WTF is an "accident of birth"?
So they are abolishing hereditary peers
Awright, we are a meritocratic democracy, got it. Where lawmakers should actually be qualified instead of inheriting positions. Like, by pandering to lobby groups, which secures you positive media coverage, which secures you the vote by the plebs, which qualifies you to make laws that you then get dictated by lobby groups or supranational institutions (or, in the case of Britain and Europe, by the transatlantic bully). But at least every aspiring political prostitute gets a fair shot at playing the game, no matter who their parents are. Gotcha.
Putting these minor flaws of democratic egalitarianism to the side for a moment, what on earth is an “accident of birth”? Surely we are not talking about the results of teenage pregnancies or unwanted out-of-wedlock children here? Pretty sure they aren’t about to enact an anti-bastard law.
So what is it? Presumably, the “accident of birth” means that you can’t have any privilege because you could have just as easily been born into a totally different body. How, I don’t know; what that even means, I can’t tell. You would, after all, be an entirely different person; even die-hard blank-slatists should acknowledge as much.
But let’s play around a little bit with this idea.
The “accident birth” talking point sort of ties in with John Rawls’ (in)famous “veil of ignorance” concept that supposedly helps us bring justice to society: if we just pretend we don’t know any specifics about ourselves and others while making decisions about what a just society should look like, this will help us overcome our biases.1
While the idea of a “veil of ignorance” is intended as a sort of thought experiment and not as a metaphysical claim, the way our minds work is that we tend to confuse the two: we are rightfully reluctant to take a thought experiment seriously if it is based on an absurd premise, and so we automatically try to make the premise less absurd by giving it metaphysical weight: we literally go behind the veil of ignorance, a position from which people’s births look like mere “accidents.” All people become the same abstract blobs, randomly shuffled around. Time, too, disappears in the non-embodied abstract realm, and hence the blobs are there before birth, after birth, whatever.
These mind-tricks that give far-out social justice theories metaphysical reality obscure the obvious fact that the very idea of an “accident of birth” is absurd, no matter how you look at it. (Leaving aside the insult of calling my birth an “accident,” as if it were something that should have been avoided by better safety measures.)
In the materialist picture, the world has a deep causal backstory that leads precisely to our moment of birth, with all that this entails: genetic lineage, cultural circumstances, and so on. Far from being an accident, our birth is literally determined by the history of the cosmos. We absolutely could not have been born as a different person; the very notion is completely contrary to a world self-contained in a complex web of material causes and effects. What’s more, since our biology determines everything about us, we couldn’t exist any other way than the way we are as a specific biological being.
Let’s move on to a more Christian perspective. While there has been considerable debate among Christians as to how this whole soul business works, it is clear that there is such a thing as a soul, and that it enters (or fuses with) the body at some point (when exactly that happens is subject to debate, too). While some theologies lean more towards downplaying or even denying a life of the soul before conception of the body, others emphasize that the soul has a life of its own prior to ensoulment. (Jeremiah 1:5 says "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, And before you were born I consecrated you …”)2
If we view the soul as basically being created by God at conception, the same picture emerges with regard to the “accident of birth” claim as under materialism: body and soul are a tight union, so any talk about the possibility of the soul having entered a different body doesn’t make much sense. But even if we take the stronger view that the soul was created by God independently of the body, and had an existence of its own prior to birth/conception, the “accident of birth” idea still doesn’t hold water: while it may be conceivable that the soul could have entered a different body, this merging of body and soul is certainly not accidental. Unless we are supposed to believe that God distributes souls by turning some giant wheel of fortune or by playing soul-lotto. No, I’m sure he has his reasons, and therefore, again, there is no accident of birth, but a deliberate bringing together of a certain soul with a certain body, both being dependent upon each other and producing a unique human being that couldn’t have come to be any other way.
Now, what about full-blown reincarnation? In this picture, at first glance we might be tempted to accept the accident of birth idea. I could have been born as someone else, after all, to a wealthy family of noblemen perhaps, or as a peasant boy. But just as with the Christian picture, to talk about an “accident” only makes sense if we assume a Cosmic lottery ejecting souls to earth at random. Which nobody who takes reincarnation seriously believes: whatever is going on, it’s clear that souls, or God, or the higher soul economy or whatever, match bodies to souls for certain purposes—such as learning certain things, experiencing certain challenges, paying karmic debt, etc. In other words, that I was born a man is not an accident; that I’m not born into nobility is not an accident; that I’m born into a reasonably healthy body (knock on wood) is not an accident. What’s more, even under a scheme of reincarnation, the earthly attributes of a person are not merely the product of the soul, but clearly a fusion between body and soul, so, again, the same objections as in the materialist picture apply: genetics do matter even here (the same soul in a different body would be a different person), as indeed does the material history of the cosmos. And if my soul incarnated in this specific body, while there might be some randomness involved (after all, there is not an infinite number of possible bodies available to incarnate into), the soul’s (or God’s) choice by definition is not random, is no accident.
Where does this leave us?
The “accident of birth” concept is the product of a bizarre mishmash of the materialist and neo-Darwinian emphasis on randomness in the creation of life, and a New Age soul-wandering cosmos minus higher beings or a higher order. A religion without a God. A universe that is neither material nor spiritual, leaving only a void, a big chunk of nothingness. A delusion fueled by over-abstraction and nonsensical metaphysics.
I suppose in such a universe that is a nothingness-void, anything is possible, including life behind the veil of ignorance, where everybody’s birth looks like an accident.
What was the political question here again?
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I was partly inspired to write this based on this X post, which led to a “wtf, where to even begin” reaction in me.
I totally didn’t pull that quote from Reddit.
I think "accident of birth" is meant not in the sense of an unintended or unfortunate occurrence but in the Greek sense of an "essence vs. accident" paradigm (I don't know if that's Plato or Aristotle or somebody else, but it's one of those guys). I.e. that the physical appearance of something does not necessarily align with it's essential form (a chair that breaks apart as soon as you sit on it has the accident of "chair-ness" but not the essence, because being a chair that holds no weight isn't truly a chair)
So the implication here is that an "accident" of birth is separate from the "essence" of a person, with the latter being decisive in determing their entitlements.
As you point out, this is still wrong, because the circumstances of birth obviously affects essence for all sorts of reasons and under even opposing paradigms. One of those that you don't mention is existentialism, as defined by Sartre ("a person exists before he can be defined by any concept"). Shitlibs would probably modify that slightly by saying a person exists and then by pronouncing the correct leftist shibboleths obtains a holy essence based on whatever power dynamics operate at any time. Or something like that; it's very confusing.
The “accident of birth” seems to be associated with a logically flawed idea of moral universalism: that all humans are equal in value and dignity, irrespective of who they individually are. This is wrong because if human are subject to some non-trivial universal principle in virtue of which are valuable and have moral status (universalism) then it must be possible for this principle to be realised/expressed by different individuals more or less faithfully, resulting in different degrees of value and status. The moral challenge is then to treat others in a way that does not undermine the expression of the universal principle in ourselves.
If we were all expressing the normative principle equally, in the same degree, then it would be a trivial principle, therefore not normative. A crucial aspect of universalism is that we all have choice, which is the entry level qualification for moral beings, and that our choices determine the quality of who we are, so reducing humans to fungible units of value implies that our choices have no consequence, that we are not even moral beings, therefore we are not subject to any moral principle.