How many chances should government get?
Is it even worth trying to get Haiti right?
The Washington Post reports that at an international donor conference today, the U.S. will pledge $1 billion to reconstruct the Haitian government as part of an international effort to rebuild the earthquake-ravaged state. The U.S. has a long history of such aid to Haiti — roughly $4 billion since 1990 — with, admittedly, little clear lasting impact to show. Yet as the Post article notes, “this time, U.S. officials say, they will do things differently.”
Of course this is a common refrain every time someone wants to try something that was unsuccessful in the past. Yet two decades of failure should leave us, at the very least, skeptical of the U.S. government’s ability to get it right. So how many chances should it get? At what point should we say, even if the goal of reconstructing Haiti is right, our inability to do it means the policy is wrong?
The question gets at the understudied relationship between morality and empirical data. I’ve suggested before that the “site of public philosophy” can be either the ends, ways or means of a particular policy. The ends are simple: you either support or don’t support the policy’s goal – in this case, reconstruction in Haiti. Debates over ways and means are much more complicated, for they get at not just moral arguments — whether a way or mean is morally (un)acceptable — but also empirical arguments about the ability of the way/mean to achieve the policy’s goal. A complete assessment of a policy must evaluate the morality of the end and the morality and empirical soundness of ways and means for achieving that end. If any piece comes up short – either it is not morally right or it will not work — then the policy should be questioned.
As I’ve discussed in the past, the challenge of empirical uncertainty arises when trying to assess whether a ways/means will work to achieve a particular end. Sometimes we use theories to help us predict effect. The “broken windows” theory of sociology, for example, 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. Social science theories like this help us predict effect, but they cannot say definitively what the effect will be.
Which brings us back to Haiti. There are certainly theories of international development that might help guide us, but more often than not the success of a particular development project depend on numerous factors not easily understandable beforehand. As a result we are left guessing how best to develop Haiti. So far, our guesses have been wrong. Of course there is a chance that this time will be right, but how many times can or must we make such a gamble? How much money wasted will have been worth it if we do finally succeed? It seems I haven’t done much here to provide answers, but at the very least I have helped to clarify the question.
-Marc
Photo by Flickr user DVIDSHUB used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Related posts:
- On the site of public philosophy
- Public philosophy in the face of uncertainty
- Does symbolism matter in the pursuit of justice?
- Obama and the Iranian election
- How must we help Haiti?
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