Difficult choices: to agonize or not to agonize?

Social Research, Spring, 2007 by Edna Ullmann-Margalit

"AGONY OF DOUBT"

"WHAT A DIFFICULT CHOICE," A FRIEND SMILINGLY COMMENTS AS SHE faces the well-endowed dessert counter at a party. Having heard the traffic report on the radio in the morning, I may find it difficult to choose which route to take, as I learn that all routes to my destination are likely to be congested. A relative tells me that the formal act of signing the final papers committing his aging parent to an institution was one of the most difficult choices he experienced. Reflecting on the legal and medical professions, the comment is sometimes heard that in choosing either of them one must be prepared to face many difficult choices in one's professional career; so, too, with regard to being a politician or a statesman.

In the summer of 2006, Israel went to war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Israeli cabinet, led by the prime minister, took the decision to go to war within a few hours after a border skirmish in which three soldiers were killed and two soldiers were kidnapped by Hezbollah. Some two months later, after the war ended with ambiguous results, pressure mounted on the Israeli government to appoint a commission of inquiry into the conduct of the war. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert agonized for about two weeks before finally reaching the decision about which format of commission, from a menu of several options, he was going to approve.

In what follows, I shall be concerned to explore what makes choices difficult above and beyond the difficulty of expected-value calculation. I shall consider a choice difficult to the extent that it poses a special, noncalculative challenge to the choosing agent, either in virtue of certain characteristics of the choice itself or of the agent facing it. From the point of view of the psychologist, the description of Olmert's behavior clearly indicates that the choice to appoint a state commission of inquiry (rather than, say, a judicial commission) was to the prime minister more difficult than the choice to go to war. The longer it takes to reach the decision, says the psychologist's formula, the more difficult the choice reveals itself to be.

Let us try to make sense of Olmert's choices, in light of the psychologist's formula relating the difficulty of the choice directly to the time it takes. One possible conclusion from applying the psychologist's formula here is that the intuitively suggestive link between the difficulty of the choice and the momentousness of the outcome should be questioned: even though the choice to go to war was clearly the more momentous one, the choice of the format of inquiry appears to have been the more difficult one. Another possible conclusion is that a choice whose outcome is likely directly to affect the agent's own life and career is more difficult than a choice whose outcome is likely directly to affect the lives of many people other than the agent's--even when the effect on the lives of the many might be momentous.

Yet another way to react to the attempt to apply the psychologist's formula to Olmert's case is to say that Olmert's situation shows the formula to be wrong: some difficult choices are made quickly. Rather than the speed of the choice attesting to its nondifficulty, it may attest to some other feature of the choice situation or, sometimes, to the perversity of the agent making the choice. We may recognize that the decision about the format of inquiry took longer for the prime minister to make than the decision about going to war, but reject the notion that the former is, as such, a more difficult decision than the latter.

Consider in this connection the well-known phenomenon, popularly referred to as one of Parkinson's laws, that the time spent by committees over a decision is inversely related to the cost of the project to be decided on. Ordinary committee members tend to have particular views and to feel strongly about issues they are familiar with, at the same time that they feel alienated from important, expensive, and unfamiliar items. Overwhelmed, people feel uncomfortable discussing big items: they tend to rely on experts' advice and they want the vote over quickly. A parliamentary committee is likely, for example, to spend much more time on a proposal for new parking arrangements than over a proposal for a multimillion dollar nuclear facility. (1)

We may at this point want to go beyond the simplistic positive formula relating the difficulty of the choice with the time spent on it, and to ask normative questions. Harking back to the depiction of difficult choices as those that pose a special challenge to the choosing person, is it acceptable to us that the choice to go to war is less difficult than the choice of the format of inquiry? Can it be right? Or does the time difference in reaching the decisions possibly reflect more about the personality of the choosing agent than about the nature of the choices involved?

A preliminary distinction suggests itself: a difficult choice versus a choice difficult for agent A. The distinction is between choices that are difficult, in and of themselves, and choices that particular agents have difficulties coping with (while others may not). In dealing with the first sort, the focus is on an analysis of types of choice situations; in dealing with the second the focus is on an analysis of personality types and--possibly--of personality disorders.