John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, had three simple rules: Do no harm. Do more good. Stay in Love with God.

That compares to his superior, Jesus Christ, who said the most important things are 1) to love your God, and 2) to love your neighbor.

So from John Wesley’s perspective, loving your neighbor is DOING good and NOT DOING harm.

“Do no harm” originated long before John Wesley. The Latin phrase: Primum non nocere – first, do no harm, likely originated with Hippocrates (470-360 B.C.). The Hippocratic Oath contains a version that states: “I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm”. “

Though the idea of doing no harm is sensible, it is not practical. That’s likely why there is no Biblical Reference. If God had commanded to “Do no harm”, people would have stopped helping each other altogether, as most of us understand that in order to do good, some harm may need to be done.

That’s why the medical establishment and the Hippocratic Oath have abandoned the idea of “doing no harm”. Now it’s “abstain from intentional wrong doing”.

Consider chemotherapy to treat cancer. It definitely does harm to the person as it attempts to wipe out the disease. In many cases, it doesn’t work. The result is that the last months or years of a person’s life are miserable.

But the chances of a longer, better life are worth the harm for many as they carefully weigh the decision.

But when we think about “doing good”, it is best to consider both the good that is being done as well as the harm that can come from doing the good. If the net result – good minus the harm – is “good” than the deed is “net good”.

Even though not always practical, primum non nocere still has important application for decision making. When doing what we perceive as good, we should consider the impact of our decisions and actions. Good decisions consider first, second and third order consequences.

To consider the consequences of your actions requires activation of the Frontal Cortex – the Reasoning part of the brain. You lay out the problem to be solved and consider the what ifs.

The Emotional and Primitive parts of our brain are more than happy to make a quick decision on what to do with no cognitive thinking whatsoever. But emotions such as anger, guilt, sadness, and anxiety can drive us to react in a less than optimum way.

Many decisions to do good come from the emotional part of the brain. We feel bad for someone, so we act first and rationalize later.

This is not good decision-making.

Poor decisions to “do good” are made all the time at all levels: personal, family, business, politics. We’re human, so emotional situations can trigger emotions to act irrationally.

One of my favorite examples of bad decision-making is the Rent Moratorium during the Pandemic.

State Governments such as New York prevented landlords from evicting tenants that were not paying. Even though the Federal government handed out money by the trillions, landlords were told that tenants did not have to pay per their written contract – their lease agreement. The NYS Governor, through emergency powers that were granted him, forced landlords to serve tenants with no compensation.

This was great news to those renters that love to hate on landlords. With victim mentality in hand, they blamed the one person providing them with the most basic need – shelter – for all their problems. Read the emotion in this popular meme:

The long term consequences of the Rent Moratorium were disastrous:

• Many small landlords were destroyed in the process. They ended up selling their units.
• Large Corporations like Blackrock swooped in and bought up units for pennies on a dollar.
• Rents FOR EVERYONE went sky-high.
• Inflation went crazy.
• Landlords today, particularly large corporate ones, are much less likely to rent to someone with questionable credit.
• Eventually, the Moratorium ended and the bad tenants were evicted.

To my point, I found the above meme on a FB page of someone that is very educated and intelligent. Where they lack is in emotional intelligence – or the rational ability to control their emotions.

The Rent Moratorium was an emotional decision that was intended to help some people at the clear expense of others. Primum non nocere was not a consideration, as it was known from the start that landlords would suffer. It was the emotional demonization of landlords that led to a very bad decision.

How do I know this? It’s because some of the trillions of dollars given away could have – and should have – been directed to paying people’s rents during the pandemic. Instead, we forced people to stay home, separated from family and friends, and handed them a bunch of money to spend as they wished.

Is there any wonder the pandemic was replaced with epidemics of mental health and drug use?

Second and third order consequences due to the reaction to the pandemic by our government are popping up everywhere. The biggest negative effect we are feeling is from INFLATION. Who knew printing trillions and giving it away would cause uncontrollable inflation? Actually, a lot of people.

Once again, emotional decisions made with little consideration of “Do no harm”.

Where the doing of harm cannot always be eliminated, minimizing the damage can be achieved by minimizing the harm. The Federal Reserve is faced with a decision today to either 1) keep tightening policy through interest rate hikes and risk a recession OR 2) let inflation run. Currently, they have chosen the “harm” of a recession, because if inflation is allowed to run, it would devastate those on fixed incomes and many generations to come.

This is a calculated decision based on data – unlike the emotional decision preceding it to dump trillions onto the American people. Unfortunately, harm will be done either way. The goal is to minimize it.

As the recession descends upon us, what happens when

• people lose their jobs and can’t afford their debt, car and mortgage payments
• the government’s debt service payments skyrockets as a result of rising interest rates and it eats up the entire budget
• people can’t afford to buy a house due to high interest rates
• inflation doesn’t come down as expected
• corporations go bankrupt because they can’t stay afloat without cheap money

Will we be able to stay the course to minimize harm or will we go back into full panic mode and make emotional, money-printing decisions that will further harm us in terrible ways.

We will see.

Pro/Con List

I see smart, intelligent people make poor, emotional decisions all the time. I blog about it here.

When most of us make an important decisions, we use a Pro/Con list. We do them in our head, on a piece of paper or – best of all – on a spreadsheet.

Consider the “Cons” as those things that can do harm.

Below, I did a Pro/Con for the Rent Moratorium decision.

So yes, as a landlord I have a bias. But from where I sit, it was one of the worst political decisions ever made.

Where the most important thing immediately was keeping people in their homes, the results of the decision did harm to ALL tenants in the longer term. The decision 1) encouraged drug abuse 2) raised rents for everyone 3) fueled inflation 4) discourages landlords from taking a chance on tenants 5) put many tenants in deep debt.

Conclusion

Most important decisions come with some potential harm. It’s one thing to live your life making all your personal choices based on emotions. It’s quite another when you are making decisions to help others and don’t consider consequences and actually hurt people.

Ron