'Blamelessness over need': Professor questions priorities implicit in compensation for 9/11 victims

BY JIA-RUI CHONG

Michele Landis Dauber admitted the question might be in poor taste, but she said she had to ask it: "Why is it that the families of the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks get generous compensation while others -- those with teenage pregnancies, those in poverty -- get nothing?"

As part of the "Ethics @ Noon" series, sponsored by the Ethics in Society Program, the assistant professor of law on Friday looked at the ethics of the government's most recent distribution of "disaster relief" in the larger context of state assistance.

Dauber, who has studied natural disaster relief and the welfare state, said the decision to compensate each victim's family with $1.65 million affects all beneficiaries of government aid. The government gives with one hand and takes back with the other. Pointing to the recession and unemployment, Dauber said that there are many now who are "far more financially deprived" who will see only a reduction in their aid. On the fifth anniversary of welfare reform, said Dauber, "it's a cutback at the worst time."

"Is this right? No. But this is an obvious answer. I'm more interested in why this obvious inequity in distribution has not entered into the public debate," Dauber said.

Keeping up with newspaper articles and studying the public comments posted on the government's Sept. 11 website for victims and their families, she identified three themes in the way Americans talk about handouts.

First, compensation has had only a tenuous relationship to need in U.S. history. Since 1789, she said, when the government first gave direct federal aid, "the common thread was moral blamelessness."

Second, fairness in financial distribution has been judged according to precedent. All bills with compensation packages refer to previous compensation packages. Though the money earmarked for the Sept. 11 fund far exceeds the amount for past events, no one is criticizing the fund.

"The only thing you hear is people from before saying they didn't receive enough so they want to be on parity with Sept. 11," she explained. Some victims of the Nairobi bombing, for instance, are asking for $1.5 million because that attack was the work of the same terrorist group.

The third theme is the power of blamelessness. Dauber argued that those who are blameless achieve a moral virtue that those who seem to suffer because of perceived laziness -- however needy they are -- cannot achieve. The Sept. 11 victims were excused from the "polluting" paperwork, given child care and hot buffets in government offices, and saw tax rules suspended so that charities could share donations with victims' families. By contrast, welfare recipients, she said, still have to stand in lines and wade through red tape, and cannot even dream of receiving $1.6 million per person.

The great need that has arisen because of the recession has led many to try to link their misfortunes to the terrorist attacks. Given that government policy is open-handed with "blameless victims" and tight-fisted with "victims of their own fate," Dauber said that "Sept. 11 has become a proxy for 'It wasn't my fault.'

"It's easier to tell your story if you have an exploding building to point to than an unexpected pregnancy to explain," she said.

The "real accomplishment of government policy makers," she said, is to make their decisions to prioritize blamelessness over need seem "inevitable" and "natural." One legal repercussion of this triage system could be that lawyers will change their strategies to claim that their clients are victims of "a force beyond their control" in order to win compensation cases. Emphasizing that their clients have need or emphasizing the extent of their need, she said, will not be effective.

But she admits that this is a "pragmatic" consequence of her study, not one that is necessarily right or that answers the question of who is ultimately most deserving of government money. Nor does this strategy properly consider victims' sense of their own motivation or the extent to which they could have avoided their tragedy -- controversial topics in general legal debate.

Dauber did try to explain why Americans have elevated blamelessness over need. It is a tricky question of psychology, she said, but she suggested that people tend to be more generous when they can identify with those seeking assistance.

"People want to think that this is something that could happen to 'people like us.' " For example, she said, the average person can't imagine being a heroin addict, "but they can imagine being in a chair in an office at the World Trade Center."