- If you've ever taken any sort of class
in philosophy or read a basic philosophy book,
you tend to encounter two thought experiments
that try to test our moral intuitions-
and they're called the "trolley problem"
or perhaps also the "screaming baby problem."
The trolley problem goes like this:
You see a trolley or a train barreling down the tracks,
and it's heading towards an individual who's on the tracks.
Now, the trolley problem, as it's often formulated,
is that there are two people on one set of tracks
where a train is headed,
and if you pull the lever and divert the train
it will hit somebody else, but just one person.
And the question is: Do you pull the lever?
Do you divert the train?
So the thought experiment is trying to test our intuitions
about how should we behave when we face impossible choices?
And one example to illustrate this point is
Winston Churchill in World War II.
Winston Churchill had a secret that the Germans
didn't know: during the middle of the war,
they had cracked the Nazi enigma codes.
They had cracked the codes
that allowed the British government
to actually understand exactly what the Nazis
were saying to one another.
The Nazis didn't know this.
But the problem is once the Nazis realized
the codes have been cracked,
they are 100% immediately going to change the codes-
so this created real-life trolley problems
for Winston Churchill.
And one of them was an Australian ship
that they knew was about to be torpedoed.
Churchill decided not to warn them
because if he warned them,
and they diverted course, it would be a clue
to the Nazis that the codes have been broken.
He caused the deaths of the people who ultimately did die
on that ship, but he did it because he believed
that understanding that the codes had been broken
among the Nazi-war elite would lead to decisions and changes
in their behavior that would cause tens of thousands
if not hundreds of thousands, even millions of more deaths,
and the war being prolonged significantly more.
Modern presidents and prime ministers are
making decisions all the time that hurt people,
but they're making decisions
that hopefully hurt fewer people than the alternative-
and they're doing so in immense uncertainty.
They don't know what the outcomes are going to be,
and yet they're making the best choice they can.
This is not to absolve leaders who inflict harm.
We have to enforce the rules.
We have to hold people accountable when they
break the rules, when they abuse their power.
But we should also think carefully
about the logic of evaluating leaders,
and only condemn the leaders who made bad choices relative
to the alternatives.
One thing that's really important to understand
when you evaluate people in power is what is the true effect
of power corrupting,
and what just looks like power corrupting?
Because power has certain, weird effects on people.
And I highlight four mitigating factors
that make power appear to corrupt,
when something else is actually going on:
Those four I call the problem of dirty hands,
the idea of learning, the problem of opportunity,
and the problem of scrutiny.
So when it comes to dirty hands,
it's the idea that people who are
in positions of power often face awful choices;
choices where there's only downsides.
So you end up inflicting damage
because there's no good option.
That makes it look like you have dirty hands,
when in fact, some of the time at least,
the system is providing you with a series of options
that are all bad.
Your hands are going to get dirty no matter what,
and the people who are out of power
are the only ones who can keep their hands clean.
The second of learning is this idea
that people learn to get good at being bad.
If you imagine someone who's already a rotten person,
a corrupt person, if you stick them
into a position of power,
they're not gonna know what they're doing,
so they're not gonna be able to inflict harm as easily
as somebody who's been in the job for 20 years.
And as a result, what ends up happening is if you look
at the data of harm that's produced by people in power,
it might get worse over time.
Not because the person has become worse,
but because they've gotten better at being worse.
The third mitigating factor is this idea of opportunity.
It's the idea that people who are in positions of power
just have more chances, more opportunities
to harm other people.
So it's going to look like they are worse
than the rest of us, because if you are the president
or prime minister or general or CEO,
you're going to have the ability
to have your decisions hurt other people.
The fourth mitigating factor is this concept of scrutiny,
and it's this idea that actually people in power,
although I think they don't get enough scrutiny,
still get a lot more scrutiny than the rest of us
in terms of journalists looking into them and so on.
And indeed, when you see lots of abusive power scandals,
this is exactly what's happening.
Bernie Madoff was bad from the start.
Bernie Madoff's investment fund was always crooked,
but only when he started making so much money
did people start looking into this.
And so it was a question of: Is he under the microscope?
There have to be hundreds, maybe thousands
of Bernie Madoffs out there who are just escaping scrutiny.
Now, when you put these four together,
these four mitigating factors, they teach you a lesson:
If you chalk up something to power corrupting,
or a broken system attracting the wrong people
or something like that,
and in fact, what's happening
is one of these four phenomena,
you're going to come up with the wrong solution
because you're gonna misdiagnose what's actually going on.
I'm very clear that we should not simply say,
"Oh, because of these four mitigating factors
we should not hold leaders accountable."
We absolutely should, but they're just for us
to make smart assessments of what's actually happening
around power so we can make better decisions,
both in punishing leaders who behave badly,
and in fixing systems in the first place.
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