The Malice Model of Misfortune

(This was originally from my blog, but I wanted to share it here because I think the idea of the Malice Model of Misfortune is potentially important, and might be of interest to some folks around here. I think it captures a lot of what goes wrong in political thought in a unified framework.)

My psychological diagnosis of what’s really going on in cases like that of the driver- the Malice Model of Misfortune

My view of the world is that ₩Ɇ ₳ⱤɆ ł₦ ⱧɆⱠⱠ. The world is random, violent, and dangerous. Good intentions are our only defence against causing ruinous evil, and they are a bad defence.

Many people do not accept this; they seek to impose meaning on awful events in a way that excludes them from the normal course of things, marking them as abnormal. Punishment fulfills this function.

There is a common way of viewing the world, which I call the Malice Model of Misfortune:

The Malice Model of Misfortune is a modified version of the Just World Fallacy. It is, in various forms, a key driver of political conservatism- although both the left and the right are riddled with it.

The premise of the model is that, generally speaking, the world operates justly - good people get good things, and bad people get bad things. But there is one exception. Bad things can happen to good people, but only in one way- through evil, malicious human agency. Thus, most problems do not require much by way of resolution- generally, good will be paid to good and bad to bad. However, malicious agency is the exception requiring our attention because it can cause real injustice to good people. When something bad happens to a good person, those who operate on this worldview either try to find a way to attribute it to malicious action or try to convince themselves the victim wasn’t good after all. Another way of putting it: only evil causes evil- either the victim’s own evil, or the evil of a perpetrator.

Anthropologically, this view isn’t new. As I’ve discussed previously, many cultures didn’t believe in natural death, attributing apparently natural deaths to witchcraft. Even in cultures that do accept natural death, the idea that bad events are caused by witches is often popular. The temptation to argue that apparent bad is either actually just, or is secretly caused by a person, is strong. Karma, evil spirits, witchcraft, conspiracy theories, all of these fall into the pattern.

The malice model is bad for two reasons:

1. It makes us harshly punish morally normal- or close to it- people as if they were morally depraved.
2. It makes us focus on problems that can easily be framed in terms of individual malice, and to focus on solutions framed around individual malice.

The first problem is awful, no doubt, but the second does even more damage.

This gets applied in the road-death case in a couple of ways.

First of all, it convinces many people that the driver must have really done something wrong or been a wicked person in some way. They must be one of the bad drivers, unlike you*. They* must have done something really negligent.

Secondly, even if the advocate of harsh punishment doesn’t quite think of the unfortunate driver as malicious, they might start to see them as in some way spiritually-morally polluted- in need of cleansing through punishment. Perhaps they don’t have the accidents of malice, but in some sense, they have the essence. Punishing them harshly asserts that they are aberrant; this is outside the realm of us, this is outside our moral order.

How the malice model explains much of politics

• Global warming and environmental degradation

Global warming is under-attended to as a policy priority by many voters because it’s hard to understand it in terms of malicious individual choices. Because the harm is laundered through an impersonal mechanism, and individual moral choice matters little, people struggle to care about it as much as they should. Even when people do care about it, they often frame their care in ways that overstate individual moral choice and culpability.

• Criminal justice obsession

Criminal justice gets far more attention than issues which are, in welfare assessment terms, far weightier. It is not unusual for 25% of voters to say it is their top issue, and 20% of news coverage dedicated to it is common. The malice theory of misfortune explains this obsession. You might say, “Isn’t it just much more interesting? Isn’t that why it attracts attention?” And yes, it is to most people, but this is linked to the malice model. The typical person just finds individual malice much more interesting than structural issues for psychological reasons related to our embrace of the malice model.

• Terrorism obsession

9/11 caused about 1 in 1000 deaths in 2001. The war on terror period lasted about 10 years and, in some sense, still continues to this day. People were saying stuff like “The constitution is not a suicide pact” to justify annihilating civil liberties over a problem that, demographically, was a drop in the ocean. 8 trillion dollars were spent on the war! 2.5 billion dollars was spent on the war on terror per individual victim of 9/11. If the war on terror prevented one thousand 9/11s, it would still have been too expensive on a lives saved basis, in that the money could have easily saved more American lives if it were spent on other things.

• Agentifying macroeconomics

The unemployed must be maliciously lying about seeking a job. Unemployment is due to evil HR ladies (not that I have any love for HR myself). Inflation must be due to sellers suddenly getting greedier, and not structural capitalist forces. All these are instances of the malice theory of misfortune.

• All the usual just world stuff

Because the malice model of misfortune is a tweak on just-world theory, all the usual problems of just-world theory are present. The poor must have done something stupid. Disaster sufferers must have been imprudent. The laid-off worker must not have been good enough. It couldn’t happen to me because I’m a good person.

• Bad medical policy

All medical problems either get turned into a just world parable, “if only he hadn’t made such bad choices, he wouldn’t have had a stroke” or turned into an implausible story about malice, “It was the MRNA vaccines that gave him the stroke through the plandemic” or ignored. Structural and design problems are discounted. Either it's the moral failing of the victim, or it's the malicious intention of Big Pharma, or something like that.

Also in the health world- actively avoiding solutions that don’t “punish” “malice”. This explains a lot of antipathy to GLP-1 agonists as a solution for weight management, among those who see obesity as a moral failing.

• Inability to think about structural barriers to equality

Even people who worry about racism, sexism, etc., constantly fall into speaking as if the only way these things operate is through malice. Consider the startup founder who doesn’t want to hire a 25-year-old woman who has just gotten married because they suspect she will get pregnant. The founder may have no antipathy to women whatsoever. The startup founder might even be a woman herself. The founder’s choice is wicked- to be sure- but is best understood as part of a structural problem that ultimately needs a structural solution (e.g., a partway solution would be government rather than business-funded maternity leave). A malice-first framework obscures this, focusing all attention on individual bias. Even seemingly more sophisticated explanations ultimately come back to individual agency- e.g. unconscious bias.

• The obsession with bad moral choices causes people to ignore structural problems, even when the moral failings may be real

I’m gay. Do gay guys sometimes have unprotected sex? Yes. Is this morally regrettable? Often, yes. Thumping the table about it, however, will not end the practice. During the AIDS crisis, a phantom moral solution (“what if they just all stop acting wrongly”- often understood as stopping being gay altogether) was used as a reason against action. Ultimately, this killed hundreds of thousands of people and caused untold economic, cultural, and political damage.

Or take a case of real moral depravity- domestic violence. Notice that 95% of our discourse about domestic violence is about punishing the people who commit it, rather than, for example, creating shelters so victim-survivors can leave safely. There is a real and urgent need to punish perpetrators, but other aspects of the solution become lost in the overwhelming focus on malice. Politicians underfund shelters.