevertheless found desirable the execution of at least some people.

When considering rectification of historic social injustice, a person who supports only gradual change must also support the consequences of sustaining injustice. If a person believes social injustice is wrong and should be corrected but not immediately, they have implicitly accepted the resulting limitations on the life and well-being of the the disadvantaged group. Arguing for gradual change or maintaining a status quo of injustice implicitly argues that the oppressed accept the limitations on their health, wealth, and well-being in order not to discomfort the privileged.

Requiring gradual change to rectify social injustice places an unequal value on the lives of the disadvantaged and the privileged. Members of disadvantaged groups face shorter lifespans due to bias in healthcare, hiring, and education. If a welfare program’s food assistance does not allow for a family to buy fresh fruits and vegetables, or not enough of any food, people who rely on that program will suffer the effects of hunger. When the disruption of generational wealth places most of a population at an economic disadvantage, members of that group will more often suffer the effects of hunger. As long as the structure of social institutions maintains this situation, human lives will be shorter and more painful. Webs of disadvantage like this one render social institutions as a whole prejudiced against disadvantaged groups.

If one understands that support for a law entails support for its known consequences, one must also recognize a shared culpability when those consequences manifest. When members of a privileged group reject the discomfort of negotiating new boundaries or receiving less undeserved deference, they express a disregard for human life. They bear moral responsibility for the lives lost to that disregard. Instead, members of privileged groups should study the dynamics of injustice in their society, forsake their privilege at every opportunity, and demand immediate rectification. Asking people to wait means asking them to die.