On its web site, the White House takes the blame for what went wrong with its response during Katrina and assesses the significance of the hurricane in the following way:

Hurricane Katrina will undoubtedly be regarded by history as one of the most destructive, costly, and tragic events our Nation has ever endured. Yet with collective determination, unity of effort, and effective organizational change, the true legacy of Katrina can be that of a catalyst that triggered a real and lasting improvement to our national preparedness…Katrina creates an opportunity—indeed an imperative—for a national dialogue about true national preparedness …and obligates us to re-examine how we are organized and resourced to address the full range of catastrophic events—both natural and man-made.

(http://www.whitehouse.gov/reports/katrina-lessons-learned/foreword.html)

Individual Americans feel compassion for the suffering and loss of the victims of Katrina. Should individual Americans also share a degree of the blame for the inadequacies of the emergency response? What is more, can any responsibility be assigned to Americans from states far away from Louisiana? (The disaster preparedness and response to most incidents is currently a state and local responsibility.)

The response of the government, to a degree, is the expression of the collective agency of the American people because ideally the government promotes shared societal goals associated with the sense of group identity. I would like us to explore whether a particular understanding of what characterizes a member of the American society is privileged over others and whether the corresponding norms and social habits affected the handling of the likely danger to New Orleans from the levees’ failure and the disaster itself.[i]

In a thought experiment typical for moral philosophy and often discussed, if you are one of one thousand able swimmers on a beach without a lifeguard and one person in the water is drowning, you may be said to have an imperfect duty to rescue this person (for 999 swimmers beside you can do it, too, and, as a matter of fact, if everyone rushes in the water to save this person this may hamper the rescue efforts). But all swimmers on the beach have a perfect duty to organize a prompt rescue and assign responsibilities to one another in a quickly drawn scheme.[ii] Besides whatever we may perceive to be its regular functions, the government is our scheme of helping fellow-citizens—stranded or in danger or whose basic rights are violated. We all have a duty to other members to organize so as to help them.

Given this aspect of government, I want to consider to what extent the dialogue about national preparedness called for by the White House should start with the examination of what kind of identity and group membership the American government should embody. Then we can assess how the government can live up to what we perceive to be special obligations to compatriots.

I assume that we all have a duty to protect human rights worldwide; but we have special responsibilities to fellow-citizens. There are many theories that explain why this special obligation arises, but the most neutral I think is Robert Goodin’s. He does not consider that our duties to fellow-citizens arise because of the contract we enter with other members of our society: he instead treats these duties as the same in nature as our duties to the foreigners. However, he thinks that, being members of the same society, we are in a state of mutual heightened vulnerability; we, as individuals, members of groups and organizations, representatives of institutions or majority opinions, can affect and even harm fellow-citizens.[iii] Thus, we have a duty to protect the compatriots’ autonomy and well-being. The government, which ideally represents the common good and enacts the will of the people, has this additional dimension—it is discharging our duty to others to protect their basic rights.

Are we responsible for the federal government’s slow response time to the projected dangers to New Orleans? Are we responsible if the emergency plan was not drawn with a realistic consideration of resources required to equally safeguard everyone’s well-being? As members of collectives, we are certainly responsible for the shared ideas that constitute our identity as members. Christopher McMahon defines a collective agent as a group of cooperatively disposed people that has made the choice of a cooperative scheme or of a procedure for selecting schemes. [iv] Individual actions performed in light of beliefs about group membership are interdependent with respect both to other members and to individuals outside of the group, because what individuals think about the attitudes toward group membership taken by members and non-members serves as partial reasons for acting.[v] Thus, we may be implicated when acting upon and expecting the government to act upon the ideas of inclusion and exclusion in some cooperative schemes and the ideal of the average citizen reflected in them. Most citizens are disposed to avow sincerely that the society is largely just—but we need to consider whether in some areas the reality may still fall short of this ideal.

The ideal of all liberal democracies is that they defend individual autonomy. We often think of autonomy as the individual capacity to make unimpeded choices, but in fact our autonomy is largely defined by a socially constructed boundary of personal and public space that comes about through our interaction with society. The way that collective agency is constructed in some cases creates almost permanent contexts of inclusion/exclusion for some individuals and groups.[vi] To determine whether the societal model of cooperation needs adjustment, we need to determine whether the prevalent shared norms and ideals of membership that define the collective self of the people influence the degree of the governmental concern for various groups of citizens. We ought to ask if the failure of the government that represents the community is in part the failure of the fundamental beliefs of membership. And since collective membership is carried out by individuals acting on the shared beliefs of belonging, individual members are responsible for their group identity and for challenging and changing their beliefs if they do not in fact correspond to the ideal of justice and common good. For example, if the evacuation plan is drawn based on the assumptions about the average citizen that do not apply to you, can you be considered a moral agent equal to others or only a moral recipient subject to others’ discretion? [vii]

We need to make sure, whatever the mistakes of the government and the difficulties in the coordination of its different levels were in the face of the unprecedented disaster that Katrina brought about, that in future hurricanes, as little suffering as possible will be the result of the government’s inability to show equal concern for all citizens facing an emergency. Perhaps the problem of coordination can in part be solved by the open-minded consultation during the formulation of emergency plans with all those potentially affected by the plans. We can start with listening to the testimonies of others—both of the government and of those who lived through Katrina’s severe impact. Mere geographical proximity does not always matter for the formation of the collective agents that influence governments—but special histories of group and individual interaction do. With this in mind, those away from Louisiana can decide whether they need to reexamine what they consider their ideal of American identity.