Choice of Undesirable Outcomes

On Choice of Undesirable Outcomes and Policy Making in Singapore

Updated: 14 Dec 2006

A week ago, I attended a session to have coffee (and not tea) with George Yeo, our foreign minister organized by Bedok Reservoir-Punggol YP. It was a well-organized event, and I would say that other elected members of parliament (be it the ruling party or the opposition) should organize more of these sessions so that the citizens have a better idea on what they are doing for the community. On a personal note, I find it interesting to observe the event, as I watched our foreign minister gave his views and insights to different questions posed by the youths (mostly undergraduates in NUS and SMU). Since there were no burning questions in my mind, I just took down some notes which I might want to discuss in the near future. So, this begins what I want to talk about in this post.

Our minister gave a very candid and frank response based on his experience and historical knowledge  on why we are engaging the governments of the Middle East and Myanmar. With other issues such as the Israel-Palestine conflict, he brought up a consistent argument which was resonated by many practitioners in the area of foreign policy [1]. The argument is what I called the choice of undesirable outcomes: In international affairs, the only way to engage governments with controversial stance is to decide your action on the choice of undesirable outcomes, given all the other idealistic alternatives are not realistically achievable. The context of his argument arises from Singapore's choice in engaging controversial regimes such as Myanmar in foreign policy. The view is that simple and "one size fit all" solutions do not work in foreign policy and that historical issues form part of the problem. I agree with him that in most situations of foreign policy, particularly in dealing with rouge states, the choice of undesirable outcomes is the best strategy for the policy maker to decide their course of action. For example, in the days of the Cold War, US and the former Soviet Union adopted the approach of containment so that both sides will not end up in a mutually assured destruction (MAD) situation.

Another example stems from my experience in attending debates by prominent diplomats and individuals on the Palestine-Israeli relations in the Cambridge Union (when I was studying there). In those debates, both the Israelis and Palestinian groups would end up dragging history from the Oslo agreement back to the 1967 agreement. That's not the worst part, they will continue and shift the markers of agreement back to 1948. It is the historical baggage that stop them from accepting the new realities present in today's Israel and Palestine. That sets up the difficulty for both sides to reach agreement practically on any issue. Hence in such situations, the choice of necessary evils comes in play.

This type of argument is often used in politics and policy making on the context of Singapore. Let's take that argument and place it in a general context [2]: Given a situation where the options one is faced with are all undesirable, rationality dictates that, all things being equal, one should go for the least undesirable option. The best example, provided by Hui Chieh is a bad investor and his options in the stock market. If an investor made a few bad investments in the stock market, and assuming that the options presented are either to hold on to the stocks or sell them, coupled with the conditions that money is the only metric involved, it is reasonable to accept that the investor will go for the option that gives the highest expected outcome. In this situation, the investor will definitely pick the option of cutting his losses.

Some people call this "lesser" or "least evil". In the unfortunate world of politics, the politicians often applied the rule of necessary evils (which may or may not mean morally wrong) to solve their problems. In the real world, it is hard to pin down all the possible options and find a good measure to rank these options that will give us the best possible choices to make decisions. Perhaps, it is the uncertainty in the real world (as a theoretical physicist will put it) that we select the probable situation that will maximize our utility. The volatility in the few options presented might cascade a situation in further chaos, but it is the best one as we claim it to be, that we hope to make the situation better. In the words of Keith Olbermann (news anchor from MSNBC) who criticised the Bush Administration for the death of Habeas Corpus, where he said that "Each of these actions (policies chosen by the US President) was undertaken for the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons."

In Singapore, the choice of undesirable outcomes has been exercised in the light of the GST hike and the integrated resorts (casino) policy. In the case of the GST hike, the undesirable outcome is that if we don't raise GST to 7%, capital gains tax or personal income tax has to be raised in order to adjust the spending of the government in transport, healthcare, social security (CPF), education and helping the poorest 10-20% of the population. Similarly, the IR policy is another example solely based on finding the best solution to revitalize the Singapore economy. We do not know the drip down effects of these policies at least till another one or two decades in Singapore.

Yet, the key issue lies with the choice of the citizen in endorsing the policies of the establishment. While necessary evils might be chosen to keep the society in economic prosperity and how we deal with other nations in the international arena, it is always important for us, the citizens to take a step back and examine the policy in detail. In almost all situations, we accept without question and fail to give the checks and balances required. There is nothing wrong about asking questions because we may find something that even the most rational course of action might turn out disastrous. Oftentimes, we have listened to our inner voices (and in the words of Olbermann), "the wolf is at the door; this will be temporary; this will be precise; this too shall pass." However, life is not so simple, as we can always decide on policies that is based on the choice of undesirable outcomes, but ultimately, we should question whether "each of these actions was undertaken for the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons". We should be concerned about our future, because we are going to spend the rest of our lives living there.

Acknowledgments: I thank Loy Hui Chieh for discussions on the choice of undesirable outcomes and my friend, Ivy Kong for inviting me to attend the coffee session with our foreign minister, George Yeo.

Endnotes:
[1] I highly recommend Professor Tommy Koh's "The Quest for World Order: Perspectives of a Pragmatic Idealist" for those who are interested in reading about foreign policy from the perspective of a Singaporean. I read this book eight years old and it remains to be one of the influential books for me, particularly, as a pragmatic idealist.
[2] The philosophical formulation of the statement is provided by Loy Hui Chieh and should be rightfully attributed to him.

Comments

[kwokheng]

'I highly recommend Professor Tommy Koh's "The Quest for World Order: Perspectives of a Pragmatic Idealist" for those who are interested in reading about foreign policy from the perspective of a Singaporean.'

Also interesting is Michael Leifer's 'Singapore's Foreign Policy'.

Leifer may not be Singaporean -- he's British -- but Singapore's foreign policy is his area of specialisation.

kh

[Bernard Leong]

Hi Loy,

I updated the article with your modified statement. Realistically speaking, in real world situations, particularly in negotiations, both parties will tend to isolate certain factors and try to construct the scenarios by varying the scenarios. For example, in the MAD scenario, the lose-lose situation is that both US and former Soviet Union attack each other with nuclear weapons, and hence both administrations try to exploit the other options to gain advantage over the other.

[loy hui chieh]

I didn't know you were going to use my formulation. I think it should be:

Given a situation where the options one is faced with are all undesirable, rationality dictates that, all things being equal, one should go for the least undesirable option.

This is just a particular instance of opting for the most desirable option. By the way, I don't believe that the 'principle' says very much; it is at best a truism. In actual scenarios, there can always be disputes over the relative 'undesirability' of each option, the choice of metrics, whether 'all things' are equal, etc.