Recently on Facebook I presented
the following poser:
10 people are trapped in a remote cave in a storm,
with rising water that looks certain to drown them all. You have some budget in
your department for a rescue mission, and there are two types of operation
available within your budget.
Operation 1) You are guaranteed to save 5 of them, but
the other 5 will drown.
Operation 2) You have a 60% chance of saving all of
them, but a 40% chance that the mission fails and all of them drown.
You can only afford one Operation. If you only care
about the 10 people trapped in the cave, do you go for Operation 1 or 2?
If you found the question
difficult, or found it easy and answered Operation 1, you're missing a
no-brainer - you should definitely choose Operation 2. Here's why. Imagine
you're one of the individuals trapped in the cave. With Operation 1 you have a
50% chance of surviving; with Operation 2 you have a 60% chance of surviving.
If you are an individual person trapped in that cave, then survival is the most
important thing to you, and it's better to pick the option that gives you an
extra 10% chance of survival.
Now consider the cave
problem as an illustration for how politics often works. Imagine if you're
someone like Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders, who cares primarily about slogans
and left wing adulation - you might be tempted to choose operation 1, so you
can have a guaranteed photo shot of you standing with the five survivors, even
if you've chosen the option that's the least good for the collective.
We've seen this time and
time again with calls to use taxpayers' money to subsidise the failing steel
industry, or failing holiday firms, or increase the minimum wage law above the
marginal product. The people who benefit from those policies are a small
subsection of society (like the steelworkers who make the news: "Corbyn
saves 5000 steelworkers' jobs" as the headline might be), whereas the people
who bear the much larger costs are the wider population who have to pay more
for their steel because foreign competition is being starved.
In
a Rawlsian ' veil of ignorance' system of ethics, political policies would be
implemented through conditions under which "No
one knows his place in society, his class position or social status; nor does
he know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his
intelligence and strength, and the like." So if we pretend that prior
to being born we could all partake in a committee meeting to decide upon the
fairest and most just society, not knowing where we'd be in that society in
terms of environment, background, and natural talents, we'd (try to) pick the
most objectively good one (Operation 2 in the cave problem), not the most
subjectively good one for our own reputation (Operation 1 in the cave problem).
What a shame that so many political gimmicks and superficially alluring
policies are built on the squalid tactis of the latter, and not the more
prudent measures of the former.
