Anti-Climacus

WELL: So I'm a little confused by this Will Baude post on his revising his thoughts on the Iraq war. Says Will:

"I was skeptical, but perhaps not as much ex ante as it looks ex post like I ought to have been."

I'm not sure that there's any reason for people who supported the war to back away from that support now, even if you accept the narrative that things are going impossibly bad at the moment. Now, it might be that Will's particular problem is that he didn't do an exhaustive run-through of the counterfactual possibilities of the war (you might, reasonably enough, say you decided wrongly if there were facts you could've known at the time but didn't, for whatever reason).

If you supported the war on deontological grounds (as I did), then nothing in the execution of the war should make you revise your decision to support it. If your relevant principle is that democracy is better than horrible totalitarian dictatorship, and that the war represented the best chance for Iraq to move from one to another in a soon-enough time frame (approximately my rationale), you'd pick to support it again no matter how many iterations of the same you went through, because the principle is always going to trump other considerations (at least, it will if your relevant principle is as strongly held as this one is for me).

If you supported on utilitarian grounds, all things considered, you probably had a mental calculation that went like this:

p(everything goes smoothly) + q(everything goes badly for a little while, but works out well) + r(everything goes badly for a long while, but works out well) > s(everything goes to pot)

where p, q, r and s are probablities of the various outcomes, and each outcome is weighted in an appropriate manner.

But so long as your beliefs ran that way, it's hard to see why you'd revise your decision should you come to it again. The following counterfactual might be helpful: re-imagine the decision on the Iraq war where there was a 99% probability that everything would work out with no hitches and only a 1% chance it wouldn't work at all. Suppose further that it so happens that nothing works out. Did you make the all-things-considered wrong decision? It's hard to see how that claim could be sustained. Does it mean that the next time you faced that decision, based on what happened in the first instance? You'd be a fool if you did. It seems, in other words, to be an odd feature of revising your evaluation of past decisions based on what happens that the rightness or wrongness of your decision changes as information you couldn't possibly have had available to you at the time (what actions would happen after the decision) changes.

And revisionism of one's beliefs looks even weirder in this case than most. In straightforward decisions you make about your own actions, it makes sense (kind of) that you should be penalized twice: once for the consequences of your decision and once again for deciding it in the first place--because, had you decided otherwise, that would've changed the outcome in a relevant way. But it seems odd for people to feel badly about their decisions either way when nothing they themselves could have done would've changed what happened (decisions about the Iraq war were, unless you're GWB, decisions you made about actions that would be entirely in the hands of other people).

I'm not necessarily saying that people shouldn't change their opinions about what should be done based on what happens, just that changing one's beliefs about decisions already made seems to back one into all sorts of weird philosophical problems.