Rethinking 'Death Ships,' aka 'Parasitism' aka "It's Not About You..."

I wrote an off-the-top-of-the-head flippancy the other day about "death ships," with particular reference to the economy. It stands as a useful reminder of the principle that to be a blogger, you can't be a perfectionist: I knew almost from the moment that I posted it that it was insufficiently thought out, certainly incomplete and probably self-contradictory.

Here I am back just a couple of days later with a tiny effort at clarification. Recall my core examples: I talked about the guys who created investment vehicles designed to fail so they could short them. Or, mortgages designed to default, so they could enjoy the refinance. Or ships designed to sink you could collect the insurance.

I suppose the common thread here is the notion of devices designed to serve some purpose other than their "real" purpose. But baldly stated, the analytical flaw should be obvious. That is: who gets to define the "real" purpose? We'll stipulate that the sailor doesn't want to board a ship that is destined to sink. But that adverts only to his purpose. From the standpoint of the owner-investor, the real purpose was something else altogether. So in the abstract, there is nothing going on here more sinister than a conflict of purposes. What can be interesting about that?

I'm not sure I know the answer to my own question, but I'm not satisfied with the framing. For it does seem that this conflict of purposes is a recurrent theme in our moral universe, and we do seem to insist that some purposes are more "real" than others. You can see this in jokes--a huge tranche of comedy is built on cross purposes: "I don't know about you, but I just stepped on a duck;" "we've already settled that, we're just arguing over price." And so forth, some of them are even clean.

At least one enduring theme here is the idea of self-absorption. Cleopatra, astounded, looks on astounded as life ebbs from her beloved Antony:

Noblest of men, woo't die?
Hast thou no care of me?

We think of Cleopatra as a narcissist but which of us is not a narcissist when it comes to making such fine distinctions?

I was mulling all this over in the car this morning as I listened to Carl Zimmer on an NPR talk show, flogging his new book Parasite Rex. They're everywhere, those little rascals: creatures who deploy the lives of other creatures, often without the host so much as suspecting, so as to serve purposes of their own. One of my own favorites is the toxoplasma gondii which subtly alters the olfactory system of the rat so that he no longer fears cat urine; leading to the transmission of the rat into the belly of the cat, which is where the toxoplasma gondii wanted to be all along.

It's creepy somehow, although Zimmer asks: how does it differ from the activity of a lion, who survives only in the presence of lesser beasts who can't run as fast? And yet we name sports teams after lions; there's no such thing as a team called the Detroit Tapeworms.

Kant says that we cannot suppose a right to treat another as a means rather than an end. So we cannot (perhaps unless you are a priest) deploy children for our own sexual gratification. Of course part of the problem is figuring out when we are treating others as a means rather than an end. I suspect that a lot of the challenge here is that this is not an easy or obvious line to draw. I can feel for Cleopatra, even as she rails against the dying Antony. On the other hand, I'm not sure we need to allow a banking system where people create securities on purpose designed to fail