Character Matters

It was good to ditch Platner

The Democratic party has successfully ousted Platner. The reasons for doing this are myriad and mainly character-based: he’s been accused of physical abuse, rape, and various other items of serious misconduct. I think it’s safe to say that Platner is a bad guy. But should those who think well of his political views think him a bad candidate? Republicans faced a similar dilemma in the form of Roy Moore, who was credibly accused of sexually assaulting multiple teenage girls.

I think the answer is yes. Even if you agree with a candidate politically, if they are morally rotten, you shouldn’t support them. Character matters in a candidate. But it’s not for the standard reason people think.

The most important facts about a candidate are what they will do politically. The harms of an elected official being personally nasty—or even being emboldened to commit serious crimes—pale in comparison to the huge effects of their policies being enacted. Even if electing some poorly behaved politician would embolden them to go out and commit several murders, this would be only a fraction as significant as the effects of their policies. And even if there is some good in retributively punishing people for misconduct, that pales in comparison to the benefits of passing good policies that benefit millions of people.

So character only matters insofar as it affects what a person does while in office. But character makes a big difference with regards to what politicians do. Even if someone is aligned with you politically, insofar as they’re a terrible person, they’re much likelier to enact bad policy.

Take the recent Save Our Bacon Act as an example. I don’t actually believe that our Congresspeople are unaware that locking pigs in tiny cages where they can’t turn around is cruel. Rather, they supported the bill because they were selfish and prioritized their own political advancement over protecting innocent creatures from torture. The worse a person is, the likelier it is that they’ll behave immorally on matters of consequence. If our elected leaders were all moral people, then the SOB act would have been dead on arrival.

Take another example: politically, I’m a lot more aligned with Bill Clinton than George Bush. But George Bush seems like a nicer guy. Clinton bombed Al-Shifa for cynical political reasons, even though he knew that this would cause lots of innocent people to die. Similarly, Clinton privileged his own political advancement over the lives of the Rwandans and as a result greenlit the genocide that may have in total led to millions of deaths.¹

In contrast, Bush was mostly motivated by altruism when he set up PEPFAR. This decision led to tens of millions of lives being saved. Bush’s PEPFAR decision might have been so good that despite his repeated horrible policies—e.g. the war in Iraq—he may be, by utilitarian lights, the best president of my lifetime. Trump, by contrast, is perhaps the single most morally irresponsible man on the planet and callously undermined much of foreign aid.

If good character can redeem Bush, it matters a lot.

Cases where good character matters tend to be uniquely important. If you do things that are bad for Americans, you tend to pay a political price for it. So cases where political expediency conflicts with morality tend to be cases where one’s victims aren’t present Americans—and they often are very numerous.

The most consequential political decisions mostly affect foreigners. Americans are well off by global standards. Bad policies generally do not lead to Americans dying in large numbers. Bad economic policy whose victims are American might make well-off Americans a bit poorer; bad foreign policy might lead to babies being beaten to death with clubs or dying in their beds from lack of medicine.

Another case where there is a conflict between political expediency and morality is in cases where bad policies look good. For example, imposing pharmaceutical price controls looks like an obvious no-brainer. It’s not. Pharmaceutical profit margins tend to be very tight and come mostly from a small number of extremely profitable drugs. If firms make less profit from new innovation, they’re incentivized to spend less on life-saving new drugs. This has a truly calamitous effect on global innovation—studies often find pharmaceutical price controls would, over the course of decades, shave years off people’s average lifespan. Scott Alexander estimated that the number of lost life years from pharmaceutical price controls would be greater than the number lost from Mao’s great leap forward.

Suppose you’re a politician who knows this. You’ll benefit politically if you impose price controls. The victims—numerous though they will be—will be indirect and will live in the future. Politicians pay no costs for filling invisible graveyards.

This is merely one illustrative example of a more general point: there are lots of bad things that politicians can do. Though political incentives often eliminate the most egregious forms of misconduct, they aren’t enough to ensure that politicians do what they believe to be right. And when politicians do things that they know to be wrong, these often have extremely bad effects.

Now, here is one other feature of supporting virtuous politicians: we’re all better off if we all do it. Roosevelt is rumored (probably falsely) to have said of the president of Nicaragua “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch.” If both parties support their own side’s rogues and scoundrels, everyone is worse off. Neither party benefits politically—we just get the halls of congress filled with sons of bitches. Instead, we’re all better off if we don’t support sons of bitches, even if they agree with us politically.

Things may be better by the lights of Democrats if Platner wins than if he loses. But if both Platner and Roy Moore win, then everyone is worse off. Thus, it is good to have a political norm against supporting those who do terrible things. And you should be very wary about breaking good norms.

For this reason, even if I supported Platner’s political views (I don’t) I’d still call for him to drop out of the race. Politics is worse if our elected leaders are bad people, because this leads to them knowingly doing bad things. We ought not sell out our principles for political expediency. I’ll close by quoting Michael Huemer’s response to Ben Shapiro—when Shapiro claimed that Trump’s attempted coup was not disqualifying because “the guard rails held.” It’s not exactly the same, but the basic principle is similar.

Let me tell you how I view this. Say you’re on a bus ride on a winding mountain road. You see the driver suddenly swing the wheel to the right, trying to send the bus over the cliff. Fortunately, the guard rail on the side of the road holds, and the bus bounces back onto the road. The bus driver does this repeatedly during the drive, but every time, the guard rail holds the bus back.

When you finally get off the bus, one of your fellow passengers declares that this was an excellent bus driver. He proposes hiring this driver to drive the same group to another city. “What are you, out of your f—ing mind?” you reply. “He tried to drive us off a cliff!” “Oh that,” says the other passenger. “The guard rail held, so what’s the big deal? Don’t worry, this next drive won’t go by a cliff. Since the rest of his driving performance was fine, we should hire him.”

That guy is Ben Shapiro.

Do I have to spell it out, Ben? Driving off a cliff is not the only bad thing a bus driver can do. There is an indefinite number of disasters a crazy person can cause. Anyone who would try to drive a bus off a cliff can never be trusted with a bus, or indeed anything else, and if you think he’s an acceptable driver, you’re as crazy as he is.

1. Accounting, of course, for it leading to the two Congo wars which killed many millions.