You Shouldn't Just Do Things
06 Jul 2025Praise, condemnation, questions, and comments can be sent, as always, via email
I’ve noticed the motto “you can just do things” appearing in assorted forms and from various sources over the past year. A cursory internet search shows a self-help book named for the motto which promises the keys to professional success. The phrase seems to have originated in the tech world, where it serves as a rallying cry for founders to quit their jobs and go build something. The phrase seems to have creeped its way into the political sphere, where it is being used as a rallying cry for the unchecked power of the executive branch. I take just doing things, in this latter context, to mean acting without providing publicly acceptable justification.
Jacob Silverman has an excellent article here which nicely sums up the ways in which the “you can just do things” mantra is slowly eroding the federal government. I will not be rehearsing these ideas here. My focus instead is to make a case for why you shouldn’t just do things when acting from a position of authority. I justify this claim on two grounds: (1) just doing things amounts to exercising authority arbitrarily (2) exercising authority arbitrarily does not promote the common good. I’ll defend each in turn.
_-_The_Marriage_of_George_III_-_RCIN_404353_-_Royal_Collection.jpg)
“The Marriage of George III”, oil painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, circa 1761.
Just Doing Things, Arbitrarily
I have defined “just doing things” in the context of present-day American politics as acting without providing publicly acceptable justification. It is a very short leap from this definition to the conclusion that just doing things, so defined, amounts to exercising authority arbitrarily. Instead of making this leap and moving on, I will defend this definition of just doing things. I will take as granted that the equivocation with “exercising authority arbitrarily” follows from the acceptance of this definition.
Let’s consider a toy example and build from there. Suppose you and I are deciding where to go for lunch. You want to go to the farmer’s market, and claim that the food at the farmer’s market is fresh, affordable, and supports the local community. I want to go to the local pizza joint, and claim that the pizza there whitens your teeth. Let’s further suppose that your claims are well-founded, maybe you read a news report on how food at the farmer’s market is sourced, and my claims are not well founded, I’m just saying whatever will get me pizza.
In some sense we have both provided a justification for our preferred lunch spot. We’ve both offered some sort of claim which could support making our respective choices. Your justification, however, is much better than mine. Your claims can be backed up by publicly available evidence, using generally accepted standards of discourse. My claims are just made up as I go along, I’m saying whatever I need to so that I can get the thing I ultimately want. Your justification is better because it is more epistemically sound and widely available to be understood by the general public.
Your claims are publicly acceptable justification, while mine are not. You can give your claims as justification to anyone who accepts standard rules of evidence and argumentation and reasonably persuade them towards your position. My claims are not acceptable under standard rules of evidence and argumentation: I have no evidence to back them up, even though I might try to invent it. I’m just making claims as a pretense to get the thing that I want.
The current trend of just doing things in American political life is more like my attempts to get us to eat pizza than your attempts to get us to go to the farmer’s market. Thinly veiled attempts at justification are given, but aren’t publicly acceptable justification. Hispanic people are deported because they have tattoos, so they must be gang members and/or terrorists. The colleges and universities have to be shut down because they are hotbeds of antisemitism. The military parade is to celebrate the founding of the armed forces, not for the president’s birthday, even though they conveniently align. The tariffs are to balance the trade deficit, not to solicit flattery from other heads of state.
These justifications come across as post-hoc rationalizing of what seems to be the arbitrary whims of the president. He might have a reason, he might not, it doesn’t really matter because he’s in charge and stacked the deck with loyalists who will flood the channels with rhetoric and spin. Publicly acceptable justification does not come in the form of brow-beating, of accusations of bias and slander, of endless framing and denials and dogmatic adherence to the party line. Publicly acceptable justification comes, most often, in the form of boring, dispassionate, carefully reasoned appeals to some sort of shared factual reality.
In the absence of publicly acceptable justification, we have leaders who can act on their own whims, unaccountable to the forums of public debate. This creates a gap between the people and their government. Leaders, in such a society, don’t have to act in accordance with the will of the people, instead they can just do things, they can act arbitrarily, without any need to explain or justify.
“The State Opening of Parliament with Queen Victoria”, painting by Joseph Nash, circa 1851.
Arbitrary Action and the Common Good
You might be reading this post thinking, so what? Who cares? I like the things the president is doing and so he should do whatever he wants, about time this country changed something. I can sympathize. If there was someone in office doing all the things I want done and tearing through any and all red tape to do so I probably wouldn’t be as interested in EU immigration laws as I currently am.
One of the problems with democracy is that the tyranny of the majority can be as much of a threat as tyranny of the one. We don’t necessarily have a reason to think that the rule of the people will be more effective than the rule of the one. The people could vote for irresponsible, short-sighted policies just the same as a tyrant could single-handedly enact them.
Public reason, some shared set of standards governing how we make arguments and dispute normative and positive facts, is useful for checking whether or not policies, laws, and other proceedings of government are, in fact, short sighted and irresponsible, regardless of who is in charge. When we lose public reason, when leaders can act arbitrarily without providing any justification, then it becomes that much harder to verify whether the actions the government is taking are in fact working towards the common good.
The forum of public reason, in which leaders are held accountable not just to the people but to truth, ensures the government’s actions are well-founded in some kind of factual reality, and that the claimed effects of an action are also the true effects of an action. Suppose, for example, that the government claims that a new tax bill will help the middle class through trickle-down effects. The bill raises taxes on low and middle income earners, while lowering taxes on the highest income earners. With a robust process for public reason to hold government accountable, it could easily be demonstrated that the new tax bill would certainly hurt the middle class, rather than help it. Leaders could be influenced to change course.
Underlying all of this, of course, is the idea that people should participate in their own governance. This is becoming a less and less popular idea by the day. Neo-monarchists are on the rise and slowly gaining a more mainstream intellectual foothold. Now, I’ve called myself an elitist on this blog before. I’ve shamed people for not reading books with a high enough Lexile score. I’ve even sympathized with Aristotle’s Politics. Despite all that, I don’t think that people should be cut off from the process of government.
I do think that there are some kind of objective standards by which one’s life should be judged. Permissive standards, but standards nonetheless. I don’t think, however, that it is the government’s job to unilaterally force those standards onto people. Perhaps it is the job of government to subsidize the things that are ultimately valuable by those standards. Things like public recreational facilities, a robust public education program, museums, and cultural centers all require public support to thrive since they don’t naturally lend themselves to generating profit. They are all also plausibly valuable.
People should be able to voice their concerns with the values that the government promotes. They should be able to, in good faith, demand an explanation from the government and scrutinize the arguments and evidence provided. If not because they have a natural right to such treatment, then at least because it will be more more effective at promoting the best things in life than arbitrary, unaccountable decrees.
Furthermore, it’s really hard to know what the objective standards of a good life are. There have been substantive ethical debates on the nature of the good life since the dawn of Western philosophy. The standards that the ruling party thinks are right might be wrong. Requiring public justification helps to ensure the wrong standards, the standards that lack rigorous justification, are caught before they can do real damage to people.
In the end it seems I’ve come much closer to Rawls than I ever thought I would. Just doing things amounts to acting arbitrarily, and acting arbitrarily is contrary to the common good. Leaders who can act without being held accountable to public reason are in serious danger of doing real harm to the people they lead. Maybe it’s a good idea to drop out of school and start building a startup. But the same cavalier attitude isn’t conducive to good governance.
If you liked this post, please let me know! If not, also let me know! Thanks for reading!