Recently, I’ve been pondering on the idea of reasonableness. It’s a word that carries a lot of weight, where its applicability to any situation is highly subjective and can be easily contested. In most scenarios, there is some semblance of agreement between most parties regarding what is considered reasonable. More aptly, ideas where a reasonable amount of people can agree on what is deemed reasonable. A good metric to assess reasonableness is to determine whether it carries more reward than risk. More reasonable items carry substantially more reward than risk or have no risk at all. In daily life, reasonableness can be easily determined. However, in difficult situations, things can get a lot more tricky.

Let’s say you want to perform an action that has a small but nonzero chance of dying. Would you do it? Maybe, depending on how small that probability is. Let’s say across your lifetime, the odds of you dying is around 1 in 93. Would you still do it? If you said “no”, then I guess you’d better never drive again. This example isn’t so black and white, though. Even though your chances of dying or killing someone while driving are slim, most people still choose to drive. Although the benefit you get from any one drive is small, it compounds over the course of time, where it would essentially be impossible to do anything in your life if you couldn’t drive. With this argument, maybe the rewards do outweigh the risks.

It’s not so simple, though. We engage in risky activities all of the time that aren’t as “reasonable” as driving a car. Whether it’s speeding down the road or the freeway when you’re late to a meeting, having a few cheat days in a row during a diet, or spending a hefty percentage of your paycheck on that one thing you don’t really need, we choose to ignore risk for brief periods of time. Under an objective lens, speeding down the road dramatically increases your chance of injury and death. Even worse, you can end up harming innocent bystanders. All of this to maybe save a few minutes off your commute. With this context, you should never even dream of speeding on your way to work. Although the chances for you to crash while speeding are pretty slim, across the globe, thousands of people will die because of this “reasonable” decision. Despite the risk, we just move on with our day.

A Case Study: COVID-19

The one topic I’ve found the most controversial about reasonable behavior is disease. During COVID-19, the entire world went into shutdown while an unknown virus wreaked havoc. After months of researchers frantically researching this new disease, we slowly began to understand the virus, its adverse effects, and potential measures we could take to fight it. During this time, there was a huge debate on whether we should open the countries back up or stay locked down.

Lockdown advocates and critics could both agree that more people would die if we opened the country up. Typically, more death is bad and certain more death is even worse. A “reasonable” decision would just be to keep the lockdowns forever. As usual, it’s not so simple.

I think everyone can agree that at some point, we needed to end the lockdowns. It was just a matter of when. Regardless of when we opened back up, more people would die as a result. If you criticized lockdown dissenters for killing more people by opening up the country, you are essentially doing the same thing if you ever wanted the country to open up again. Even if to a lesser extent, you are still “killing people.” The safest option would be to lockdown forever, or long enough to where COVID no longer existed. But clearly, that’s unreasonable.

Another hot topic of debate was the issue of masking. Some people wanted to remove mask mandates early on, while other people wanted to keep them around. In this case again (not discussing the efficacy of masking), it’s an issue of reducing risk, where not masking would supposedly cause more death. As was the case before, almost everyone would agree that we needed to remove the mandates at some point–the question was just when. And as was the case before, regardless of when we did (assuming masking was effective), we would end up killing more people.

We all might have held that the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers were responsible for an increased COVID-19 death toll. They had an easy choice to prevent the spread of a deadly disease but decided against it. However, most of us are guilty of the same things, even if we don’t want to admit it. There’s a chance that we made someone seriously ill that time we took that exam despite having a cough. There’s a chance that one time we didn’t properly wash our hands, our germs may have ended an immunocompromised person’s life. I’m not saying these things are all morally equivalent to the example above. However, I am saying that they are not as different as you would like to believe.

In a disease- and risk-free world, we should lock down forever to prevent all diseases from spreading. Everyone would mask forever to prevent anyone else from ever getting sick again. We would never touch or talk to anyone ever again. Clearly, this is unreasonable. This is unreasonable without even considering the secondary consequences of lockdowns and masking: the degradation of education quality, the destruction caused to relationships, and the increased drug overdoses from lockdowns. My point is not to convince you of whether any of these measures were good or bad. I just want you to see how everything is much more complicated than what meets the eye. Having a black-and-white image of what is good or bad, reasonable or unreasonable, is simply too shallow.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, we all allow some tolerance of risk, even if the result ends up with more suffering. We have to realize that no matter what we do, there is always risk involved. Some people will thrive and some people will suffer regardless of what you do. Too often, people are forced into shallow factions, debating issues at a surface level without considering secondary or tertiary consequences. It boils down to one simple metric (e.g. death) that can’t possibly contextualize the whole situation. I don’t advocate for you to be more fuzzy with your opinions or morals. But, I do encourage more nuanced opinions with more consideration of factors that most people wouldn’t think of. It’ll allow you to contextualize the world in a way you have never seen before.

Inspiration

This thought process originated from when I did competitive debate back in high school. For every argument, we were supposed to weigh our impact. The idea was that each argument had a variety of consequences, and the goal was to prove why your benefits or consequences were better or worse than your opponents.

Let’s say for a given topic, team A’s impact was that if we did some action X, we would grow the economy by 30%. Team B’s impact is that if we did action X, we would worsen climate change substantially. Both teams want to argue how their argument “outweighs” their opponents, i.e. how the benefits and consequences (secondary, tertiary, etc.) should be more important at the end of the day. Examples:

• Team A: with a 30% better economy, we can invest more money in green energy, offsetting climate change.
• Team A: people’s lives will be better, which matters more than climate, which we can adapt to
• Team B: climate change will happen so fast that the effects will be detrimental before any green energy can be enacted
• Team B: even with people’s lives improving, more people will die, which is worse than any marginal benefits

It was an aspect of debate that encouraged teams to be as creative as possible. We would have to argue why growing the economy was more important than a potential nuclear war, or why preserving moral principles is more important than saving a million lives. It forced me into a critical lens where things weren’t black and white, where you had to evaluate layers of information, where there are benefits and consequences of all action and inaction. In the end, it allowed me to better understand risk, suffering, and their considerations in everyday life.