31.3: Ethics and Public Policy

When thinking about how to make morally just public policy, there are a number of concerns to keep in mind. Chief among these concerns is that policy disagreements are often framed as clashes of values. Gun control is seen as a tension between freedom or safety, abortion as freedom of choice vs a right to life, and so on. While concerns about these values are often part of what is going on, reducing disagreements to clashes of values more often results in bad arguments built on the either/or fallacy.

People are also very likely to fall victim to the status quo bias when considering matters of public policy. Changes to public policy means changes to how our society works. For many, change can be scary. and doubly so when that change may directly impact them. The result is a willingness to accept substandard conditions rather than risk disruption. You see this most often when the potential benefits of the policy change is likely to have a greater impact on others. Most white people prefer the status quo over serious change to the criminal justice system, and most people who can afford to send their children to private school prefer the status quo to restructuring the education system, and so forth.

A more subtle version of the status quo bias in public discourse is incrementalism. Advocates for incrementalism call for small, slow change over large revisions to how society works. That said, incrementalists are very often on the same side of history as the people who want no change at all. Personally, it might seem reasonable to enact changes slowly, so as to allow for people to adjust to changing norms and conventions. Objectively though, what incrementalists are often asking is for people to delay experiencing equal rights in favor of the comfort of others. Civil unions were the incrementalist response to gay marriage, and banning chokeholds is an incrementalist response to police violence. These measures may be better than nothing, but they aren’t much more than the status quo.

Another form of psychological accounting that happens a lot with issues of public policy is sunk costs. When something is a feature of society and we’ve already invested in the institution, it can be difficult for people to acknowledge a need to reform or eliminate it. Many argue that the U.S.’s war on drugs is an area in which we can see this happening. Increasingly more money is invested in policing and incarcerating drug users with very little to show for the financial and human cost. Rather than invest in alternative methods to address drug addiction, however, we double down on the strategies that we have been using for years. To do otherwise would be to admit that the money we already invested was not worth it.

Lastly, we should remember the lessons learned about the illusion of explanatory depth. Public policy decisions are almost always quite complicated. We should keep this in mind when considering the arguments people give about these issues. People who claim to have all the answers about immigration, healthcare, criminal justice reform, or any number of other issues might have ideas worth considering, but they likely do not have a comprehensive understanding. Certainly, we should be skeptical of simple solutions to these complicated problems. And we should make sure we understand what people actually mean, especially when it sounds like a simple solution. A position like defund the police sounds simple enough, but when you actually look into what it means, it is a call to radically restructure our society.