I’m doing good work in my government job. Should I quit anyway?

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a new framework for thinking through your ethical dilemmas and philosophical questions. To submit a question, email Sigal at sigal.samuel@vox.com or fill out this anonymous form. Either way, if we choose your question, it’ll be anonymized. Here’s this week’s question, condensed and edited for clarity: I work for the federal government in a policy role. I took the job before President Trump won the election and I didn’t expect that he would triumph. Since he’s come into power, I’ve been wrestling with the question of whether to quit or stay. I strongly disagree with this administration’s politics and don’t want to be complicit in them. But I think I’m doing good and valuable work in my particular lane — work that could improve things for people in this country and abroad. How do you decide whether to participate in an admin you disagree with or whether to walk away in protest? Dear Concerned About Complicity, Why did you choose this career to begin with? It sounds like it was because you — like lots of other people who go into government — sincerely care about doing good. So let’s use that as our lodestar here. If your goal is to do good, the most obvious potential reason to stay in your job is that you believe it still gives you a unique opportunity to do just that. Even though you disagree with this administration’s politics, it’s possible that you can still do more good by staying put than you could do by leaving government and avoiding the taint of politics. There are a number of ways that could be true. One is if your particular role is relatively removed from the administration’s more controversial moves: if you work for the Environmental Protection Agency, say, not the Justice Department. Another is if you believe you can create positive impact from within — for example, by making the case for better policies at critical moments — in a way that wouldn’t happen if you resigned and got replaced. And then there’s the simple fact that, well, this is how the system of liberal democracy works. When a president is democratically elected, it’s the job of government employees to heed the president’s decisions, and not just the ones they personally agree with. There are really good reasons to want to uphold that system. One of liberal democracy’s great defenders, the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, argued in his essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” that human values are inherently diverse, sometimes incompatible, and impossible to rank on a single scale. That means no single political arrangement can satisfy all legitimate human values simultaneously. So, he reasoned, we need to embrace political pluralism and respect competing perspectives. However. All of the above assumes that staying in your job would allow you to achieve the overarching goal. Remember, that goal is to do good. --- Have a question you want me to answer in the next Your Mileage May Vary column? Feel free to email me at sigal.samuel@vox.com or fill out this anonymous form! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does and their questions will be prioritized for future editions. Sign up here! --- So, what if you find that you cannot actually create any positive impact from within? What if your arguments are suppressed at every turn? What if there’s so much intimidation that it leaves you both powerless and traumatized? What if you are pressured to do harm? For that matter, what if your boss tells you to carry out a policy that’s actually illegal? What if the administration, despite being elected through the machinery of democracy, goes on to hack away at democracy itself — the system you’re committed to upholding? Well, then, Hannah Arendt might have a thing or two to say to you. Arendt, a German-Jewish philosopher known for her post-Holocaust theorizing on the banality of evil, published a short essay in 1964 called “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship.” Writing from firsthand experience (she lived in Germany during the rise of Nazism until fleeing in 1933), she notes that a lot of Germans who collaborated with the Nazis later said they’d “stayed on the job in order to prevent worse things from happening; only those who remained inside had a chance to mitigate things and to help at least some people … whereas those who did nothing shirked all responsibilities and thought only of themselves, of the salvation of their precious souls.” Arendt is not impressed by this argument. She cautions against people’s tendency to convince themselves that, if they continue to serve power, they’ll be doing more good on net — or choosing the lesser of two evils: > Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil … Moreover, if we look at the techniques of totalitarian government, it is obvious that the argument of “the lesser evil” — far from being raised only from the outside by those who do not belong to the ruling elite — is one of the mechanisms built into the machinery of terror and criminality. Acceptance of lesser evils is consciously used in conditioning the government officials as well as the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such. Arendt’s point is that if you choose the “acceptance of lesser evils” route, you’re playing a game in which the deck is stacked against you. You’re incentivized to stay, because quitting can be socially, professionally, or financially ruinous, and bit by bit — like the frog in the boiling pot — you can become acclimated to worse and worse policies. “The extermination of Jews,” Arendt writes, “was preceded by a very gradual sequence of anti-Jewish measures, each of which was accepted with the argument that refusal to cooperate would make things worse — until a stage was reached where nothing worse could possibly have happened.” So, if you’re going to play this game, you need a way to make sure that you won’t fall into the traps. You might think the best way to do this is to get very clear on your own personal rules — to establish in advance, ideally in writing, at what point you’ll just say, “I’m out.” There’s some merit to that idea, because the mind has a way of shifting the goalposts as things progress, saying, “But that’s not really so bad, right? I’ll wait just a little bit more…” The law can be a useful heuristic device here — you want to keep following it, even if people start pressuring you to do something illegal. Moral rules can also be a powerful heuristic device — think “thou shalt not kill,” for starters. But Arendt emphasizes that legality and morality can fall short in extreme political situations. That’s because the illegal can become legalized overnight. The whole state machinery can start enforcing what were previously considered crimes, and moral norms can be changed along with them. The public can be swayed into accepting the new reality. So how do you safeguard your integrity? Arendt observes that what was special about those who refused to collaborate with the Nazis wasn’t that classic rules about right and wrong were firmly established in their conscience, but that their conscience didn’t work by automatically applying any pre-learned rules. She writes: > Much more reliable will be the doubters and skeptics, not because skepticism is good or doubting wholesome, but because they are used to examine things and to make up their own minds. In other words, it’s about daring to think and judge for yourself at every turn. It’s about continuing to ask yourself tough questions. Arendt had a great hack for achieving this: She surrounded herself with people she disagreed with, both in the legendary cocktail-fueled salons she hosted and in her one-on-one friendships. She and her friends challenged and sharpened each other’s thoughts through intellectual debate. Though it was sometimes painful, Arendt insisted that this type of friendship has a radical political power: It teaches you the all-important skill of thinking. So, over the coming weeks, keep your eyes trained on what the administration does. Each week, return to your lodestar and ask yourself anew: What would my challengers say to me now? Are there concrete indications that I’m succeeding in my overarching goal? Am I still doing good here? Bonus: What I’m reading * Over the past week, I’ve become completely obsessed with the novel Babel by R.F. Kuang. It imagines an alternative history where Oxford scholars use the power of translation to expand the British empire — and their students launch an anti-colonialist secret society to bring the empire down. It raises questions about complicity in an unusually thoughtful and totally un-put-down-able way. * In Foreign Affairs, two democracy experts make this prediction: “US democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for liberal democracy,” they write. “What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism — a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition.” * The biologist Michael Levin is a proponent of panpsychism, the idea that everything — from plants to cells to atoms — has consciousness. He’s got a new piece out in Noema Magazine with this fantastic headline: “Living Things Are Not Machines (Also, They Totally Are).” He writes that almost everyone thinks there’s some secret sauce that separates life from mere machines, but when pressed, nobody can articulate what it is. What if there’s actually no clear, bright line? This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.

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I’m doing good work in my government job. Should I quit anyway?