“I told you so” has to be the most irritating phrase in the English language. It represents a claim to foreknowledge when, in truth, none ever existed. Take those now crowing that the failure of the EU vaccine roll-out demonstrates how right we were do decide to leave the EU. Of course, it doesn’t. Back in June 2016, not even the wildest imagination could have predicted Covid-19 and its consequences.
And what rankles most about all this Brexit triumphalism is that it distorts the reasons why many of us voted to Leave. I had no idea whether Brexit would be “a success”. And I didn’t vote for it because I thought it might be – I voted out of sheer principle: for me the nation state is the upper limit of democratic legitimacy. Others believed that co-operation was intrinsic to the European project, and voted for that. I respect that view, even though I don’t hold it.
Even more problematic, though, is how an essentially moral decision – and a clash of different principles – has been turned into a kind of glorified guessing game. One in which how things turn out is the only basis on which a decision should be counted as morally commendable. After all, if you save a child from drowning, and that child goes on to be some mass murderer, you don’t conclude that the saving act was a morally bad one.
The trouble is, if a decision is to be judged solely on the basis of its consequences, then we consign moral success to the swirling darkness of the future, with all its unknown unknowns, all its unintended and unexpected twists and turns. So we can never be confident that we have made the right call. In any case, at what point in the future might we judge a decision the right one – after a year’s consequences, after 10 years, a century? When do we close the book on a decision’s consequences, and proclaim some final judgment? Consequentialists don’t tell us because there isn’t an answer. In other words, they don’t have enough respect for the utter mysteriousness of the future, enough humility before the unknown.
Kant understood the alternative — that we make many moral decisions on the basis of principle and not consequences. As he put it: “A good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes, because of its fitness to attain some proposed end, but only because of its volition, that is, it is good in itself … Usefulness or fruitfulness can neither add anything to this worth nor take anything away from it.”
This basic principle applies just as much to many who voted to Remain as it does to Leavers. I take it that many Remainers believe the basic principles of the EU are so morally commendable that they would regard their decision to vote as they did to be right, even if, over time, its “usefulness” seemed to tell against them. To this extent, I do not believe that the failure of the EU vaccine roll-out has anything significant to tell us about the rightness — or not — of the decision to leave the EU.
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