Quotes About Decision-making

As a software developer writes a function, she commits to a strategy and a series of steps, and in doing so she eliminates other strategies or steps.

Jefferson was ambivalent about executive power – until he bore executive responsibility.

As one Democratic insider familiar with Mook's thinking put it, "When you're done with a condom, you throw it out.

But when it came to her own behavior—to the threat she posed to herself—she'd been incapable of gauging its gravity and reluctant to avail herself of the only option for fixing it. Too little, too late, she'd now tried to address it.

Jim Cannon, Baker's top aide, knew that his boss was "more responsible than he is ambitious." When Cannon advised Baker that voting yes would prevent him from becoming the Republican nominee for president in 1980, the senator snapped, "So be it.

Moral life, it can be said, is just too messy, and the situations we encounter differ from each other in subtle ways that no panoply of principles could ever manage to capture. Principles deal in samenesses, and there just aren't enough samenesses to go around. (page 2)

7. Resolved, Never to do any thing, which I should be afraid to do if it were the last hour of my life.

choice.—The question is, What influences, directs, or determines the mind or Will to come to such a conclusion or choice as it does?

Present choice cannot at present choose to be otherwise: for that would be at present to choose something diverse from what is at present chosen.

Does the mind will, in any given manner, without a motive, cause or ground, which renders the given choice, rather than a different choice, certain.

Above all, the sense of personal responsibility was reduced by the way agency was fragmented. Among the airmen who obeyed the order to drop the bomb, the many scientists who helped to make it, the President, the many political and military advisers involved in the decision, who killed the people of Hiroshima? No one seems to have felt that the responsibility was fully his.

Those who actually dropped the bombs were less responsible than the people who took the decisions higher up the chain of command. In modern technological war, psychological responses are poorly correlated with degrees of responsibility. In people further back up the chain, this casual distance reduces the psychological resistance they have to overcome.

Reasoning can take you wherever you want to go.

You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning) comes back empty-handed, the master (intuition) doesn't change his judgment.

The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant.

If you want to make people behave more ethically, there are two ways you can go. You can change the elephant, which takes a long time and is hard to do. Or, to borrow an idea from the book Switch, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath,54 you can change the path that the elephant and rider find themselves traveling on. You can make minor and inexpensive tweaks to the environment, which can produce big increases in ethical behavior.

In other words, under normal circumstances the rider takes its cue from the elephant, just as a lawyer takes instructions from a client. But if you force the two to sit around and chat for a few minutes, the elephant actually opens up to advice from the rider and arguments from outside sources. Intuitions come first, and under normal circumstances they cause us to engage in socially strategic reasoning, but there are ways to make the relationship more of a two-way street.

first principle: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.7 Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning.

The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant.

moral thinking is more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth:

Reasoning was merely the servant of the passions, and when the servant failed to find any good arguments, the master did not change his mind.

The first principle of moral psychology is Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

Accountability increases exploratory thought only when three conditions apply: (1) decision makers learn before forming any opinion that they will be accountable to an audience, (2) the audience's views are unknown, and (3) they believe the audience is well informed and interested in accuracy. When all three conditions apply, people do their darnedest to figure out the truth

Everything in this world is a matter of calculation. Advance then with caution, the balance in your hand. Put into one scale the pleasures which any object may offer; but put fairly into the other the pains which are to follow, & see which preponderates.7