After her first dinner with future president Barack Obama, a forty-five-minute meet and greet that turned into a four-hour mindmeld, the then senator from Illinois told Samantha Power he admired her first book, “A Problem from Hell”, an already classic study of genocide prevention. But, he added, it “seemed like malpractice to judge one’s prospects by one’s intentions, rather than making a strenuous effort to anticipate and weigh potential consequences.”
This is from Samuel Moyn, “The Road to Hell,” American Affairs Journal, Volume IV, No. 1, Spring 2020: 149-160. It’s excellent. I particularly appreciate Obama’s bluntness. He seemed to have good instincts on this. Too bad he didn’t follow them.
Samuel Moyn is Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University. His article has not only good content but also a lot of nice punchy lines. The piece is all about unintended consequences of government intervention.
Another great paragraph:
The overall thrust of Power’s argument is to deny the need for any accounting of how good intentions can drive perverse results in the use of state power abroad. Only copping to forgivable or unintentional mistakes, it pushes back against the possibility of ethical compromise in crossing the Rubicon from government critic to government service. It succeeds in doing so, however, only because it studiously avoids serious discussion of how the wrong idealism in power can lead to the worst kind of unintended consequences.
And this:
But not only does Power skirt the entire mystery of “who said Qaddafi had to go,” which was reconstructed insightfully at the time by Hugh Roberts in the London Review of Books.4 When it comes to this improvident decision’s medium- and long-range consequences for Libya, Power is more avoidant than circumspect. “I hoped that Obama would not regret his decision,” Power recalls. But once again she does not address whether she was obligated to do more than hope that the consequences would not outrun her intentions. When a single Cameroonian boy dies inadvertently, seven cars back in her motorcade, Power says to herself, “over and over” in her mind: “First, do no harm. Do. No. Harm.” When a country descends into anarchy intentionally, however, she cannot muster the thought.
I’ve written here, here, and here about the problems with Samantha Power’s thinking about Libya. She is not impressive.
Also, the incentives are dysfunctional. Power paid not at all for her input into an intervention that arguably caused the deaths 250,000 people.
READER COMMENTS
Christophe Biocca
Mar 2 2020 at 8:04am
Typo: “the deaths 250,000 thousand people” probably should read “the deaths of 250,000 people”
David Henderson
Mar 2 2020 at 9:12am
Correction made. Thanks, Christophe.
Thaomas
Mar 2 2020 at 9:10am
Specifically, what should Powers have done?
Can we be sure that w/o the European/US intervention Libya would not have become another Syria?
KevinDC
Mar 2 2020 at 11:04am
Hey Thaomas –
You ask:
Can we be sure? Definitely not. Counterfactuals about what “would have happened” if X or Y had been different strike me as more creative writing exercises than anything else – so many major events have turned on so many minor and totally unforeseeable details that any attempt to say “if X had been different we would have gotten result Y instead” seems hilariously hubristic to me.
However, I think that the lack of certainty about the results of taking action is itself an argument for nonintervention as a general policy. Saying “if we intervene, we know with very high confidence that we can bring about good results X and avoid bad results Y, while also being confident that no unintended consequences will arise that will offset this,” is a very strong argument in favor of intervention. (Not just military intervention, intervention in general.) But in the real world, this confidence level is only very rarely justified. By contrast “who knows whether or not intervening will make things better? And we have no reliable way to predict what unintended consequences might happen in the long run!”, is a really good reason to avoid intervention. If you have no dependable way of knowing whether or not your intervention is actually going to make things better, you should leave it alone.
Mike Huemer wrote an essay arguing this called “In Praise of Passivity”, where he argued that the moral bar for intervention should be much higher than nonintervention. One thought experiment he gives in support of this:
I think it’s clear that we simply don’t have the level of certainty about the ultimate effects of military intervention to justify the vast majority of what the US government does. I don’t ultimately buy Bryan Caplan’s argument for strict pacifism, but I think the presumption in favor of nonintervention is very strong.
nobody.really
Mar 2 2020 at 11:59pm
If you truly believe that minimizing moral culpability is the goal, then presumably you embrace anarchy–because to authorize any government agency is to potentially implicate yourself in some wrongful deed by that agent. A government agent might save 100,000 people, yet harm one–and that would mean culpability.
But what about those of us who don’t subscribe to the religion of moral culpability, and merely want to adopt a strategy for promoting better outcomes? Is it purely coincidence that all the places on Earth that seem to have good outcomes have declined to embrace anarchy?
KevinDC
Mar 3 2020 at 8:42am
Good morning nobody –
As is often the case, I am impressed at how your response manages to be completely unrelated to what what you’re ostensibly responding to. 😛
The thrust of my post was that unless you have good and defensible reasons for thinking benefits of an intervention will outweigh costs (that is, it will succeed in “promoting better outcomes”, which is a position you weirdly imply I oppose), you probably shouldn’t intervene. Somehow, you turned that into me aiming for “minimizing moral culpability” (whatever that means) in a way that would make me opposed to instances where a “government agent might save 100,000 people, yet harm one” because I think “to authorize any government agency is to potentially implicate yourself in some wrongful deed by that agent.” Um, no, I don’t think that. Which is why I’ve never said it, or anything within a light year of that. Nor do I “embrace anarchy” – I have no idea how you jumped to that conclusion either.
