Public philosophy in the face of uncertainty
The New York Times has an article today on the receding ice cap on Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. The ice atop the mountain, apparently, has declined 26 percent since 2000. Eighty-five percent of the ice cover that was present in 1912 has vanished.
But according to a study published today by the National Academy of Sciences, there is no consensus among scientists on whether the melting is attributable to man-made climate change or some other climatological factors.
The article raises a challenging question about how we should deal with public policy issues under conditions of uncertainty (read: all of them). Uncertainty comes into play in terms of cause and effect. Since we can’t know the future, we can never be certain about the effect of our actions.
The implications for public philosophy can be significant. If your value system tells you there are any outcomes that policy should achieve — say, lower crime or higher education scores or lower poverty rates — how are you supposed to legislate (or vote for candidates who will legislate) in support of these goals? When there is uncertainty over cause and effect, normative beliefs about ends are not enough. In fact, for many (if not most) public policy issues, competing candidates — politicians on the left and the right — agree on the ends. It’s the means where they disagree.
Under uncertainty philosophy only gets us so far. Philosophy can tell us the ends (ex. safer communities); philosophy can bound the ways and means (ex. no restrictions on freedom, criminals deserve severe punishment); but philosophy cannot definitely tell us which ways and means to use, for the ways and means to an end are always uncertain (though to varying degrees). Often, in these cases, we have laws or theories that help us predict effect. For example, science tells me that if I paint a house with lead-based paint, there is a decent chance that the inhabitants will develop some health problem due to its toxicity. The “broken windows” theory of sociology suggests that if I fix broken windows, clean up litter and prosecute misdemeanors in my city, small crime will be deterred and major crime will be prevented. These laws and theories help us predict effect, but they cannot say definitively what the effect will be (though laws get pretty close).
Public philosophy, not surprisingly, is an imperfect science. We do the best we can given what we believe and what we know. In the face of uncertainty that’s all that can be asked of us.
-Marc
Photo by Flickr user advencap used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Related posts:
- How many chances should government get?
- On the site of public philosophy
- Philosophy in the face of reality
- The perils of philosophy in public
- Public philosophy 4 kidz, continued
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4 Responses to “Public philosophy in the face of uncertainty”
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You’d think that the American public philosophy of a quick emergency response time would deter things like small crime, but an NYC datamine study at NYU shows otherwise.
http://homepages.nyu.edu/~der304/graffiti_vs_response.html
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