Ferry Capsizes Off Guyana Coast with 116 People Onboard
When a Ferry Capsizes, So Does a Theory of Responsibility
The loss off Guyana’s coast shows how cheaply we value the lives of those who travel without influence, and how easily both state and market excuse themselves when the bill arrives in corpses rather than in coin.
A ferry carrying 116 passengers and crew leaves Georgetown for Port Kaituma and does not arrive. Somewhere near Iron Punt, in the dark, it capsizes. By the time light returns, rescuers have brought 53 people out of the water and are racing for the rest. We are told there were some 250 life jackets, eight lifeboats, “other safety gear,” a coastguard and private vessels in support, a medical team dispatched. Thus the modern vocabulary of responsibility is complete: equipment was present, officials were visible, prayers were said. Yet a vessel full of human beings is overturned at sea. When the fact is so stark, fine phrases are but a polite form of evasion.
In the work I called *The Wealth of Nations*, I assigned to the sovereign three duties: defence, the exact administration of justice, and certain public works and institutions which, though of great value to society, could seldom repay a private undertaker. Safe passages, harbours, and means of communication belong plainly to this class. The ferry that carries labourers, traders, and children is as truly an instrument of the national industry as any great highway. When that instrument fails so completely that scores of lives are thrown into the sea at once, we must not ask only whether this captain erred or that inspector slept; we must ask whether the public duty was discharged at all, or only imitated.
The presence of many life jackets and lifeboats shows, not that safety was secured, but that safety had been reduced to a checklist. It is cheaper to purchase jackets than to enforce drills, cheaper to buy lifeboats than to maintain hull and discipline, cheaper to proclaim regulations than to visit, test, and, when necessary, punish. In any age, men respond less to the eloquence of ministers than to the incentives before them. If an operator gains from sailing full and fast, and loses little from sailing careless, he will, without malice, let others bear the danger. The benefits of laxity are concentrated, immediate, and easily counted; the costs are diffused, uncertain, and in this case paid in the silent currency of missing bodies.
When I wrote of prices and policies, I urged that we attend not only to what is seen, but to what is foregone: to the unseen cost borne by those without a voice. Here, the unseen cost of doing safety on the cheap is borne by passengers and their families, who did not sit at the table where the savings were reckoned. It is the labouring poor, above all, who rely on public ferries rather than private craft, who cannot choose the time of sailing, who must trust that another has done for them what they cannot inspect themselves. To shift grave risk upon such people for the sake of a few saved expenses is not commerce; it is that “vile maxim” by which some would make all for themselves and nothing for other people.
Yet we deceive ourselves if we rest content with denouncing the merchant and acquitting the magistrate. The impartial spectator, that internal judge of our conduct of whom I spoke in *The Theory of Moral Sentiments*, would ask of the state not, “Did you send boats after the drowning?” but rather, “Why were they drowning at all?” If enquiry should show that rules were outdated, inspections perfunctory, penalties trivial, then the fault lies not merely in private negligence but in public parsimony and indolence. A government that will gladly pay for conspicuous rescue, with cameras and commendations, yet grudges the dull expense of continuous oversight, purchases praise at the price of lives. Praise-worthiness, unfortunately, is not to be had so cheaply.
We must also anticipate the familiar chorus that will follow any proposal to strengthen standards. Operators will plead that tighter rules would ruin them, that costs would soar, that competition from less regulated routes would drive them from the water. Such petitions, when they come from those whose profits are directly concerned, ought always, as I argued in *The Wealth of Nations*, to be listened to with the most suspicious attention. It is not that such men are monsters; it is that their trade teaches them daily to overrate their own inconveniences and to overlook the dispersed, unvoiced interest of the passenger who simply wishes to reach home alive. When the desire to avoid expense dresses itself in the language of public spirit, we are in the presence of a very old and very shabby hypocrisy.
None of this requires a statesman to play the man of system, re-arranging the great chess-board of human society as though ships, officers, and passengers were lifeless pieces obedient to his hand. It does require him to recognise that, in this traffic, the invisible hand which often guides self-interest to serve the public is feeble. The passenger cannot bargain over hull integrity; the crew cannot, each in his station, enforce a culture of safety against owners and ministers alike. When so many have so little leverage over the conditions of their own survival, the sovereign who fails to secure those conditions does not merely miscalculate; he betrays his most elementary charge. A society that lets its poor cross dangerous waters in unsafe ships should not be surprised when one day the sea presents its account.
I do not know, and cannot know from afar, which particular hands are guilty in Guyana. But I know the form of the failure: dispersed and voiceless people took the risk; concentrated and powerful interests took the savings; and when the dice at last fell badly, the ocean, as usual, took the blame.
From the works cited
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — The sovereign's three duties (defence, justice, public works and institutions, including education for the common people) and the four maxims of taxation: equality, certainty, convenience, economy.
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — Trace every policy to its effect on the price system and ask who bears the unseen cost: benefits are visible and concentrated, costs are diffuse and quiet.
- The Theory of Moral Sentiments — Judge conduct by the impartial spectator: what would a well-informed, disinterested observer feel about this action? Praise-worthiness matters more than praise; to be loved without being lovely is worth nothing, and to be blamed unjustly stings less than to deserve blame.