Protecting and Permitting Are Not the Same Verb

The two impulses are often described as a balance, but they operate on different timescales and different evidence.

It is conventional to describe the situation as a balance between protecting and permitting, as though the two sat on a single beam and could be adjusted against one another. The metaphor flatters the problem. Protection operates on short timescales and specific hazards; it can be reasoned about concretely, and its success is observable in the negative, as the absence of an event. Permission operates on long timescales and unspecific outcomes; its benefits arrive years later, cannot be traced to any particular instance, and are never observable as such. These are not two ends of one scale. They are different kinds of claim, evaluated by different methods.

Because they are different kinds of claim, they are not commensurable, and the appearance of balance is produced by quietly ignoring one side of the comparison. In practice the concrete claim wins, not because it is stronger but because it is legible, and legibility is what survives an argument. This is a general feature of decision making under scrutiny: the legible consideration displaces the diffuse one, and does so more thoroughly the more the decision is observed by others. Increase the observation and you increase the displacement, without changing anyone's underlying view about what matters. The result is a position nobody argued for, arrived at by a route nobody noticed taking.

The useful move here is not to argue for less protection, which would be both foolish and beside the point. It is to notice that the diffuse side of the ledger has no natural advocate, and that if it is to be counted at all it has to be counted deliberately, in advance, and in general terms rather than case by case. Case by case, it will always lose, because case by case it has nothing to show. Whatever the right position is, it will not be found by adding up individual decisions, since the individual decisions are systematically biased in one direction.