The nominations are all in, and boy, there are a lot of them! Before we open the envelope, here are the contenders:
#1A. Ethics Surrender, or “We can’t stop it.”
#1B. The Psychic Historian, or “I’m on The Right Side Of History”
#2A. Sicilian Ethics, or “They had it coming”
#8A. The Dead Horse-Beater’s Dodge, or “This can’t make things any worse”
#13. The Saint’s Excuse: “It’s for a good cause”
#13A The Road To Hell, or “I meant well” (“I didn’t mean any harm!”)
#15. The Futility Illusion: “If I don’t do it, somebody else will.”
#18. Hamm’s Excuse: “It wasn’t my fault.”
#19A The Insidious Confession, or “It wasn’t the best choice.”
#19 B. Murkowski’s Lament, or “It was a difficult decision.”
#22. The Comparative Virtue Excuse: “There are worse things.”
#23. The Dealer’s Excuse. or “I’m just giving the people what they want!”
#25. The Coercion Myth: “I have no choice!”
#28. The Revolutionary’s Excuse: “These are not ordinary times.”
#29A The Gruber Variation, or “They are too stupid to know what’s good for them”
#31. The Troublesome Luxury: “Ethics is a luxury we can’t afford right now”
#36. Victim Blindness, or “They/He/She/ You should have seen it coming.”
#37. The Maladroit’s Diversion, or “Nobody said it would be easy!”
#38. The Miscreant’s Mulligan or “Give him/her/them/me a break!”
#40. The Desperation Dodge or “I’ll do anything!”
#41. The Evasive Tautology, or “It is what it is.”
#49. Ethics Jiu Jitsu, or “Haters Gonna Hate!”
#50. “Convenient Futility,” or “It wouldn’t have mattered if I had done the right thing.”
#51. The Apathy Defense, or “Nobody Cares.”
#51A. Narcissist Ethics , or “I don’t care”
#52. The Underwood Maneuver, or “That’s in the past.”
#54. Tessio’s Excuse, or “It’s just business”
#58. The Golden Rule Mutation, or “I’m all right with it!”
#60. The Ironic Rationalization, or “It’s The Right Thing To Do”
#64. Yoo’s Rationalization or “It isn’t what it is”
#69. John Lyly’s Rationalization, Or “All’s fair in love and war”
Some of these have been evoked by Joe Biden directly, others by his desperate defenders. I will not hold you in necessary suspense: the Unethical Rationalization settled upon by the defenders of the completely botched abandonment of Afghanistan, all of its people who relied on our commitment to their sorrow, and the so far undetermined number of Americans currently trapped in the country is…
50. “Convenient Futility,” or “It wouldn’t have mattered if I had done the right thing.”
The description on the list reads,
“One of the more pathetic excuses incompetent and negligent individuals try to employ when they have made bad decisions with disastrous results is to argue that a better decision would have not made any difference, so, by implication, it wasn’t such a bad decision after all. It may or may not be the case that the irresponsible or incompetent decision wasn’t the only reason for the related harm, or that other decisions would have turned out just as badly. That, however, is convenient speculation. If the decision was demonstrably careless, ill-advised, poorly reasoned or foolish and bad consequences follow, the decision-maker is accountable.
“#50 is the reverse of hindsight bias, in which a decision is second-guessed by critics based on information the decision-maker couldn’t have had when the decision was made. With Convenient Futility, the argument is that unknown and untested approaches to the problem or situation other than the one that was used couldn’t have been any more effective. It’s an air-tight, all purpose excuse, reflecting back on Rationalization #8, “No harm, no foul,” as in “OK, it was a bad decision, but since everything would have fallen apart no matter what, it’s no big deal!”
“The rationalization confounds law and ethics. I was once on the jury for a medical negligence lawsuit in which a woman was suing a doctor for causing her to go blind by giving her an incompetent diagnosis. The doctor’s defense was that she would have lost her sight anyway because she didn’t follow the treatment prescribed by another doctor. That defense worked: he wasn’t legally responsible for her blindness due to an intervening cause. Nevertheless, the doctor was still an incompetent, dangerous doctor. He was just lucky that his ineptitude didn’t blind her.
“It wouldn’t have mattered because the same thing might have happened even if I was competent‘ is still an admission of incompetence.
“Like many of the rationalizations on the list, #50 is sometimes fair and true. Those in charge are often held responsible for events that nobody could have foreseen or prevented. That, in part, is what makes the rationalization so useful for a failed decision-maker desperately searching for an excuse.”
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