The ability to be swayed by a flawed argument because we are more likely to be persuaded by what we FEEL rather than what is true.

Objectivity is found in not having a gain or a deficit in outcome, this negates much of the philosophy of the common person since the issues they philosophise about tend to be immediate to their needs or circumstances, i.e. they are within the problem.

Detachment seems to be a requirement when planning political, structural or economic futures. The problem then is why should persons who are not effected by something, be the ones to deliberate upon it? It is intuitive to reason that persons should be involved in, or bound by, the results of decisions they make, they should have a stake in the outcomes of those decisions because that introduces responsibility into the scenario. This intuition on necessary responsibility may however be tremendously flawed because personal biases could not be eliminated.

If you didn’t care about an issue are you the correct person then to be deliberating on it? Would you get involved if you didn’t have a stake in the outcome? The problem is eliminating the biases associated with caring about something and instead using reason and information to decide. This approach can seem somewhat detached and the persons benefiting / losing from the outcome (decision) may FEEL uneasy with it. yet when we allow feelings to be a critical component of decision making we lose reason.

This bind is not easy to escape. Moral hazard is the term for making decisions for other people that we ourselves do not then have to live up to. This is a criticism easily levied at political actors, that they are detached from the rules they make. Let us imagine that the minister for health makes a decision on public health that has harsh consequences for some people in a county of England, maybe a closure or merger that limits the availability of some resource, and we the people find out that he/she pays for private healthcare or has it included in their remuneration package. What would that makes us feel concerning their decision?

Conversely, if we had a government minister that was too close to the problem they might make a decision that wasn’t based on data from the ONS. They might be concentrating on Dementia and missing stress, simply because they had a family member that had suffered that horrible issue. Now that might seem noble, but if it went against what the data collectors highlighted as the greater of the two problems in question, and it also went against what those who measured the effect of government spending in these areas, the returns, measured, then it may be said to be unreasonable to push resources toward something that they make little difference to, at the detriment of something they could have made a big difference to.

Do you see the bind? no matter which way we judge it the person may do the wrong thing.

Paul S Wilson