70. Integrity benefits from moral luck
How SPs’ integrity is judged can depend on how their decisions work out. Whether a decision turns out positively or negatively can depend on factors over which SPs have no control. SPs therefore need their decisions to turn out well. They also need moral good luck in the problems that confront them: some problems can increase integrity, while others only damage it. SPs can take this good or bad luck into account in their decisions and communication about them.
“There is no gambling like politics,” according to British statesman Benjamin Disraeli.403
Politics means taking risks. In Disraeli’s view, risks are very much the territory of politics. The same applies to integrity risks. In politics and government, with the best of intentions, SPs risk damaging and losing their integrity. On the one hand, as we saw previously, there is plenty we can do to avoid this loss of integrity, and even to take the lead. On the other hand, not everything is within our control. Integrity can also be damaged or lost due to bad luck. To put it another way, you have to be lucky to have integrity.
How a person is judged depends on how their decisions turn out. If a decision works out well, the judgment is positive. If it works out badly, this leads to a negative judgment. For this reason Bernard Williams speaks of moral luck.404 How a decision works out depends on many coincidental factors that we cannot influence or even foresee. Nevertheless, they have an impact on personal integrity.
Williams gives a fictitious example of painter Paul Gauguin.405 In order to concentrate fully on an artistic project abroad, he abandons his wife. Judgments of Gauguin’s moral integrity depend on the success of the project. If the project works out, Gauguin is praised for sacrificing even his wife to complete the project. If it goes wrong, Gauguin is accused of dumping his wife for a failed project. The same goes for SPs. An SP who stands up for investment in education to improve economic prosperity will be considered morally right and praised if greater investment results in improvements in prosperity, even if this depends on countless other factors, whereas if greater investment fails to increase prosperity, for instance because foreign economies collapse, the SP will not be readily praised and most likely will be accused of misspending money that could have been better spent on other causes that would have helped the economy. Similarly the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was based on the assumption that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. If these weapons had indeed been found, this would have justified the war and benefited the integrity of the SPs who had voted for it. However, since no weapons were found, doubt was cast on the integrity of the SPs involved and all kinds of impure intentions were attributed to them (such as economic interests, ambition, and power politics). So you need moral luck to have integrity.
Moral luck shows up not only in how issues pan out, but also in which issues arise. It is morally unlucky to be confronted with situations in which integrity can only be damaged or lost, for example, if predecessors have left skeletons in the closet but it is impossible to lay the blame on them. Equally, it is possible to be morally lucky and to be confronted with situations that showcase and strengthen personal integrity, as, for instance, in times of disaster or crisis, by giving a great deal of attention to victims, refusing to renounce certain principles, and throwing yourself heart and soul into recovery. SPs who stand as moral heroes have often been able to do so due to great emergencies happening around them (such as war and great social divides). If they had lived in different times or places, perhaps no one would have heard of them.406
The question is what we can do with moral luck. If it is pure coincidence, then by definition we have no influence and can do nothing with it. It would be an oversimplification to say that people can compel luck and bring misfortune on themselves. Moreover that would not be pure luck, as then people would have some influence, whereas the defining characteristic of luck is that you have no control over it. In any case, in decision making we can take into account the luck factor, estimating how much luck you need for your decision to have the desired effect and thinking through the consequences if things do not go your way, for example if it turns out that the information presented is untrue, important issues have been missed, or if it turns out tomorrow that all developments go in the opposite direction to predictions and everything goes wrong.
In addition to taking into account the influence of luck on events, you can also factor it into the way you communicate decisions, avoiding sounding too certain about the ef