are bad people incompetent?

I finished reading Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. It’s a monster of a book—over 1300 pages, 66 audiobook hours—and, while I never would have started the book if he had been longer than that, now that I know how good it is, I would read a book twice as long with more time talking about more of his projects.

Robert Moses is incredibly captivating, despite being remarkably straightforward in his motivations. As Caro presents him, he’s motivated by achievement, by shaping New York in the way that he sees as best. He builds highways where he wants them, makes public parks and beaches where he sees them as best, destroys neighborhoods and nature and beauty, and creates and preserves nature and beauty. Maybe it’s Caro’s brilliance in simplifying a life into a clear motivation, or maybe Moses really was so straightforward. But he’s also a narcissistic, petty bully who disregards any opinion that isn’t his own, however good. Caro illustrates cases where he makes things hard on himself by not listening to anyone else, but it’s also clear that, on balance, he did as much as he did precisely by moving forward, whatever anyone else’s views.

I found myself wondering over and over in this book what a less narcissistic Moses would have been like, one who wasn’t so resistant to negative feedback, who solicited, or even just cared about, input from the people. He would have done less, there’s no question, and I wonder if, on balance, the people of New York would have been better off for it. Old, thriving neighborhoods wouldn’t have been destroyed, and some highways would be in better places, maybe making room for more beaches or parks. But democracy also would have stopped him from doing lots of things that it turns out were better in the long run even if the people were opposed at the time, and the people of New York—at least the ones who didn’t have to move away—probably came to value the changes once they were done.

I wish I had the expertise to teach a course on the book so I could talk it all through. But one reason that I’m interested in Moses is that I have this vague thought that bad people are, as a general rule, incompetent. And I wonder if the subject of this book is a counterexample to that, or if his incredible competence is a sign that he wasn’t bad but just had moral blindspots. (For example, Caro makes the case that he’s clearly racist. Someone with his views today would be a bad person; for someone in 1930, it’s a little more complicated.)

For four presidential years, I heard people (including myself) say something like, “Can you imagine what would happen if he were competent?” What we were imagining is that all the arrogance, misguided beliefs, narcissism and callous disregard for others, intentional cruelty or at least serious negligence that we saw would be that much worse if they were wielded by someone who didn’t also self-sabotage and who could implement his plans effectively.

What does it mean to be bad, even evil? To generalize, being bad is a combination of not caring about others while pursuing one’s own self-centered goals. Both parts of that seem necessary. A depressed person might not care about others, but they also don’t care about themselves; they’re not evil. A single-minded, nascent do-gooder has seemingly good goals, not self-centered ones, so they aren’t evil even if they do bad things along the way by not caring about others; at worst, they’re misguided, bad people, not evil. (Whether a person is bad or evil probably depends on their intentions: destroying lives while trying to get rich is bad; trying to destroy lives in order to “win” over others to demonstrate one’s dominance is probably also evil.)

History does seem to have genuinely evil, genuinely effective people. Those people mostly ended up making history, though, because they had a group of people surrounding them who were (also?) competent, so maybe the famously evil people were more charismatic than competent. But that shifts the question to the henchmen: were the henchmen both competent and bad? In a big enough bureaucracy, the decisions and actions are widely distributed so that the bad people don’t have to be competent and the competent people don’t have to be bad. But can this explain every case? At some point, I have to assume there are some bad people doing competent things. And yet, despite that, I still suspect that there’s a strong connection—not a perfect correlation, but some connection—between being bad, even being evil, and being incompetent.

The reason I’m skeptical about how competent a bad person can be is that being competent means something like paying attention to the issues that are relevant to your decisions. A competent person might sometimes forget or overlook things, but they generally notice and pay attention to the things that are relevant, that matter, for what they’re doing. A bad person is someone who systematically doesn’t pay attention to other people, especially when he’s pursuing his own goals; or, if he’s genuinely evil, he does pay attention to others but pays attention to them for the wrong reasons, like someone who wants to understand his acquaintances to be able to take advantage of them.

So the reason to wonder whether being competent and being a bad person are incompatible is that the very thing that makes a person competent is the thing that makes them notice and respond to the needs of others, which is what a bad person is lacking.

The exception to this would be the person who competently pays attention to all the right things, but doesn’t weigh them correctly in making decisions. The evil person does this, because they care about people’s vulnerabilities as a way to exploit them, for example, but there’s a less evil version as well: the misguided or deluded competent person. The racist in 1930 is someone who might generally pay attention to the right things, but he is mistaken in the stereotypes he holds, so he makes decisions that are competent only on some very mistaken assumptions. Moses, for example, thought that the people living in Harlem wouldn’t appreciate parks. That’s obviously bad and seems incompetent because it’s the kind of thing that he easily could have been figured out by asking people—or, for that matter, by not making the assumption that the people living in Harlem whom he knew only by reputation were fundamentally different from the people living elsewhere whom he knew more directly.

But you can also imagine someone holding that biased belief because they’ve been reliably (and incorrectly) informed about what “those people” are like, and they don’t have the background and environment to realize that acting on this false belief is a place where they’re not being competent. I’d have to say more about this case, or any case that’s similar, but being mistaken about something that you could be forgiven for being mistaken about is certainly one way to be both bad and competent.

Even that, though, seems limited in real world cases. Most white Americans in the 1930s probably shared some mistaken racial stereotypes, but many were self-aware and self-critical. I don’t have strong opinions on how widely we apply the word “racist,” but it’s important to think about why some people who believed in racial stereotypes don’t strike us as particularly bad, even if they strike us as misguided. Being competent—paying attention to the right things, and therefore having doubts about some of one’s own beliefs, or even acting against those beliefs in the way that Huck Finn did when he didn’t turn over Jim as a runaway slave despite Huck’s explicitly racist beliefs—might even make a difference to how self-aware and self-critical one was when it came to noticing the needs of others.

That’s my thought, anyway. If you’re bad, you’re probably going to have a hard time being competent, and if you’re competent, then it’s going to be harder for you to be bad. Underlying it is my view that good reasoning and clear thinking are what lead a person to be moral, and obviously those also lead a person to be competent. The exceptions are interesting, and I’m especially interested in thinking about whether a bad person can make themselves more competent without also making themselves a better person. I can picture such a person, whereas it’s harder for me to picture a competent person becoming worse: Moses would seem to have been one of those people, but, without knowing more than what Caro presented in his book, I would guess that his story is better described as someone whose worse traits were exaggerated as he got more power, someone whose effects on others also became worse, but not someone who became worse.

All that said, there are many ways to be incompetent, and I’m not sure that all the ways of being incompetent will lead to being bad. But thinking about the ways to be incompetent will have to wait.