Shelving Hard Decisions Is the Least Ethical Course

In September 1951 Dr B. R. Ambedkar resigned as the Union law minister because the Hindu Code Bill, which sought to give Hindu women rights of divorce and inheritance, had been put aside. It had not been defeated. It had been allowed to wait, session after session, until the minister who drafted it concluded that he was no longer serving a purpose. The substance of the bill was later passed in separate pieces in the middle of the decade, and a generation of women lived in the interval under the old rules. No one in government had voted against them. The decision was made by not making one, and the cost fell on the people who had least power to protest it.

Philosophers have long insisted that such omissions count. Jean Paul Sartre argued that people are condemned to be free and that choosing not to choose is itself a choice, made with the same responsibility as any other. Max Weber distinguished the ethic of conviction, which asks whether an act is pure, from the ethic of responsibility, which asks what follows from it. A politician who shelves a decision to keep his hands clean has chosen conviction over responsibility. The Bhagavad Gita makes the same point in its own setting. When Arjuna collapses at Kurukshetra and refuses to act, Krishna tells him that no one can remain even for a moment without action, which is to say that refusal is also something that is done.

The practical cost of delay is easy to see in public life. Over five crore cases are pending in courts across India, and many of those who wait are undertrial prisoners who have been held for longer than they might have served if convicted. Gladstone's maxim that justice delayed is justice denied describes a decision that has been made by the calendar and not by any judge. In climate policy, the three decades since the Rio summit of 1992 have been a long record of agreed intentions and postponed obligations, each year of delay raising the cost of the cuts that will eventually be needed. In every such case the lesson is the same. Every postponement is a decision made in favour of whoever benefits from the present arrangement.

Every postponement is a decision made in favour of whoever benefits from the present arrangement.

Moral psychology explains why shelving is so tempting. Experiments by Ilana Ritov and Jonathan Baron in 1990 found that people often prefer to risk a larger harm that comes from doing nothing than to accept a smaller harm that comes from acting. In their study, parents hesitated to vaccinate a child against a disease even when told that the vaccine's risk was lower than the disease's. This omission bias means that the harm of inaction feels like fate, while the harm of action feels like guilt. A leader who postpones is rarely blamed for the injury that follows, and so every institution that punishes errors of commission more than errors of omission trains its officials to wait.

The principle is old in Indian political thought as well. Kautilya's advice to the king was that petitioners should not be made to wait at the door and that urgent matters should be heard at once, because a ruler who delays is, in effect, deciding against the weakest of those who come to him. The Hindu Code Bill showed what follows when such advice is ignored, since the people who bore the cost of the government's caution were the women whose rights the code would have secured.

A reasonable critic will say that delay is sometimes wise, and that a state which decides everything at once decides badly. The framers of the Constitution deferred the question of a uniform civil code by placing it among the Directive Principles in Article 44, and few would say that they should have forced a settlement in 1950. Courts sometimes decline to decide a case, a restraint that the American scholar Alexander Bickel called a passive virtue, because a premature ruling can split a society. Evidence may be missing, consensus may be unripe and a hasty choice may do more damage than a pause. These are real considerations, and a rule that condemned all delay would produce rash and brittle decisions.

The objection helps to refine the principle. The difference lies between a deferral and a shelving. A deferral is made openly, with reasons, a date for review and an owner who is accountable for the outcome. A shelving is a decision disguised as a non decision, with no reason given, no date set and no one responsible. The first is a way of deciding well, and the second is a way of avoiding blame. The test is simple to state. Ask who decided to wait, for how long, with what justification and on whose behalf. If no one can answer, the delay is not prudence but abdication.

Leadership traditions have tried to build this test into institutions. Harry Truman kept a sign on his desk that read the buck stops here, and the phrase has since become a standard for the executive. Statutory deadlines, time bound inquiries and requirements to record reasons for delay are administrative versions of the same idea. They make the decision to wait visible and attach a name to it, so that officials who would once have let a file gather dust must now explain why it has not moved. What they cannot do is make the underlying choice easier, because the hardest decisions are hard precisely because every option harms someone.

That fact is the deepest difficulty in the topic. If every option causes harm, then deciding means choosing who will be hurt, and shelving can look less like cowardice than like a refusal to make that choice on behalf of others. The shelver may see the weight of the dilemma more clearly than the one who hurries to resolve it. It remains unclear whether the person who waits is a coward or the only one honest about the cost, and the people who are waiting have no means of telling which.