Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Articles

Uncertainty and Public Policy

Richard Taylor tells us why public policies always go wrong…

Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, to my layman’s understanding, says that the position and momentum of a particle, such as an electron, can never both be known with complete accuracy at the same instant, because any attempt to ascertain either one necessarily alters the other. In short, the observation itself changes what is observed.

Something like this occurs also in the area of social policy. That is, the attempt to solve some social problem renders the problem itself unsolvable as it stands, simply because the solution becomes itself among the conditions that gave rise to the problem in the first place. Public policies are thus inherently flawed.

…