Fragility, Stability, and Our Ideals Regarding the Weil-Being of Others:Reflections on Fukushima Daiichi

摘要

In The fragility of goodness, Martha Nussbaum explored 'the gap between being a good person and managing to live a good life' (Nussbaum, 2001, p. xviii). This gap results from the importance of contingent, external goods such as wealth, personal relationships, health, and the political circumstances of one's birth for living a good life (Nussbaum, 2001, p. 331). There her focus was on the role moral luck plays in flourishing. With exposure to the right external goods, a good person would have a reasonable chance at a flourishing life. Without those goods, chances dwindle. The goodness of one's life is fragile, dependent as it is on the vicissitudes of life. My concern in what follows is with a related lesson we should take from the fragility, not of goodness itself, but of the society and social infrastructure on which many of those goods depend. The recent Fukushima disaster should remind us that despite our many failsafe mechanisms, triple redundancies and contingency plans, our society and our social institutions, including the infrastructure that undergirds those institutions, are fragile both in the face of known dangers and unpredictable events.