Free People
By: Herrmann Banks
Tags: Britney Spears, Freedom, Risk

It is another hot day in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where strangers are kind and beauty is overflowing.

The New Yorker, in a piece about the conservatorship (guardianship) of Britney Spears, quotes an ACLU lawyer: “There’s this concept of dignity of risk. Most of us have a very wide range of bad choices we can make that society is O.K. with, but, in a conservatorship, you’re subject to the decision-making rubric of best interest. And it’s possible we’d all be better off if someone was making decisions for us like that, but those are not the values of the society we live in.” Why not?

One possibility is that “the society we live in” believes that, with few exceptions, no one can be trusted to take decisions in the best interest of Alice other than Alice herself. Perhaps, Alice’s parents can be trusted at first, but even they ought to let Alice err and learn from her own errors in order to prepare her for the life when they are no longer around.

A subtler possibility is that ensuring that Alice takes decisions in her own best interest is not in society’s best interest. Indeed, it is in society’s best interest that Alice err occasionally, so that others can learn from her mistakes.

To illustrate, consider a hotel lobby in Las Vegas with (just) two slot machines, red and blue, each programmed for different odds of winning by different manufacturers. Alice and Bob enter the lobby with the intention to identify the most profitable slot machine through trial and error. They have separate finances but are friendly enough to share with each other the outcomes of their play. Suppose that Alice decides that it is in her best interest to play the slot machine that has been the most profitable so far — say, the red one. (It is conceivable that Alice could decide to play the blue one instead, in spite of its lower estimated profitability, just to learn more about it. But I assume that Alice assesses the trade-off carefully and concludes that it is not worth playing the blue slot machine even for the sake of learning.) In this case, it is in Bob’s best interest to do likewise. He plays the red slot machine. This is not what Alice would like him to do. Rather, Alice would prefer that Bob experiment with the blue slot machine. To see this, note that if Bob’s playing the blue slot machine only serves to confirm that the blue slot machine’s profit is inferior, then Alice loses nothing. The money lost is Bob’s. Alice continues playing the red slot machine. By contrast, if Bob’s play controverts the inferiority of the blue slot machine, then Alice learns a useful piece of information that she can profit from: she can switch to the blue slot machine. Because Bob’s situation is symmetric, he, too, would prefer Alice play the blue slot machine rather than the red one. Indeed, both Alice and Bob could benefit if each agreed to “err” occasionally and not play the slot machine that is in his or her best interest.

In other words, “the society we live in” may prefer to empower individuals to commit (what from the individual perspective are) mistakes for the sake of the common good, with the common good being collection of teaching moments that are useful to society at large. But if the common good is so important for society, why would society object to empowering individuals to sell their kidneys or to participate in medical challenge trials in exchange for money? Markets for kidneys and medical trials are feared lest someone sell a kidney or enrol in a medical trial by mistake — albeit a mistake that will save lives. Perhaps, this is too much mistake for society. But what about the corresponding mistake of failing to part with one’s kidney or to enrol in a medical trial and then living the rest of one’s life with the realisation that one could have saved lives but has not done so? Should not the individuals be protected from such mistakes, too?

Recognition of the dignity of risk is a good starting point for normalising life with uncertainty. It is imprudent to wait for all risks to magically disappear before one starts living or lets others live. The world bereft of all uncertainty — the world in which all molecular motion ceases — has the temperature of −273.15 degrees Celsius, the absolute zero. So, maybe, #FreeBritney to begin with?

Thank you kindly.