Weighing goods and bads?

By Dr John Murray

It seems obvious that in this current crisis, and indeed more generally in political, professional, and personal life, we need to weigh up the goods and bads involved in the options we face for choice. Isn’t such weighing up required if we are to be rational and scientific and fair?

However, it is impossible to know all the goods and bads in the diverse options that we face when we have to make a choice. You simply can’t work out accurately all the consequences. For example, it is impossible for us to know accurately just how many direct and indirect bad effects the current Covid19 lock down will cause into the future. It is even more difficult to work out what the effects would have been if we had adopted some other policy or set of policies. Even if we compare ourselves to other countries, we can never be sure that our situation in Ireland is exactly comparable in all variables.

Furthermore, if we could somehow work out the consequences of a lock down strategy, we still would not be able to rationally weigh them up. The goods and bads in choices are irreducibly diverse. That’s why we have to make a choice. If one is going to weigh things, one needs a standard of measurement. What standard of measurement is to be used in weighing up the diverse goods and bads in coping with the Covid19 crisis? If we use several diverse standards of measurement, we face the problem of how to weigh up the different standards against each other.

We can try to simplify matters. We could focus on numbers of lives saved versus number of lives lost in each option. Hard to predict, but at least it looks like we are weighing up similar goods and bads using a transparent and rational standard of measurement. However, although lives saved or lost are important, no doubt, they are not the only things that matter. And we will cause harms if we cut down direct risks to life so much that we prevent people from living, from socialising, from working, from creating wealth, and so forth.

Perhaps all we can do is ‘do our best’ to make an informed guess about the goods and bads, about consequences. But even if we do that, we need to be guided by moral standards that cannot be reduced to (supposedl) scientific calculations. One such standard is the Golden Rule: treat others in the way that you’d like to be treated (if the positions were reversed). Only if this ethical standard of judgment is followed, honestly and consistently, can we be sure that the choices we make, and the structures we create, are not based on merely apparent ‘rational’ weighings of consequences, but on really fair and just choices to respect each and every person’s dignity. Judgments of proportionality that are shaped by the Golden Rule are able to avoid selfishness, moral blindness, prejudice and selfish partiality. We must love our neighbours as we love ourselves.