Dirty words, dirty hands

“The reasons schools are being reopened are purely political.”

“I think it’s very cynical, the way the government is making decisions about Covid; it’s all about economics.”

I’m paraphrasing friends’ statements, and this is just a small sample of similar opinions. These two happen to be about the Covid crisis, but I’ve heard variants in a hundred different contexts, within all cultures I am intimately exposed to (US, German, French).

“Politics” and “economics” are dirty words.

I think I understand what people mean when they use politics and economics as dirty words. But doing so is wrong-headed and counter-productive. I have needs and desires which I cannot meet with resources at my immediate disposal. Meanwhile, I have a superabundance of other resources that happen to meet your unfulfilled needs, and you just happen to have more than you need of something that will scratch my itch. There’s a win-win solution here. The systematic ways we find win-win solutions are called economics. If economics is dirty, roll me in the mud.

Sometimes, no win-win solution is possible. Yet a decision has to be made, and any option – including inaction – will designate some groups as winners and some as losers. The systematic ways we designate winners and losers are called politics.

It is impossible to govern without picking winners and losers, not because government is dirty and not because those who govern are intrinsically corrupt: Government is simply the mechanism we set in motion to resolve situations where no win-win solution is available. In political philosophy this is called the “dirty hands” problem, and its name unhelpfully reinforces the perception that politics is unclean.

Nothing in my lifetime has pushed the dirty hands problem right under my nose like Covid has. We’re whiplashing around as we try to spread costs and benefits as fairly as possible, but there are winners and losers. Many people in my bubble characterize the pandemic as a scientific problem, and believe policy should be a simple matter of following the science. If we had but one goal, and that goal was to contain the epidemic, then that would be the best approach. But containing the epidemic is not our sole goal, not individually or collectively. The epidemic poses, by its nature, a political problem: who will benefit and who will bear the burden?

There is a wonderful book about how society has confronted the dirty hands problem historically: Paradoxes of Political Ethics: From Dirty Hands to the Invisible Hand by John M. Parrish. The title embeds the thesis that, over the course of Western history, more and more win-lose situations have been reframed as win-win situations that can be resolved economically. But something that caught my attention in the book is the idea that democracy is attractive because it is a kind of shell game of moral responsibility. The dirty work has to be done, the difficult choices made. Voters absolve themselves of the responsibility for it by blaming the politicians. Politicians absolve themselves by invoking the will of the people. It’s a stable arrangement that allows everyone to feel like they’ve kept their hands clean.

Maybe it’s fine to participate in the shell game. There are worse vices than hypocrisy. But I can’t help but worry that passing the blame and washing our hands undermines the mutual trust and respect on which our web of reciprocal relationships rests. And I can’t help but believe we’d find more win-win solutions if we all rolled up our sleeves and got our hands dirty instead of looking down at those who do.