The evening is drawing to a close. The professor is not. I am glad, as I am enjoying myself.
Some of my guests, Sean not least, are less than completely entertained. They are … what is the word I am looking for – not “stultified”, not “mortified”, and certainly not “magnified”. I have it … “liquefied”, yes, a perfect description for a pickled state.
How can I tell? The eyes have it. They droop. The nose too. It glows.
“Decision-making entails judgement,” Prof Seth continues. “This is so whenever a decision is taken, at least deliberately. I say this to distinguish cases when a person reacts instinctively and makes himself prey to sheer emotion. Here, there is no deliberation, and so no scope for the exercise of deliberative judgement.
“But I do not exclude cases where a person might decide to do nothing, and so leave matters to others, to chance or, as we sometimes say, to force of circumstances. These decisions entail as much of an exercise of judgement as any other. Deciding to do nothing is itself a decision, and letting things take their course is a decision.”
“I have a course and it is homeward. I feel bottled up inside,” Sean mutters. Oh dear. The man is making me cross. I have degrees of comparison when this happens – irked, irate, and finally Irish. I am moving from comparative to superlative.
The prof, for his part, is unmoved. “I include in deliberative decisions those that leave the matter to chance. For instance, many years ago, three shipwrecked sailors, starving to death in a life raft, drew lots to make a decision – literally one of life and death. They resolved to draw lots to see which of them should be killed, carved up, and eaten.
“Duly skewered”
“The short straw was drawn by the youngest of the three, the cabin boy, funny that, and he was duly skewered, butchered, cut up, and eaten.”
“Chop Stewie, I gather,” says Terence, who has recovered his sense of humour. Well, sort of.
“This case, sad as it is, shows how people can make decisions whose substratum is chance. Such decisions are technically termed aleatory. But I digress.”
“Prof,” cries Terence, “before you proceed, do say what happened to the two sailors who fed on … erm … this boy’s meat.”
“Ah, the other two. Dudley and Stephens survived and reached home soil, England, three years later. Not long afterwards they were arraigned for murder. In their defence, they said that stranded sailors customarily behave thus when otherwise all will die. The court rejected the plea. It said that Englishmen are bound by higher standards than this.
“Ripe old age”
“Happily – or not, depending on your viewpoint,” Seth continues, “they were ultimately pardoned and lived to a ripe old age.
“But back to decision-making. Decisions, when deliberative, demand an exercise of judgement on ends and means. The factors to be taken into account are typically these:
- Who is to be the subject of the decision? It can be a person or a group of people, but choice must be exercised.
- Why does the subject deserve this treatment? Why not someone else? What moral considerations are at play? What practical ones?
- Where, when, for how long, in what manner, and under what circumstances will the subject be so treated?
“Underlying the making of these choices are values and interests, personal and social, from which no one can escape.
“Included among them can be a quest for fairness. Fairness is not an amorphous or indeterminate concept, but captures a belief, strongly held, that decisions should be properly balanced. What this will entail is a factual issue, and so never beyond debate and contestation.
“Proportionality is frequently invoked in this context. The idea is that the means used should be proportionate to the ends sought to be achieved. This generally requires of us that we do about as much good as we can with the resources we have, and as little harm.
“Disproportionate harm”
“Israel is constantly castigated for inflicting excessive and so disproportionate harm on Gaza. This is understandable, but the people who say the proportionality principle has been breached seldom tell us how they think Israel should otherwise have proceeded. Practically, how in the face of complete obduracy was Israel to get back what PM Starmer unhappily termed ‘the sausages’? He did say this. Truly. The man is juvenile as well as delinquent.
“Equality, the third notion so often invoked in evaluating decisions, is seen as a way to escape the delicate process of balancing. Equality operates by setting up a person or, more rarely, a thing as a standard to be met. No need to weigh up all the substantive factors, equality proponents say – just ensure that the case we favour matches the one in place.
“This is all well and good until we appreciate that the choice of the standard is itself impregnated with all the factors I have described. Recourse to it represents just a facile attempt to duck the process of balancing by taking the ends as given and begging the question on means.
“Once we understand this, we see that equality is indeed the ‘empty idea’ that writers like Paul Weston say it is.
“Now I’ve set the table, I now consider the pie. Should it be distributed whole or—ha! ha! – piesmeal. Sorry, I can do better than this, and do normally.” Sure you can, Prof. Sure you do.
“Terence, as decision-maker, had an aim in mind – the pie’s distribution – and the means to achieve it. He had a range of options before him, and he decided that Donny should receive it.
“He saw no reason to distribute it equally between the three boys or even apportion it divergently by reference to their behaviour. Whether he acted unfairly is debatable, but it would be tiresome to do that now. Enough is enough.”
“Masterly”
“Thank you, Prof Seth. Masterly. To the rest of you, I say: hark, awake and greet the dawn. Afore ye go, though, who would like another drink?”
Each of my guests has a decision to make, and each, answering positively, opts for yet another glass of my precious whisky. Or whiskey. A dose by any other name …
Was the decision to offer them another drink the result of a proper balancing of options? No, I conclude. Was the decision to accept my offer unbalanced? Yes, I conclude, as I usher them out, inebriated all, and propel them in the rough direction of home.
I enjoyed the evening hugely. My guests? They didn’t say they didn’t.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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