On Two Types of Errors

As university lecturers, my colleagues and I are sometimes called upon to make judgments on what’s fair. Should we let student A re-write the midterm? Is it right to excuse student B from class for a sporting event?

If we had perfect information about the world, every call would be easy to make. We’d know in an instant who was too embarrassed to tell us about mental-health problems, who’d realized after choosing to skip that actually they don’t want a C after all, who wanted an unfair edge over their fellow students, and who was struggling to get by without knowing how to ask for help.

But we don’t. And so, we have to decide which type of error we think is worse: giving too much to someone who doesn’t deserve it or not giving enough to someone who does.

The older I get, the more I think the world boils down to our choices between these two options.

I prefer to make errors of the first type. I’d far rather accidentally allow a cheating student to take advantage of my accommodation than lose a student who needed understanding and lenience.

In part, that’s because I see the world as a place where most people act in good faith and occasionally need help to thrive. Do I have evidence for that optimistic perspective? Not really. So many of the students I meet and teach seem genuinely invested in learning and doing well, reluctant to ask for anything like special treatment because they take pride in not needing help. But I’m pretty gullible and tend to believe people when they tell me about themselves, so who knows?

Even on a larger scale, I still choose the prospect of not turning away anyone who needs help at the cost of helping people who don’t need it. If having a robust social support network means a handful of selfish people see that as an opportunity to freeload, so be it. The rest who need access to support more than make up for it.

Of course, in some situations it’s not that simple. “Innocent until proven guilty” purportedly errs on the side of making sure nobody is punished for something they didn’t do, which is a great ideal. But the complementary error, letting someone who might hurt others go free, has much greater consequences than letting someone get away with cheating on a test. Sure, if Jane Q. Parking Ticket and Jin P. Remorseful get off their legitimate charges once in a while, that probably does little harm.

But what about bad actors whose malice or negligence hurt others, like a fraudster who steals needed funds, or a serial killer, or a sexual predator? What about those who commit crimes like this over and over until they’re caught? Is it worth risking sending an innocent defendant to prison to be certain that no one like this will be allowed to hurt others?

Well, I don’t know. I don’t think anybody does. But I still believe that our first moral imperative is to respond to those in need, the vulnerable and the suffering, not to defend principles for their own sake or slippery-slope every practical situation into a referendum on the value at stake as a categorical imperative.

That doesn’t always make things easy — far from it. Sometimes, such as when the rights of separate marginalized groups conflict, it’s difficult to tell what responding to those in need would look like.

How do we reconcile the needs of those sexual assault survivors who need access to single-gender safe spaces with the needs of people who don’t adhere to conventional gender presentation/identity and who also need safe, private spaces? How, as a society and also as individuals, do we address situations in which one marginalized group contributes to the marginalization of another?

That’s one difficulty. The other is the personal dimension. Simply put, it feels better to be an asshole than a dupe.

A few years back, I was duped on the subway by a scam artist, for enough money that it stung. I felt pretty stupid then, and it still hurts a little to think about it, even though “a few” years is actually more like “several,” long enough ago that I’ve moved on through a couple more stages of life.

At the time, it didn’t help much to think, well, at least I got tricked because I was trying to help someone, not because I was greedy or selfish. I felt like I’d rather have been a selfish, stingy jerk than a generous fool. Because assholes and jerks get to be the heroes: protagonists (and charismatic villains) see through tricks. They don’t fall for scams. And in the worlds where most of my favourite heroes live — for Holmeses and Houses and Mulders and even Scullys — a malicious trickster ranks above the person they trick.

Which is because for heroes, at least for contemporary Western heroes, being clever is more important than being kind, and being in control of the situation is more important than being good but vulnerable. Being in control means being powerful, and heroes are all about power. That’s what makes them agents who act instead of objects who react, which is what a conventional Western story is all about.

But in real life, there are more important things than being in control.

I don’t like the idea of a student crowing to their friends about how gullible their prof was. I don’t like to think of my colleagues or friends rolling their eyes behind my back. That hits me in the same place being scammed still twinges. But… I really don’t like to think of people who needed my help, people whose well-being in certain areas is my responsibility because of my position and power, suffering because I was too afraid of feeling foolish.

That doesn’t mean that I always allow every request — fool me once, etc. What it does mean is that I remind myself to value compassion and caring over pride and power. It means constantly re-evaluating my boundaries and considering each situation both individually and the context of my previous decisions.

It means doing the best I can with what I have, and, really, what better can any of us do?