Great short piece by Michael Huemer, my favorite philosopher. Reprinted with his permission.

What’s

killing us? I made the following graph. I include the top ten causes of

death in the U.S., plus homicide and illegal drug overdoses, because

the latter two are actually discussed in political discourse.

Observations:

1. The top causes of death almost never appear in political discourse

or discussions of social problems. They’re almost all diseases, and

there is almost no debate about what should be done about them. This is

despite that they are killing vastly more people than even the most

destructive of the social problems that we do talk about. (Illegal drugs

account for 0.7% of the death rate; murder, about 0.6%.)

2. This

is not because there is nothing to be done about the leading causes of

death. Changes in diet, exercise, and other lifestyle changes can make

very large differences to your risk of heart disease, cancer, and other

major diseases, and this is well-known.

3. It’s also not because

it’s uncontroversial what we should do about them, or because everybody

already knows. The government could, for example, try to discourage

tobacco smoking, alcohol use, and overeating, and encourage exercise.

There are many ways this could be attempted. Perhaps the government

could spend more money on trying to cure the leading diseases. There

obviously are policies that could attempt to address these problems, and

it would certainly not be uncontroversial which ones, if any, should be

adopted. Those who support social engineering by the government might

be expected to be campaigning for the government to address the things

that are killing most of us.

4. Most of these leading killers are

themselves mainly caused by old age. If “Old Age” were a category, it

would be causing by far the majority of deaths. Again, it’s not the case

that nothing could be done about this. We could be doing much more

medical research on aging.

5. It’s also not that we just don’t

care about diseases. *Some* diseases are treated as political issues,

such that there are activists campaigning for more attention and more

money to cure them. There are AIDS activists, but there aren’t any

nephritis activists. There are breast cancer walks, but there aren’t any

colon cancer walks.

6. Hypothesis: We don’t much care about the

good of society. Refinement: Love of the social good is not the main

motivation for (i) political action, and (ii) political discourse. We

don’t talk about what’s good for society because we want to help our

fellow humans. We talk about society because we want to align ourselves

with a chosen group, to signal that alignment to others, and to tell a

story about who we are. There are AIDS activists because there are

people who want to express sympathy for gays, to align themselves

against conservatives, and thereby to express “who they are”. There are

no nephritis activists, because there’s no salient group you align

yourself with (kidney disease sufferers?) by advocating for nephritis

research, there’s no group you thereby align yourself *against*, and you

don’t tell any story about what kind of person you are.

In

conclusion, this sucks. Because we actually have real problems that

require attention. If we won’t pay attention to a problem just because

it kills a million people, but we need it also to invoke some

ideological feeling of righteousness, then the biggest problems will

continue to kill us. And by the way, the smaller problems that we

actually pay attention to probably won’t be solved either, because all

our ‘solutions’ will be designed to flatter us and express our

ideologies, rather than to actually solve the problems.