Why Might Vulnerability Make Crisis Politics Morally Distinctive?
This post is co-authored by Matthew Adams and Fay Niker, and is based on their recent, open-access journal article “Taking Advantage of Crises“.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the humanitarian crisis it created, Milton Friedman wrote an influential op-ed in the Wall Street Journal advocating for a school voucher system in New Orleans. “This is a tragedy,” he wrote. “It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.” His advocacy succeeded: within 18 months, the city’s School Board went from running 123 public schools to just 4, with most replaced by privately run charter schools.
This wasn’t an isolated case of opportunism unique to free market advocates. Winston Churchill famously advised to “never let a good crisis go to waste.” More recently, figures like Arundhati Roy have suggested that crises like Covid-19 provide opportunities for progressive transformation. And the Green New Deal explicitly frames the climate crisis as an opportunity to advance broader economic reforms, including policies like living wages that extend well beyond emissions reduction.
If political actors across the ideological spectrum try to take advantage of crises, what makes such opportunism problematic? The intuitive answer focuses on ends: it’s bad when Friedmanites privatize public goods, good when progressives create quality jobs. But this simple view misses important moral nuance. Even taking advantage of crises to realize good ends can be problematic in how those ends are pursued—through cognitive distortion, emotional manipulation, or circumventing democratic procedures. More fundamentally, it doesn’t address whether strategies that take advantage of crises should be evaluated differently from essentially the same strategies used during normal times.
Recognizing the patterns
Taking advantage of a crisis can occur in various forms. We can distinguish several strategies, three of which are particularly important:
Fear Factor involves framing issues to deliberately amplify people’s crisis-related fears. The “weapons of mass destruction” framing that justified UK involvement in the Iraq War following 9/11 is a paradigm case—playing on terrorism-related fears to build support for actions people might not otherwise endorse.
Smuggling presents something as crisis-responsive while covertly advancing an independent agenda. The Friedman example illustrates what we call over-extending: instituting a measure that is at least partially responsive to the crisis, but that primarily advances an independent ideological agenda. Replacing New Orleans’ public schools with charter schools did address rebuilding the education system, but its primary effect was advancing privatization. Another form is omnibussing—appending unrelated policies onto crisis responses, as critics argue occurs when the Green New Deal includes living wage provisions alongside emissions reduction measures.
Surfing the Wave seizes a crisis-induced “radical mood” via standard democratic means. Labour’s shock 1945 election victory, running on a manifesto drawing heavily on the Beveridge Report commissioned to address wartime social and economic crises, exemplifies this strategy.
These strategies aren’t mutually exclusive in practice. The USA PATRIOT Act introduced shortly after 9/11 simultaneously smuggled liberty-restricting provisions into anti-terrorism measures, seized the radical mood, and amplified fear—using multiple strategies in concert.
The vulnerability argument
Here’s the key theoretical point: crises don’t merely create political opportunities—they create and compound vulnerabilities in ways that make certain strategies morally worse than they would be during normal times, independent of their consequences.
Crises increase vulnerabilities in several ways. Most directly, they threaten people’s corporeal wellbeing. Hurricane Katrina exposed New Orleans residents to death, infectious disease, loss of medical care, and homelessness. Covid-19 threatened lives globally. Even financial crises that don’t directly threaten health still expose people to fear, uncertainty, and dependence.
These vulnerabilities aren’t distributed evenly. Crises compound existing inequalities. During Katrina, those most vulnerable were in the city’s lowest-lying, poorest neighborhoods with predominantly Black and single-mother populations. Wealthy people facing Covid-19 could pay for better healthcare and shelter in relative luxury. Members of comparatively disadvantaged groups thus become more vulnerable not just to crisis effects but to social exploitation by those in even more powerful positions because of the crisis.
More subtly, crises create dispositional vulnerabilities through the mere possibility of exploitation. A crisis opens up new possible ways actors could take advantage of it for bad ends. These possibilities—independent of whether they’re actualized—expose people to additional vulnerability. New Orleans residents were vulnerable not just to what actually happened but to the myriad possible ways the crisis could have been exploited.
This matters because it’s worse to cognitively deceive, emotionally manipulate, or procedurally circumvent people who face such heightened vulnerabilities. Other things being equal, using Friedman’s over-extending strategy on a population reeling from a humanitarian disaster is worse than using essentially the same deceptive strategy during normal times. The badness isn’t just about consequences—it’s about the moral weight we should give to manipulating people in vulnerable states.
Why this matters
This “Weight Variantism”—the view that crisis strategies should be weighted more heavily than the same strategies during normal times—has practical implications beyond theoretical interest.
It means we should evaluate crisis-era policies with particular scrutiny for procedural violations and manipulation, even when we support their aims. A progressive policy smuggled into crisis legislation may advance justice, but the smuggling itself remains problematic in a way that matters for evaluation. The distinction between ends and means can’t be collapsed.
It also suggests that the severity of crises matters for evaluation. The worse the crisis, the greater the vulnerability, the more problematic the exploitation. Covid-19’s global scope, duration, threat to lives, and unexpectedness made it a particularly severe crisis. Strategies that take advantage of such severe crises are worse—across the cognitive, affective, and procedural dimensions—than the same strategies in response to less severe crises.
We live in an age permeated by overlapping crises—climate, public health, economic, political. Understanding when and why taking advantage of them crosses ethical lines, beyond simple disagreement about ends, helps us evaluate both past responses and future ones with greater moral precision. The question isn’t whether we should ever take advantage of crises, but how the additional vulnerabilities crises create should shape our evaluation of the various ways actors might do so.
