An American Hero in Government Openness

Daniel Ellsberg

Seven years and almost 50,000 American deaths later, after I had leaked the Pentagon Papers, I had a conversation with Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, one of the two senators who had voted against the Tonkin Gulf resolution in August 1964. If I had leaked the documents then, he said, the resolution never would have passed.

That was hard to hear. But in 1964 it hadn't occurred to me to break my vow of secrecy. Though I knew that the war was a mistake, my loyalties then were to the secretary of defense and the president. It took five years of war before I recognized the higher loyalty all officials owe to the Constitution, the rule of law, the soldiers in harm's way or their fellow citizens.

For Civil Servants: What would you do in such situations?

Related;
Ellsberg paradox
A most ingenious paradox

Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms;

A discussion of a class of situations in which many reasonable people neither wish nor tend to conform to the Savage postulates of rational behavior. There is no way to infer meaningful probabilities for events, even approximately or qualitatively, from their choices in these situations, nor can they be described as acting as if they were maximizing the mathematical expectation of utility, in terms of any probabilities whatever. None of the familiar criteria for predicting or prescribing decisionmaking under uncertainty corresponds to this pattern of choices. Yet the behavior is deliberate and orderly, and it can be described in terms of a simple, specified decision rule. Such self-consistent behavior violating the Savage axioms seems to occur in situations that can be described as highly ambiguous. In reaching a decision under these circumstances, many people seem to act conservatively. Without actually expecting the worst, they choose to act as if the worst outcomes were somewhat more likely than their best estimates of likelihood would indicate.