Casuistry as Optionality

Casuistry as Optionality

You can always find an argument or an ethical reason to defend an opinion ex post. This is a dicey point, but, as with cherry-picking, one should propose an ethical rule before an action, not after. You want to prevent fitting a narrative to what you are doing—and for a long time “casuistry,” the art of arguing the nuances of decisions, was just that, fitting narratives.

Let me first define a fraudulent opinion. It is simply one with vested interests generalized to the public good—in which, say a hairdresser recommends haircuts “for the health of people,” or a gun lobbyist claims gun ownership is “good for America,” simply making statements that benefit him personally, while the statements are dressed up to look as if they were made for the benefit of the collective. In other words, is he in the left column of [Table 7]? That comparison is not reproduced here. Likewise, Alan Blinder wrote that he opposed generalized deposit insurance, not because his company would lose business, but because of the public good.

But the heuristic is easy to implement, with a simple question. I was in Cyprus at a conference dinner in which another speaker, a Cypriot professor of petrochemical engineering in an American university, was ranting against the climate activist Lord Nicholas Stern. Stern was part of the conference but absent from the dinner. The Cypriot was extremely animated. I had no idea what the issues were, but saw the notion of “absence of evidence” mixed with “evidence of absence” and pounced on him in defense of Stern, whom I had never met. The petrochemical engineer was saying that we had no evidence that fossil fuels caused harm to the planet, turning his point semantically into something equivalent in decision making to the statement that we had evidence that fossil fuels did not harm. He made the mistake of saying that Stern was recommending useless insurance, causing me to jump to ask him if he had car, health, and other insurance for events that did not take place, that sort of argument. I started bringing up the idea that we are doing something new to the planet, that the burden of evidence is on those who disturb natural systems, that Mother Nature knows more than he will ever know, not the other way around. But it was like talking to a defense lawyer—sophistry, and absence of convergence to truth.

Then a heuristic came to mind. I surreptitiously asked a host sitting next to me if the fellow had anything to gain from his argument: it turned out that he was deep into oil companies, as an advisor, an investor, and a consultant. I immediately lost interest in what he had to say and the energy to debate him in front of others—his words were nugatory, just babble.

Note how this fits into the idea of skin in the game. If someone has an opinion, like, say, the banking system is fragile and should collapse, I want him invested in it so he is harmed if the audience for his opinion are harmed—as a token that he is not an empty suit. But when general statements about the collective welfare are made, instead, absence of investment is what is required. Via negativa.

I have just presented the mechanism of ethical optionality by which people fit their beliefs to actions rather than fit their actions to their beliefs. [Table 8] compares professions with respect to such ethical backfitting.

[Table 8: A comparison of professions regarding ethical backfitting – shown as an image in the original text.]