Superheroes and Villains: Diary of a Mad Ethics Professor
by Christopher Robichaud on February 25, 2009 in Diary of a Mad Ethics Professor
Dear Professor,
The economy continues to tank, political and business scandals are happening left and right, and the list of ‘hot spot’ areas around the world grows by the day. Like many of us here, I am a proponent of the idea that good government is uniquely positioned to help with these things. And like many of us, I also believe that I can do my part. But I’m genuinely worried about how effective any of us are going to be, given how big the problems are. This isn’t exactly a moral question, but I am wondering how honest we should be with ourselves about our abilities to fix these things. Is optimism self-delusional at this point?
Sincerely,
Crisis of Faith
Dear Crisis of Faith,
Admittedly, this question does take me a bit outside my comfort zone, even though it is dealing with honesty of a sort. But since I think it’s very important to ask, let’s see how we might think about it.
A lot of people – not just some of those in public service or wanting a career in public service – find themselves doubting whether government is going to be able to help put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Some of those folks are staunch advocates of smaller government, and so optimism over doubt was never really an option for them in the first place. But many others are open to the idea that government in general can help more than it can hurt, and that in particular it can help us now more than it can hurt us. Many students at HKS surely believe this. The question is whether this confidence is misplaced.
Now I hope you can appreciate that it’s very tempting to shout, “Of course it’s not misplaced! We can do anything we set our minds to!” and leave it at that. But since it’s not my job to be a cheerleader, I’ll instead point out that there are many interesting empirical studies suggesting that even though we all respond very positively to confidence, and even though confidence helps us succeed at some tasks we otherwise would fail at, it nevertheless is often the case – often, mind you, not always – that our confidence is unwarranted. At least it is from an epistemological perspective. In other words, we often are confident that we can do something when there isn’t strong evidence suggesting that in fact we can.
Should we therefore despair? No, and that’s because, as I mentioned, there’s also good reason to believe that being confident helps us accomplish things we otherwise wouldn’t accomplish. This puts us in an interesting place. On the one hand, it may very well be the case that we don’t at the moment have good reason to be confident that government – and our roles in it – will fix things, but on the other hand, the more confident we are that it can fix things, the more likely it is that government will end up doing so.
The moral? Well, I’m not a consequentialist, but that doesn’t mean that the consequences of some things oughtn’t play a role in our moral deliberations. Here I think it’s perfectly permissible for us to deceive ourselves a little bit at the moment – to the extent we’re capable of doing so – and be more confident than the evidence suggests we should be. And that’s because that very confidence might make the difference between government helping us out of this mess and it failing to do so. So chin up, Crisis of Faith. You’re going to get that public service job you want and be a part of a long-term project of government solving some very thorny problems. In this instance, believing this just might make it so.
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