Essay: "Detroit Needs a Statue of Robocop: Part One"

On February 7, 2011, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, in response to a direct question on the subject, tweeted that the city had no plans to build a statue of Robocop. The internet being what it is, calls for just such a statue immediately intensified, and a group of artists organized a fundraising campaign to make it happen. Within a week they had raised the necessary $50,000.



I think it’s easy to see why people got behind the idea. Robocop was a great movie about a robotic policeman who brought hope to a post-apocalyptic Detroit. Modern Detroit, I am told, be could quite accurately described as “post-apocalyptic.” It’s problems are complex and frankly borderline hopeless, and in the face of that despair, there’s something amusing about claiming that all it would take to make things right is a statue Robocop. You’d have to be a joyless curmudgeon, one would think, not to get behind the idea.

And you’d be right, of course, but the internet is full of joyless curmudgeons, and they showed up quite quickly and began noisily complaining that a statute of Robocop was a waste of money which could be much better directed to other charities.

Unfortunately, the clever artists behind the “Robocop” campaign appear to have taken these criticisms rather to heart, and at times seem almost apologetic for their desire to build a statue of Robocop. They say feeble things like “charity isn’t a zero sum game” and have encouraged their donors to give matching donations to other Detroit charities. Which is nice of them, I suppose, especially if some good causes in Detroit get a little extra scratch (I expect they need all the help they can get).

I am less nice. Had I been in the place of the artists in question, I would have told those haters to go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut; I’d have told them to take a flying fuck at the moon.

The “anti-Robocop” argument is easily demolished by unveiling it as a mistaken application of consequentialism: the view that the consequences of an action are the basis for judging the morality of that action. Now, you and I could have a wonderful debate on the merits of consequentialism versus rule-based systems of morality, if we had but world enough, and time, but for our present purposes it is enough to say that you can always criticize any action on the basis that another action might have even better consequences.

This goes far beyond giving money to UNICEF instead of, say, the Children’s Wish Foundation. For example, instead of buying a steak for dinner, I could have bought beans and then given the extra money to charity. Instead of sleeping for eight hours a night I could sleep for four and spend the rest roaming the streets as a masked crime-fighter. All of the artists in Detroit could quit their jobs and fly to volunteer in Japan. You get the idea. That sort of thinking just doesn’t lead anywhere, unless you are dealing with a limited set of options, and/or scarce resources.

In such circumstances, consequentialism can be very helpful, but as the artists pointed out, charity is not a zero-sum game. The Robocop statute did not take funds that were destined for other Detroit-area charities, and so the “I can think of an even better cause” argument is a load of crap. We should save our venom for people who are harming the world, not those who are helping it in a way which we think is suboptimal. Even a little bit is better than nothing.

But is that all we can say about the Robocop statue? That it’s better than nothing, and the criticisms against it are misguided? I don’t think so, but I’ll save those arguments for an essay next week.