Pontificators should take the Hippocratic Oath

Dec 20, 2009 Letters

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Dear Editor,
Exhortations abound in Guyana!
• “The Commissioner General of the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) should not be commenting on Government Policy” SN, 12/14/2009)
• “Guyana should not have Brokered a Deal with Norway before Copenhagen” (SN, 12/19/2009)
• “Why can’t Guyana follow the Example of the Malawi Teenager” (SN, 12/16/2009)
• “Government should re-establish an Agricultural Development Bank” (SN, 12/14/2009)
These are a small sample of exhortations of which some people would like government to take note and apply.
No government has to follow every path its pontificators recommend; let me say that some pontificators always believe that they are little Caesars and that what they recommend is God’s word, or ‘written in stone’; such paths as ‘written in stone’ may be highly untenable.
And when Government’s policies are not in sync with the detractor’s narrow-minded mentality, the detractors, operating as political jockeys and junkies, rush for their pens to tell the people that the Government is racist, autocratic, corrupt, inter alia.
Surely, any government has to be flexible and receptive to a multiplicity of ideas, but it also has to weigh the outcomes flowing from these ideas; for this reason, we should not construe that a government not being in sync with its detractors’ ideas, is upholding the wrong position; this line of action may be necessary if that government concludes that the policy outcomes would hurt its people.
We can think of three grand philosophical positions on justice, among others, that may help us to do the right thing in policy formulation on distributing justice.
First, let us make a decision that will allow the people to take full advantage of a service – the utilitarian approach; second, let us make a decision that will help the people to close the social and economic gaps in their lives – the egalitarian approach; and three, let us make a decision that will help the people to get their entitlements – the libertarian approach.
The problem with these three grand approaches, however, is that they prescribe the use of ‘perfect’ benchmarks for making policies, as say, eliminating injustices; but these benchmarks being ‘perfect’, invariably, are not feasible and realistic; and if we continue along this ‘perfect’ path, we will restrict ourselves to having one-track or tunnel vision, meaning we will only see things in ‘one’ narrow way.
But the Guyana commentators have a fetish for ‘perfect’ standards that are unrealistic in the real world; bookish standards. For this reason, in their eyes, any governmental deviation from these ‘perfect’ benchmarks constitutes a wrong-doing; and these are the unrealistic benchmarks that some Guyanese commentators use to enhance their own daily critique of Government. Perhaps, the detractors do not interpret their benchmarks as unrealistic, but in fact they are perpetually impracticable, and high on rhetoric.
That’s why any Government’s failure to apply the detractors’ ‘perfect’ and ‘text bookish’ benchmarks provides the basis for these detractors to say that a project is experiencing long delays, facing increased costs, and showing minimum transparency.
I am not suggesting that there are no Government projects functioning with poor governance; perhaps, there are. But let anyone show me which part of the world with the best governance that does not have ‘ill’ projects. This line of thinking is not to condone this evil, but to control its infection, until a cure to eliminate this iniquity becomes available.
Let’s return to our grand theories of justice – utilitarianism, egalitarianism, and libertarianism.
All three attempt to explain the nature of a perfectly just society and to eliminate injustices with a broad brush. NYU Professor Moshe Halbertal noted in his review of these grand theories in Amartya Sen’s book “The Idea of Justice’, that “…by aspiring to grandness and exclusivity they are, all of them, wrong. The very attempt to produce a total and ultimate theory for a perfectly just society will inevitably generate injustice…”
In each of the grand theories of justice, any government has to be sensitive to how outcomes impact the needs and interests of its people. For instance, assume one pharmaceutical corporation in our region, functioning within the rule of law, owns, controls, and distributes at a high price a limited supply of H1N1 swine flu medication; clearly, only those people who can afford it will effect the purchase, while the poor and vulnerable will be without the medication.
This pharmaceutical corporation has ownership and distributorship rights over the medication; and so, in accordance with the libertarian approach, it would not be appropriate to take away the medication rights from this corporation to make it available to those unable to afford it; and so, the sufferings among the poor and vulnerable remain. For this reason, bonding to the libertarian approach without considering outcomes is morally wrong, and also the ownership and distributorship rights of this corporation should not be unqualified, as Halbertal would argue. However, the unavailability of the H1N1 swine flu medication to the poor and vulnerable persists around the world.
In this H1N1 swine flu medication example, application of the libertarian approach as a grand theory of justice becomes problematic; and so abandoning or modifying this libertarian approach becomes necessary to meet people’s needs. There are arguments, too, against the other grand theories of justice.
For this reason, the people should now turn around and tell these pen pushers as political jockeys and detractors that there is no one path to reach achievable outcomes in the nation’s interest.
The detractors, manipulating and presenting their views as ‘written in stone’ do great harm to this country. Perhaps, they should take the Hippocratic Oath to first do no harm.
Prem Misir

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