The Construction of Mercy

I. The Indifferent Universe

The universe provides what we need to live: light, water, air, a soil in which something grows. Beyond that it takes no interest in us. An earthquake does not ask who is asleep in the house, a flood does not ask whose field it swallows. Why there is life at all, and why we of all creatures can live here, we do not know.

People have given very different answers to this. Some see a good higher power that arranged everything for us, and an evil one that damaged the good work. Others consider evil the unavoidable price of existence: wherever something is created, good and bad necessarily come together. Whether we assume an eternal higher power or an eternal universe, both exceed our understanding. For this essay one observation suffices, which holds in every one of these interpretations: in nature as we experience it, there is no mercy. Mercy is something people bring into the world. It is, if you like, an invention.

II. The Merciless Machine

The first machines of industry were as merciless as nature. Transmission belts ran openly through the workshops, gears lay exposed, presses made no distinction between a metal sheet and a hand. Whoever worked in the mills and foundries of the 19th century easily lost a finger, an arm or a life. The machine was a new force of nature, only built by people.

Today the lathe stands behind a guard that opens only when the spindle has stopped. The press comes down only when the operator puts both hands on two separate buttons, so that no hand can be in the tool. The locomotive brakes by itself if the driver no longer confirms at regular intervals that he is awake. And there are table saws that stop their blade within a few thousandths of a second as soon as it touches human skin. They cut wood as mercilessly as any other saw. The finger they spare.

The machine has not become weaker. It cuts steel with the same force as before. It has only learned to distinguish towards whom it may be merciless and towards whom not.

III. How Mercy Got into the Machine

One might think engineers simply became more humane. That is not wrong, but it explains little. The decisive step in Germany was a law. With the Accident Insurance Act of 1884, employers had to pay for the accidents in their factories themselves, through mutual insurance associations of their trade. And these associations received the right to issue accident prevention regulations. From then on every lost arm cost the business money. Building mercifully became cheaper than building mercilessly.

So mercy did not get into the machine as an attitude, but as a bill and as a rule. Since then it no longer depends on whether the individual designer is a kind person. It is built into the conditions under which every designer works. Shakespeare’s Portia says mercy is not strained and falls like gentle rain from heaven. That is beautiful, but in the workshop it is better not to rely on the weather.

IV. The Contradiction

In economy and politics this solution seems impossible. A company that forgoes competition out of mercy disappears from the market, and with it the jobs it wanted to spare. A state that forgoes its defence out of mercy is overrun by a less merciful neighbour. Mercy cannot be the dominant criterion there. And yet we experience the mercilessness of markets and wars as what it is: suffering that nobody deserved.

Inventors know such situations. A thing is supposed to have a property and its opposite at the same time: hard and soft, fast and safe, merciless and merciful. In TRIZ, the method of inventing that the Soviet engineer Genrich Altshuller derived from thousands of patents, this is called a physical contradiction. It is not resolved by a compromise in which both sides lose, but by separation. One separates the two properties by object, by time, by condition or by system level. The saw that cuts the wood and spares the finger separates by object.

V. Four Separations

Apply these tools to economy and politics and one finds that many solutions already exist. They were just never regarded as inventions.

By object: merciless towards the matter, merciful towards the person. The limited liability company, in Germany since 1892, allows a business to fail without the entrepreneur going under with house and home. The capital bears the risk, not the family. The same holds for a good analysis. It must be merciless towards illusions, not towards people. A merciful analysis spares the illusion and thereby, in the end, harms those who rely on it.

By time: merciless in competition, merciful after failure. Until 1868 debtors in German states could be put in prison. Today insolvency law allows release from the remaining debts after some years. The market may destroy a business, but no longer the life of the entrepreneur.

By level: merciless in the individual case, merciful as a whole. That was the idea of the social market economy as Ludwig Erhard understood it. Below, companies compete without mercy; above them stretches a net that catches the individual when he falls.

By condition: merciless in battle, merciful towards the defenceless. In 1859 the Geneva businessman Henry Dunant saw the battlefield of Solferino with thousands of untended wounded. In 1864 twelve states signed the first Geneva Convention. Even in war, the most merciless of all human undertakings, there have since been rules meant to protect the wounded and prisoners. They are often broken. But they have changed the standard by which a war is judged.

VI. Where the Guard Is Missing

From the history of the machine a rule can be derived: mercy arises reliably where the costs of mercilessness fall on whoever causes them. Where they can be shifted onto others, the guard is missing.

In 2013 the Rana Plaza factory building collapsed in Bangladesh, and more than a thousand seamstresses died. The clothes sewn there hung in European shops, and the companies that had ordered them bore hardly any of the consequences. Only years later did supply chain laws oblige buyers to pay attention to conditions at their suppliers. They were soon weakened again. In “The Market Will Sort It Out – or Maybe Not!” we described how the burden of empty gas storage ends up with those who were never asked. And in politics the pattern is oldest of all: wars are seldom fought by those who decide on them.

In all these cases the design task is the same. Not to preach mercy, but to build the bill so that mercilessness costs more than mercy.

VII. How This Essay Could Be Refuted

The first objection: constructed mercy can sit in the wrong place. In 2008 banks were rescued with taxpayers’ money because they were “too big to fail”. That was mercy, but for those who caused the crisis, paid for by those who had caused nothing. A guard that protects the machine’s operator and injures the neighbour instead is no solution. That is true, and it shows that it is not enough to build mercy in. One must design precisely for whom.

The second objection: mercy that can be calculated can also be bought. Whoever is rich enough pays the penalty and carries on. That too is true. Accident insurance worked because contributions rose with accidents and because the associations inspected the businesses. A bill without inspection is a price list.

The essay would be refuted if it could be shown that markets and states which build mercy in as a design condition are permanently inferior to those that do not.

VIII. A Task for Inventors

Nature will not grant us mercy, and we should not rely on the gentle rain from heaven. But people have proved that they can build mercy, into machines, into laws, even into rules for war. Today’s machine is no less powerful than that of 1880. It is just more cleverly designed.

If we have learned to teach a saw to spare the finger: why should it be impossible to teach a market or a state the same?