Difficult choices: to agonize or not to agonize?

Social Research, Spring, 2007 by Edna Ullmann-Margalit

Clearly, the two classes of choices are not, as a matter of empirical fact, coextensive: not everyone has difficulty dealing with difficult choices, and not every choice that someone finds difficult merits being considered a difficult choice per se. At the same time, these two classes cannot be disjoint. We would like to be able to assert that certain choices are intrinsically difficult and that people facing them do, should agonize over them.

Whether the task of providing a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for this sort of cases makes sense, remains an open question. But it seems that we all recognize some of their characteristic and salient features. Irrespective of whether they are complex or difficult to calculate, difficult choices typically involve consequences of significant moment either to the life of the person making the choice or to the lives of others; also, they typically have a moral dimension that might involve a clash of values. A person taking a difficult choice lightly and making it quickly is amiss: we feel justified in being judgmental of such a person. Having said that we note, however, that the longer time spent over the choice is not a characterizing feature of difficult choices; rather, it is a symptom thereof.

Taking our time over a difficult choice and agonizing over it is not always an option. There are cases in which the speed with which the decision has to be made is in the nature of the decision itself. Under the heading "A Man Down, a Train Arriving, and a Stranger Makes a Choice," Cara Buckley of the New York Times (January 3, 2007) tells the story of 50-year-old Wesley Autrey, who was waiting for the downtown local at 137th Street and Broadway in Manhattan. He saw a man stumbling to the platform edge and falling to the tracks, between the two rails. "The headlights of the No. 1 train appeared. 'I had to make a split-second decision,' Mr. Autrey said. So he made one, and leapt."

The question whether brave Mr. Autrey made a difficult choice in a split second or acted from instinct must remain moot. But consider a story in which an excruciatingly difficult choice was squarely faced and made under the severest time limitation--a story which, in Israel, is as well known as it is traumatic. On February 21, 1973, a Libyan Arab airliner on a regularly scheduled flight from Tripoli to Cairo left Tripoli, but lost its course over northern Egypt, entering Israeli airspace of Sinai at 13:54. After failed attempts at communication by Israeli F-4s, the plane changed course and started to descend. Suddenly, it turned back toward the west and increased altitude, as if trying to escape. Warning shots were fired. By now, the Israelis had assessed as high the risk that the plane was on a terrorist mission and they decided it must not escape. The plane was shot down at 14:08, resulting in the loss of 108 out of 113 people on board.

The incident lasted 14 minutes, from start to finish. In the duration, the entire top echelon of the Israeli air force was involved; moreover, it was later revealed that the Libyan plane had been shot down with the personal authorization of the Israeli chief of staff. The risk of shooting down a passenger-carrying civilian plane was recognized and assessed, but the risk of an airborne terrorist attack was assessed as higher.