What sort of morality in decision-making do you expect of public officials? Be careful. The answer may not be as black-and-white as you think.
I'm not talking about morality in the sense of sexual misconduct, or bribe-taking, or even involving the most widespread immoral behavior in politics: pandering. We can easily agree that it's immoral for a congressman to text pictures of his genitals or for a legislator to take kickbacks or even for a politician to tell us what we want to hear by over-simplifying an issue (though that makes us feel so good that we try not to notice).
What's worth weighing, though, is how we respond to the kind of decision-making in the public arena that doesn't come easily, or that arises amid alternatives that each seem morally right, or at least not wholly wrong. We need to think about how we respond to public servants who arrive at morally complex conclusions that could be called wrong.
What if, for example, the military jets that were scrambled on the morning of 9/11 had caught up with the airliners aimed at the World Trade Center? By what moral code would a general or a president order the downing of that passenger jet, presumably killing hundreds of people? Is that act of mass murder justified because there's some higher morality in trying to save a greater number of people on the ground?
Or what if an official decided to cut aid from some drug-addicted mentally ill people so there could be more for impoverished diabetes patients? Surely a moral code would underlie such a choice. And your response?
I've been wrestling with such scenarios this week while reading a scholarly essay, "Conflicts of Values and Political Forgiveness," by Paul Nieuwenburg, a political philosopher at Leiden, the oldest university in the Netherlands. Nieuwenburg wrote the piece for a public policy journal; its editors asked me to review it.
Nieuwenburg acknowledges at the outset the sad truth that politics tends to be hostile to public servants who venture beyond the certainty of black-and-white and into the real world of full-color decision-making.
"While from the point of view of the citizen it is desirable to be served by morally sensitive officials," he writes, "the context of decision-making causes exactly those officials to be filtered out of public service." That is, we tend to vote out those we judge to be insufficiently dogmatic toward our predisposed notions.
Nor does this apply only to elective office. Nieuwenburg cites a high-level German police official who threatened a suspected kidnapper with torture if he didn't reveal the whereabouts of the victim. After the case was closed — the kidnapped youth was found dead, and his killer imprisoned — the police official was charged with a crime and forced out of his job as a result of the torture threat.
Nieuwenburg wants democracies to figure out a process of "political forgiveness," so such officials can keep their jobs, and so morally thoughtful decision-making will be encouraged.
"The reason is that citizens have a right to be governed by officials with an acute awareness of the conflicts between the constitutional values of liberal democracy," he writes. It is "a non-negligible accomplishment" — a big deal, that is, for we non-academics — merely "to stand up to a moral dilemma."
Indeed, it is. But we seem to like better to be governed by officials who see stick-figure dimensionality and derive political support by ignoring pesky nuance.
Consider Edward Snowden, whose act in leaking top secret files revealing unimagined government snooping and data-gathering renders him either hero or traitor, martyr or coward, defender of rights or thief.
There is no doubt that Snowden committed crimes in using his role as a National Security Agency contractor to harvest and distribute information. Does it matter that he seems to have been motivated to this criminal behavior by a moral judgment that the government was breaching the privacy rights fundamental to a free society?
In Nieuwenburg's better world, Snowden (whom Nieuwenburg doesn't mention) would have access to "some kind of public ritual" involving an apology for breaching a moral code — in this case, breaking the laws aimed at keeping government secrets — and in exchange would get the "restoration of a relationship of trust" between him and his government. Nieuwenburg leaves to others the "technical task" of constructing an apparatus to realize his vision.
Of course, the task of judging public officials' behavior and meting out rewards or penalties in a free society falls to voters. How lovely it would be if we could bring an appreciation for moral complexity to that job. How unlikely.