In Praise of Passivity (2012) [pdf]
Trying to identify a few of the most ethically controversial premises:<p>* Government is ethically responsible for adverse results of acting to change society (or of limiting people&#x27;s choices), but not for those of failing to do so.<p>* People&#x27;s strongly-held hypothesis and intuitions about what might make society better are so unreliable that they&#x27;re typically at least as likely to make society worse. True or reliable ideas of this kind are exceptionally rare and take a long time to develop.<p>* It isn&#x27;t especially important for government to do what people in general think or say they want, because beliefs are so tenuous or unreliable or have so many unintended consequences.<p>Some ideas that might still be useful to people who reject some or all of those premises:<p>* Almost everyone believes that they are right and that their values will make things better, even people who strongly disagree with each other.<p>* Almost everyone believes that their own values and beliefs are well-supported or obvious, even people who strongly disagree with each other.<p>* Apparently well-thought-out political programs and proposals often fail or backfire in some way.<p>* (Not so explicit here, but sort of alluded to in passing, and found in similar writers) The ability to diagnose or describe a problem well isn&#x27;t necessarily the same thing as the ability to propose a workable or effective solution to that problem.<p>Edit: compare David Simon&#x27;s view at<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;2013&#x2F;dec&#x2F;08&#x2F;david-simon-capitalism-marx-two-americas-wire" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;2013&#x2F;dec&#x2F;08&#x2F;david-simon-ca...</a><p>&gt; I&#x27;m not a Marxist in the sense that I don&#x27;t think Marxism has a very specific clinical answer to what ails us economically. I think Marx was a much better diagnostician than he was a clinician. He was good at figuring out what was wrong or what could be wrong with capitalism if it wasn&#x27;t attended to and much less credible when it comes to how you might solve that.<p>* Some problems could be extremely intractable or only solvable at very high cost. Some changes that lots of people agree are desirable might still be out of reach in some sense; some outcomes that lots of people agree are bad may be beyond those people&#x27;s power to avert or mitigate very substantially, even if they passionately agree that those things are bad.