What follows putting reason in its place? "Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?"(response to article by Dan M. Kahan and Donald Braman in this issue, p. 1291)

• Author: Levinson, Sanford

INTRODUCTION

As it happens, I read Dan Kahan and Donald Braman's extremely interesting article (1) while on a plane, a venue where I get an increasing percentage of my reading done these days. Air travel promotes a certain kind of intellectual serendipity, given the varying materials that people bring with them to read while crossing the country. Upon finishing their decidedly academic article, I turned to the November 4, 2002, issue of The New Yorker. By uncanny coincidence, two of the articles in that issue are centrally relevant to the Kahan and Braman article and, therefore, provide a structure for my response that the editors of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review have been kind enough to solicit.

All of these writings raise extremely important--and troublesome--questions about the role of rationality in human decision making. Lawyers especially claim a devotion to abstract reason, whether through the trope of the "reasonable" person or in the almost ritualistic invocations of the notions of "stronger" and "weaker" arguments. Beyond the legal academy, of course, the whole structure of Western thought--at least since the Enlightenment, but with linkages going back to Plato and Aristotle--has focused on the duty of intellectuals to submit their claims to reason and to swear enmity to the enemies of reason. It is, then, no small matter to challenge these notions.

After finishing Kahan and Braman, the first piece I read was a review by Nicholas Lemann of Daniel Ellsberg's new book, Secrets. (2) Ellsberg, of course, is the person who leaked the Pentagon Papers, the Pentagon's "internal" history of the origins of the Vietnam War that was compiled with the approval and cooperation of high-ranking Defense Department officials. For many, including Ellsberg, the Pentagon's own (secret) narrative of the events in question betrayed an astonishing level of mendacity on the part of our country's leaders. As the war continued even after the transition from Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon, Ellsberg chose to convey the highly classified documents to reporters at The New York Times, among other publications. (3) Those newspapers famously published much of what Ellsberg gave them and then successfully defended their decisions before the Supreme Court against a vigorous attack by the executive branch. (4)

Not surprisingly, much of Ellsberg's memoir is devoted to detailing his motives for almost certainly violating the law. (5) As Lemann notes, though, there are deep connections between Ellsberg's arguments in Secrets and those on display in another recent, though far more esoteric, publication--his doctoral dissertation submitted to the Harvard economics department in 1962, entitled Risk, Ambiguity and Decision. (6)

Ellsberg was part of a generation of extremely brilliant analysts who devoted their intellectual energies to constructing more rational processes of decision making, particularly under conditions of ambiguity or incomplete information. Crucial to Ellsberg's outlook--and his ultimate decision to leak the documents--was his belief, as Lemann writes, "that bad decisions were the product of inadequate information." (7) Thus, Ellsberg was initially confident that presidents, including John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, would necessarily have made better decisions had they only received more accurate information. This conclusion, of course, is a version of the Platonic conceit that bad action betrays a deficiency of knowledge since no rational being would choose to act in dubious ways. Rationality, from this perspective, was especially to be expected of public officials, particularly with regard to such basic issues as war and peace. As Lemann writes:

For Ellsberg the shattering revelation of the Pentagon Papers was that the American Presidents who made decisions about Vietnam had actually been well informed. Nobody was lying to them about the probability of success of American engagement, and they engaged anyway. All this contradicted not only Ellsberg's own explanation for mistaken judgments but a whole way of seeing the world, in which if decision-makers can be given good information they will make rational choices. (8) Ellsberg's disillusionment, though, was only partial. Perhaps American leaders were less devoted to rational decision making than he thought, but he was a sufficiently good democrat to have faith in "the people." Surely his fellow Americans would turn against the war once they realized the misleading nature of many claims being made on its behalf. Knowing the truth would set them free--at least to reject an intellectually corrupt ruling elite. Thus, the leaking is best interpreted as an attempt to inform the ultimate sovereign--"We the People"--about what had been done in our name. The Pentagon Papers did not per se destroy Ellsberg's commitment to rationalistic decision theory. "[I]n leaking the Papers to the press," Lemann writes, "he was simply changing jurisdictions, trading in a faith that perfectly informed Presidents will make rational decisions for a faith that a perfectly informed public will force rational decisions on misguided Presidents." (9) But Lemann suggests that Ellsberg's help in "providing the public with complete information didn't have the effect that Ellsberg expected." (10) The war continued as if nothing had happened, with ever more carnage and destruction in its wake.

Not surprisingly, Lemann links his discussion about the Vietnam War to the current debate about Iraq, where many of us believe that the Bush administration is making decisions that are potentially even worse than those made by their predecessors forty years ago. Learned articles are published attacking the empirical premises of the Bush policy in the hope that they will affect political leaders and members of the mass public to whom the leaders are ultimately accountable. But, of course, no retreat from aggressive tactics seems to be happening; moreover, whatever else may be said about the November 2002 elections, they certainly do not manifest a revulsion by the American public about the prospect of a war that is likely to be disastrous and costly in every imaginable way even if, as appears likely at this time (March 21, 2003), the United States "wins" the opening battles and seizes control of Iraq.

One explanation for this response, of course, is that it is we, the opponents of the policy, who are wrong: we are the ones who are best described as obdurate and, indeed, irrational, in refusing to change our views--perhaps because we hesitate to credit the possibility that a "Texas cowboy" could be correct in his views about foreign policy. This explanation, obviously, remains within the fold of classical rational-decision theory. The polarities are simply shifted with regard to what, indeed, is the "rational" thing to do.

Lemann, however, suggests that it is the model of rational decision making embraced by Ellsberg that is fundamentally flawed. "[T]here is another explanation for the failure of accurate information to produce a single, rational outcome: the decision-makers are making value judgments about how important the goal is and how high a price they are willing to pay to achieve it." (11) And, of course, there are almost always multiple goals, with varying prices, to further complicate any notion of "rational" decision making. "In the end," Lemann concludes,

the Vietnam War can't be reduced to a problem of miscalculated probability. It is of the utmost importance right now that we understand that the decision to go to war is ideological, not informational: the reason people disagree vehemently about war in Iraq is not that the facts on the ground or the true prospects of American military success are being kept hidden. What they disagree about is under what conditions and by what means the United States should try to affect the governance of other countries. It's not what we...