The line between practicality and morality

“As Disraeli said, precedents are not dusty phrases but the representation of an embalmed principle that has been acted upon.”

Though pragmatism is by far the best way to govern, it cannot on its own form an effective government; good governance requires good goals and evidence-based decision making is simply the means to that end. Governmental ends are informed by two factors: interest and morality. Interest dominates in the international sphere and morality in the domestic sphere.

Pragmatism then must be tempered by moralism. Too much pragmatism can overstep into expediency and then we begin to do not what is best but what is easiest and from there bad long-term decisions start to pile up. Expediency can lead to a hyper focus on the short-term and can bring us to ignore long-term consequences or leave with no plan for the future. Failing to plan for the future is, I would argue, just as awful as forgetting the past. To think only of the present because we happen to be stumbling around in it is both foolish and arrogant; it is a failure to understand that the dead, the living and the yet to be born all are equal partners both in the wardenship of civilisation and as a class.

As Disraeli said, precedents are not dusty phrases but the representation of an embalmed principle that has been acted upon.

These principles are informed by experience, and so may be right or wrong, and it is the job of the current generation to sift through them and find which are good and which are bad not just so we may apply them but so they may be applied by our descendants for all time. To abolish tradition then is to remove the tools necessary for the generations of the future to properly govern themselves and in fact disadvantages them and cuts them off from the accumulated wisdom of humanity; a group that is actually far larger and with far more combined intelligence than any other.

Although pragmatism is a good dog, we cannot rely on it exclusively to get all, or even most, of the work we need doing done. As always things are much too complicated to allow one concept or set of concepts to solve all the problems we have, and ironically the reason I would argue for pragmatism is the same one that I use here to argue in tempering it. We will often be confronted with imperfect information while a decision is still demanded of us; we cannot always rely on firm evidence to inform our choices and so judgement is an ever needed quality. Empirical flexibility, then, is often the name of the game.