From the Director

Dr. Daniel E. Wueste

Responsible Action and Politics 
The assertion that these two these things — responsible action and politics— are incompatible (i.e., strange bedfellows, or like oil and water) is unlikely to meet with resistance.   After all, support for this idea is ready to hand: the current crisis in Washington, that is, the shutdown of the federal government and the threat that the debt ceiling will not be raised (i.e., that the United States will not be able to honor legal obligations that were created by Congressional action), is the upshot of action that is crassly political, the rhetorical sound bites to the contrary notwithstanding, and irresponsible.  Here I will focus on the latter.  The former can scarcely be doubted.

Responsibility brings to mind a variety of things.  Sadly, more often than not, the first thing that comes to mind is responsibility the sense that presupposes culpability, which is the first matter to be addressed on the way to holding someone accountable for some state of affairs, which, if we are thinking about blameworthiness, will be an unhappy state of affairs.  In this frame, the critical questions are about the causal connection between agent and harm and the agent’s intention.  Responsibility in this sense is important, of course.  However, two features of it diminish its ethical significance.  Or more precisely, when we think of ethics as providing direction for action rather than reaction, we won’t be looking to the past in an effort to find a causal connection between someone and lousy consequences, and so far as intention is concerned we’ll be thinking about what it is or should be rather than what it was (which, in any case, is very difficult to determine). 

In this ethical frame talk of irresponsibility (failure to act responsibly), often and rightly directs attention to the legitimate expectations about conduct associated with one’s being part of something larger than oneself, or put another way, one’s role responsibilities.  In one’s role as, say, a legislator, one’s own interests as well as the interests associated with allegiances such as membership in a political party, are, ethically, to be put to the side; doing so one avoids a conflict of interest.  The role of an elected official in a system such as ours is not to serve her interests or those of her party; it is to serve the interests of the people.  In this an elected official is like an employee whose job involves making decisions about plant location or vendors: the decision she makes is not supposed to be based on what serves her interests or the interests of, say, her church or the community theatre group she belongs to; the decision is to be made with an eye to serving the interests of the company and, of course, avoiding situations in which those interests would be in jeopardy.  That she would do this is both a reasonable and an ethical expectation about what she will do in her role/position with the company.  If she can see that a course of action she is considering would put the company in jeopardy, it should be clear that she ought not take this action; that she or some group of which she is a member might or would benefit greatly isn’t germane.  So too, ethically it makes no difference whether she can tell herself a story that makes it seem otherwise —that this story resonates with a large number of others in a group of which she is a member would not change things. 

I suspect you see where I am headed with this.  The current situation in Washington with the shutdown and the debt-ceiling gambit involves precisely the sort of thing I have been talking about.  This is patent with the debt-ceiling gambit.  The stakes are altogether too high; they are so far reaching  —the world economy, not merely our domestic economy will be impacted by default, and the impact on our domestic economy is in itself potentially so large that no end so far articulated could justify the means being used.  (I am ignoring the nonsense that default would not be a big deal; too many people who are in a position to know and cannot be discounted as partisans have spoken to the issue for the claim to be taken seriously.)

Again, even if the end (the end specified is defunding or postponement of the Affordable Care Act) were an obvious and unmitigated good, it would not/could not justify the means, namely, following through on the threat of default, which, according to business leaders and economists would have a truly devastating effect on the global as well as well as domestic economy.

Making the case that the debt ceiling gambit is irresponsible (ethically unacceptable) is not at all difficult.  The lopsided relation between possible gain (defunding or postponement of the Affordable Care Act) and likely/threatened loss (the likely and profoundly negative impact on our domestic and the global economy) is patent.  Indeed, the extent to which the likely cost exceeds the likely benefit is so great that the thought that the end could justify the means is not merely risible it is in fact absurd.  Even if default is avoided (since, from all appearances this would involve nothing more than an agreement to kick the can down the road a bit so that we will find ourselves once again on the brink in four to six weeks) serious damage will result from the economic uncertainty created by debt-ceiling brinkmanship, which, in turn, raises grave questions about the ability of the United States to govern itself, which may very well lead to a downgradingof our credit rating by yet another credit rating agency, Fitch (Standard and Poor’s downgraded its rating in 2011 in the context, now all too familiar, of debt-ceiling brinkmanship.).  Further, the way in which the persons whose lives are impacted by the shutdown as well as those (here and abroad) whose lives would be impacted by default are being used as mere means to an end —as if they were things instead of persons— or as we have heard again and again as “leverage,” involves an obvious failure to respect human dignity, or put another way, to act on a policy that could be universalized (which would have one treating others as one expects to be treated).  Moreover, and perhaps most significantly, the gambit exhibits such flagrant disregard for the integrity of institutions and the responsibilities of agents within them (by agents within them), that one can scarcely avoid the conclusion that the people who are taking us to the brink either have no understanding whatsoever of the responsibilities that come with being part of something larger than oneself, or simply do not care whether they fulfill them.

While precisely what the consequences will be can’t be known until they arrive, as it were, in this case if they aren’t bad (or as bad as predicted) that will be dumb luck rather than a demonstration of the sagacity of those engaging in debt-ceiling brinkmanship.  Why?  Because they have no good reason to expect the consequences to be anything other than very bad; moreover, that what is threatened will be bad is in fact the key assumption of such brinkmanship.  Yet, putting consequences to the side, basic ethical considerations indicate clearly that one would be acting irresponsibly if (a) one were to use others as mere means to an end —or treat them as leverage— and (b) one were to fail to fulfill the responsibilities one assumes by voluntarily becoming part of something larger than oneself, which would include striving for excellence in the pursuit of the organization’s purpose and safeguarding its integrity. 

Supposing that what I have argued here withstands critical scrutiny, the question arises whether we can reasonably infer that politics is, so to say, a lost cause ethically.   I think that the answer is no.  To be sure, the practice of politics involves ethically lamentable actions, but it also involves ethically laudable actions.  Since what we’ve got is a mixed bag, there’s hope.  Ethically speaking we, including those in politics, of course, have work to do: we should work to discourage the former and promote the latter by, for example, focusing attention on the responsibilities that one has as a result of one’s choice to be part of something larger than oneself, in particular, the responsibilities that arise because the scope of the impact one’s actions have tends to increase when one acts in a corporate/institutional/organizational role.