The Ethics of Intentional Flooding

Manitoba's decision to flood 150 homes required balancing ethical and constitutional questions.

How ethical was the Manitoba government’s decision to deliberately breach the dike that was holding back the Assiniboine River at Hoop and Holler Bend?

As Premier Greg Selinger explained, the goal of this deliberate breach was to pre-empt “catastrophic and uncontrollable” flooding further downstream, which had the potential to put around 850 homes at serious risk. The breach is diverting water across farmland adjacent to the Assiniboine, southeast of Portage la Prairie, to the Elm River. This puts around 150 homes at risk and harms the farmlands it floods.

One ethical analysis that’s been put forward is the utilitarian one – namely, that ethics requires us to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. As the nature of the harm – the flooding of homes and farmland – is the same in either breaching or not breaching the dike, at first glance, this seems to indicate that intentionally breaching the dike is ethically justified, as it results in less harm overall.

But are the two incidents of flooding directly comparable ethically? The natural flooding is an “act of God,” or a force of nature, whereas the deliberate flooding results from human agency. Those of us involved in that agency – the government decision-makers, the Canadian military (which plays a protective role), and all of us as a society (since the government acts on our behalf in making such decisions) – are morally and, possibly, legally responsible for harm caused in the latter situation in ways that we’re not in the former, because we’re complicit in inflicting the harm that results from our intentional act.

If what we plan to do is inherently wrong, it cannot be ethically justified. But when, as with breaching the dike, that is not the case, and we have to balance allowing harms to one group against intentionally inflicting harms on another, we must ethically justify inflicting those harms. To test whether we have such a justification, we often start from a principle that requires us to choose the least invasive, least restrictive alternative that is reasonably available and likely to be successful in achieving a justified goal. This is a general formulation of a doctrine of necessity, which we find in both ethics and law.

For the defence of necessity to be available to justify deliberately inflicting harm, the person relying on it must not have caused the situation that requires the harm-inflicting intervention; the harm avoided must clearly outweigh the harm inflicted; and there must be no reasonable way to avoid the greater harm other than by inflicting the lesser harm.

So let’s look at the decision-making process regarding the dike at Hoop and Holler, and the implementation of the decisions that were made: People were warned of the intended intervention in advance, and, it seems, their objections and concerns were largely listened to. Their informed consent to the plan was not sought or given, but it was not required. This was not an intervention primarily at the individual level, but at the societal one – involving the exercise of administrative discretion. Such decisions are not governed by the same ethical or legal principles as those relating just to private individuals. In short, the ethics at the different levels are not necessarily the same, and the law also differs. (For instance, governments are not legally liable, even for negligence, in relation to their discretionary or policy decisions.)