Not At Any Price

The author, who will remain nameless to spare her embarrassment, began by citing psychological experiments that show people fear losing more than they enjoy winning. Few people, for instance, will take a bet that offers them equal odds of winning $50 or losing $50. Only if the possible upside is increased considerably will they risk losing what they already have.

Based on that phenomenon, the author argued that returning Israeli hostages, who represent a loss so long as they are in captivity, should take precedence over winning the war to destroy Hamas.

The author seemed quite pleased with her cleverness. But her piece reminded me of nothing so much as the Harvard Law Review student notes of my misspent youth, in which a student offered a “clever” and inevitably unsatisfying solution to a well-known philosophical or legal conundrum. That brand of cleverness was represented in the recent Republican primaries by Vivek Ramaswamy, who, based on his academic record and billionaire status at a young age, almost surely had the highest IQ of any of the candidates. Yet his too-clever answers and putdowns of other candidates only served as reminders — to me, at least — that intelligence and wisdom are not one continuum and that the most intelligent person is often the least wise.

ON ITS FACE, the analogy of the JPPI fellow makes little sense. In the experiments she cited, it was easy to measure both gain and loss on a single scale — dollars. The real world is not like that. How does one measure, for instance, lives of captives who would hopefully be saved by a hostage deal against the potentially far greater loss of life later as a consequence of the deal? Or against the pain of families who suffered the loss of or severe injury to loved ones serving in the IDF in the current war, and who would be left feeling that the sacrifices of those loved ones were in vain if the war ends with Hamas unvanquished?