Moralistic political thinking
I have a post up at Science-Based Medicine about the pitfalls and dangers of moralistic political thinking. The focus is on COVID, but the lessons are much more broadly relevant. Here’s the lede:
The American policy response to COVID left a great deal to be desired. Figuring out what went wrong and how to do better next time should be at the top of our list going forward. But getting reform right will be difficult if we succumb to the temptation to substitute the false clarity of moral outrage for the murkiness and ambiguity of careful policy analysis.
Vinay Prasad has an essay up on his substack and at the Brownstone Institute that illustrates the challenges here. I do not think all of his criticisms of COVID policy are wrong. But I do think he is led astray by moralistic wishful thinking about politics and policy. He swings back and forth between assuming everyone will agree with him about what should be done, and assuming that legalistic restrictions can magically prevent people from doing things that he thinks are wrong. His moral certainty prevents him from thinking about how to make progress in an imperfect world and how to deal constructively with people who disagree with him. More ominously, his disappointment that the world does not live up to his standards leads him to use rhetoric that encourages polarization and dissatisfaction with democratic political institutions. Prasad’s essay is worth examining closely for what it can teach us about COVID policy, and because it illuminates the dangers posed by moralistic political thinking more generally.
Take a look!
Kramer
I am pretty sure I agree with you here, but I seem to remember trying to say something similar on AB and getting pretty beat up about it.
Could it be that “politics” is subject to human failures generally, and “meta-politics” is subject to human failure absolutely?
So we do the best we can.
What worries me is that the U.S. Constitution looks like a good start but seems to be failing at the present moment catastrophically. It also seems that it doesn’t matter much what you and I think. this could be a good thing if it meant “representative” government filtered out ill-informed public opinion. But when it (representative government) appears to have evolved into government by very narrow “interests” who have gained control of the levers and choke points of our sytem and use their power to preserve their power w/o regard to the needs of people or planet… then what do we do?
So far best I can come up with is just more and better politics…which should ideally start from us (aka we the people), but we can’t even seem to agree among ourselves…even when we agree.