Somehow, you took my clearly stated position of “if you don’t have good, justifiable reasons to believe the benefits of an intervention will outweigh the costs, you probably shouldn’t intervene,” and changed it into “no action by any government agent is ever justified unless it never causes any degree of harm to anyone at all, regardless of the amount of offsetting good it can do, because otherwise I’m morally implicated in some vague and undefined way, therefore anarchy.” Maybe this really does represent your best, good faith effort to understand and engage what I actually said – but I almost hope not.
I have often been convinced to change my mind on a topic by a counterargument. This happens at least once a week, actually. But to date, my mind has never been changed by someone who has repeatedly proven incapable of given even a minimally accurate representation of what my position actually is. It’s always come from someone who clears the first rule in Rapoport’s Rules of argument – “You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, ‘Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.'” Until you show you actually understand what I’m saying well enough to be able to restate it in a way I would also agree with, I will continue to have no reason to take any of your comments seriously.
Mark Z
Mar 2 2020 at 1:57pm
A big part of why Syria became Syria – why the conflict lasted so long and killed so many – is precisely because Great Powers intervened (in the west, because they saw a chance to overthrow Assad) and supported a side in the civil war, thereby prolonging it. That situation also probably would have been less bad had “we” done less rather than more.
Phil H
Mar 2 2020 at 8:43pm
Neither Kevin nor Mark’s answer is really adequate, though, because they are both at the act level. Of course we can’t know what the consequences would have been for any single action. So that’s the wrong place to be looking. We should be looking at the policy level.
At the policy level, if there is an external threat that means any time a dictator wobbles, they will be removed from power; and alternative, non-dictatorial models of government are available; then over time, the number of dictators will decrease.
Obviously that argument is very simplistic, and there are lots of problems and counterarguments. But the point is to have the argument on that level, because otherwise we’re just always arguing about the last war, and we don’t get any insight into how to guide the future.
KevinDC
Mar 2 2020 at 10:04pm
Hey Phil –
The comment I was making was actually not about the act level, I was making an argument at the policy level, which is why I said “lack of certainty about the results of taking action is itself an argument for nonintervention as a general policy.” Granted, the specific example I quoted about the pills was a description at the act level, but that wasn’t because my argument was at the act level. It was explicitly meant as a demonstration for why intervention carries more moral weight and therefore requires more justification than nonintervention – and that applies just as much for intervention at the policy level as it does for individual acts. If you can’t be sure with a high degree of confidence that a policy intervention actually will making things better without offsetting unintended consequences, then you ought not have the interventionist policy. Or more specifically, your policy should be to not intervene. It’s more or less the Prime Directive from Star Trek, but sadly with fewer holodecks and no faster than light travel.
I agree, as you said that “we can’t know what the consequences would have been for any single action” but it simply doesn’t follow from this that we therefore “should be looking at the policy level,” unless you work in a hidden assumption that we can know “what the consequences would have been” more accurately at the level of policy vs individual acts, which I think is just flatly false. If anything, I think the opposite is much more likely to be true. My reasons are more than I can go into in any depth here, but probably the best summation of the literature which leads me to that conclusion can be found in Jeffery Friedman’s recent book “Power Without Knowledge: A Critique of Technocracy,” which I would highly recommend to anyone. [Also, David, I know you’re a busy man, but if you could add it to your list of books to review that would be amazing – I think your review would be genuinely fascinating.]
The essay by Micheal Huemer in the article I linked to was also an argument about the policy level, not the act level, which is apparent in passages like these:
And now, at least in my head, I’m reaching the point where I’ve mentally said “policy” so many times that the word is starting to sound weird 😛
Postscript –
Please don’t read this as somehow a suggestion of complete and total agnosticism about all policies. As Huemer also acknowledges, “Of course, I am not arguing that states should never intervene in society. Some interventions are clearly justified. For instance, prohibitions on murder, theft, and assault are justified…We know that prohibitions on murder are beneficial–there are no real counter-arguments to the claim, and all experts agree.” I just think the scope of policies where we actually have knowledge which meets that level of justification is very small – again, Friedman’s book is a good explanation as to why.
David Henderson
Mar 3 2020 at 2:17pm
Thanks for your suggestion of Jeffrey Friedman’s book. I’ll find it on line.
Also, I think your comments on this post have been particularly good. Thank you.
Mark Swanstrom
Mar 2 2020 at 11:42pm
It is overly generous to say that these actions had good intentions but were met with unintended consequences. A desire to be seen as a strong leader internationally or being tough on crime domestically often leads to horrible outcomes.
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