Reason and the Side of Caution

A due recognition of the function of reason should be an enormous help to us all in days when the air is full of fallacies, and when our personal modesty, that becoming respect for other people which is proper to well-ordered natures whether young or old, makes us willing to accept conclusions duly supported by public opinion or by those whose opinions we value. Nevertheless, it is something to recognise that probably no wrong thing has ever been done or said, no crime committed, but has been justified to the perpetrator by arguments coming to him involuntarily and produced with cumulative force by his own reason.
Charlotte Mason, volume 6, page 143

"Now, I understand why Felt wanted to stop Watergate. In my memoirs
... titled THE GOOD LIFE, I recall those moments in the White House when now I realize I should have acted to stop the spreading scandal. One night, when, in my presence, Nixon ordered Halderman to get a team in place to do break-ins, I should have stood up and said, "No, Mr. President, you can't do that." But I rationalized that there was a war going on, friends of mine were POWs, and the Cold War was hanging in the balance. Maybe the president was right; we had to take extreme steps to protect the country. And getting Richard Nixon re-elected was, as I saw it then, the most important thing I could do for my country.

What I now realize today, of course, is that we humans all have an infinite capacity for self-justification. Jeremiah was right: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: Who can know it?'"
~ Chuck Colson, Breakpoint, 'The Return of Watergate'

Over and over when you read about CPS cases unnecessarily removing children from their homes, they defend their actions (or other people do it for them) by saying, 'We must err on the side of caution,' or 'on the side of safety,' or even, most egregiously, 'on the side of the children,' making it sound like the children are being sent to summer camp instead of, from their point of view, kidnapped and held against their will in something called foster care.

How did we reach the point where we thought the effects of being yanked from a loving, affectionate, familiar home against your will and placed with strangers with no communication permitted with your parents were so negligible that this was 'erring on the side of caution?' Certainly, there are times when this is absolutely necessary. But it's never 'erring on the side of caution.' It is a decision that one certain trauma is better than another possible or suspected trauma. It is sometimes the correct judgment, but so long as state officials and the public view it as a benign, unproblematic, action free of negative repercussions for the children, it will be taken far too often when it should not be.

Human beings rationalize about an extremely emotional topic. Nobody wants to see children abused, so we justify any means to stop potential abuse, even when the means we take can also be abusive and cause exactly the trauma we claim to wish to stop.

Calling it 'erring on the side of caution' makes us feel better about the terror we are inflicting on children in order to rescue them. And, again, sometimes that is what must happen. But we shouldn't tell ourselves fairy tales about it to make us feel better.