- If you've ever taken any sort of class in philosophy or read a
basic philosophy book, you tend to encounter
two thought experiments that try to test our moral intuitions- and they're called the "trolley problem" or perhaps also the
"screaming baby problem." The trolley problem goes like this: You see a trolley or a train
barreling down the tracks, and it's heading towards an
individual who's on the tracks. Now, the trolley problem,
as it's often formulated, is that there are two
people on one set of tracks where a train is headed, and if you pull the lever
and divert the train it will hit somebody
else, but just one person. And the question is:
Do you pull the lever? Do you divert the train? So the thought experiment is
trying to test our intuitions about how should we behave when
we face impossible choices? And one example to
illustrate this point is Winston Churchill in World War II. Winston Churchill had a
secret that the Germans didn't know: during the middle of the war, they had cracked the Nazi enigma codes. They had cracked the codes that allowed the British government to actually understand
exactly what the Nazis were saying to one another. The Nazis didn't know this. But the problem is once the Nazis realized the codes have been cracked, they are 100% immediately
going to change the codes- so this created real-life trolley problems for Winston Churchill. And one of them was an Australian ship that they knew was about to be torpedoed. Churchill decided not to warn them because if he warned them, and they diverted course,
it would be a clue to the Nazis that the
codes have been broken. He caused the deaths of the
people who ultimately did die on that ship, but he did
it because he believed that understanding that
the codes had been broken among the Nazi-war elite would
lead to decisions and changes in their behavior that would
cause tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands,
even millions of more deaths, and the war being prolonged
significantly more. Modern presidents and prime ministers are making decisions all the
time that hurt people, but they're making decisions that hopefully hurt fewer
people than the alternative- and they're doing so
in immense uncertainty. They don't know what the
outcomes are going to be, and yet they're making
the best choice they can. This is not to absolve
leaders who inflict harm. We have to enforce the rules. We have to hold people
accountable when they break the rules, when
they abuse their power. But we should also think carefully about the logic of evaluating leaders, and only condemn the leaders
who made bad choices relative to the alternatives. One thing that's really
important to understand when you evaluate people in
power is what is the true effect of power corrupting, and what just looks like power corrupting? Because power has certain,
weird effects on people. And I highlight four mitigating factors that make power appear to corrupt, when something else is actually going on: Those four I call the
problem of dirty hands, the idea of learning, the
problem of opportunity, and the problem of scrutiny. So when it comes to dirty hands, it's the idea that people who are in positions of power
often face awful choices; choices where there's only downsides. So you end up inflicting damage because there's no good option. That makes it look like
you have dirty hands, when in fact, some of the time at least, the system is providing you
with a series of options that are all bad. Your hands are going to
get dirty no matter what, and the people who are out of power are the only ones who can
keep their hands clean. The second of learning is this idea that people learn to
get good at being bad. If you imagine someone who's
already a rotten person, a corrupt person, if you stick them into a position of power, they're not gonna know what they're doing, so they're not gonna be able
to inflict harm as easily as somebody who's been
in the job for 20 years. And as a result, what ends
up happening is if you look at the data of harm that's
produced by people in power, it might get worse over time. Not because the person has become worse, but because they've gotten
better at being worse. The third mitigating factor
is this idea of opportunity. It's the idea that people
who are in positions of power just have more chances, more opportunities to harm other people. So it's going to look like they are worse than the rest of us, because
if you are the president or prime minister or general or CEO, you're going to have the ability to have your decisions hurt other people. The fourth mitigating factor
is this concept of scrutiny, and it's this idea that
actually people in power, although I think they
don't get enough scrutiny, still get a lot more
scrutiny than the rest of us in terms of journalists
looking into them and so on. And indeed, when you see lots
of abusive power scandals, this is exactly what's happening. Bernie Madoff was bad from the start. Bernie Madoff's investment
fund was always crooked, but only when he started
making so much money did people start looking into this. And so it was a question of:
Is he under the microscope? There have to be hundreds, maybe thousands of Bernie Madoffs out there
who are just escaping scrutiny. Now, when you put these four together, these four mitigating factors,
they teach you a lesson: If you chalk up something
to power corrupting, or a broken system
attracting the wrong people or something like that, and in fact, what's happening is one of these four phenomena, you're going to come up
with the wrong solution because you're gonna misdiagnose
what's actually going on. I'm very clear that we
should not simply say, "Oh, because of these
four mitigating factors we should not hold leaders accountable." We absolutely should,
but they're just for us to make smart assessments
of what's actually happening around power so we can
make better decisions, both in punishing
leaders who behave badly, and in fixing systems in the first place. - Get smarter, faster with videos from the world's biggest thinkers. To learn even more from the
world's biggest thinkers, get Big Think+ for your business.
