Being Right For The Wrong Reasons is Still Being Wrong.

Why moral intuitions deserve better arguments

(Audio version here)

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We humans are the possessors of powerful prefrontal cortexes which enable us to reason. We have a powerful drive to reason verbally. However, we are also emotionally-driven animals who tend to use that reasoning ability to rationalise whatever it is we feel, believe or want to believe. This is often referred to as ‘motivated reasoning.’ So automatic is this that we are frequently unaware that we are doing it and inclined to believe that we have reached our conclusions via objective reasoning based on evidence and principle.

This is why it is so valuable to have clearly thought through first principles and test our reasoning against them. Engage in thought experiments that put one’s ethical arguments in different contexts and relate it to different scenarios. Does it still work? If not and you find yourself scrabbling to bring in more tangential reasoning in order to scaffold your conclusion, you are likely to be trying to rationalise a moral intuition rather than operating on consistently held reasoned principles. We all do this. It is how our brains work. Nevertheless, this is the time to stop and think about what your moral intuitions are really telling you and on what grounds.

I recently had a cluster of conversations that exemplified this. The topic was about the requirements of migrants and it went like this:

“People who move to the UK should learn to speak English.”

Me: “I agree. Do you also believe that Brits who move to somewhere like Spain should learn to speak Spanish?”

“That’s different. Brits who move to Spain pay taxes.” (We have now switched from cultural factors to economic ones to scaffold the first claim)

Me: “Do you believe that people who move to the UK should learn English unless they pay taxes in which case they don’t need to?’

“The Spanish encourage Brits to move there. They welcome them! There is no comparable clash of culture!” (We have switched back to cultural factors but a different one to scaffold the first claim)

Me: “Not all the Spanish do. There’s a movement which objects on the grounds that it makes housing unaffordable for Spaniards and impacts Spanish culture.”

“The government supports it and makes it easy for Brits to move there!” (We’ve now moved to governmental policy)

Me: “Do you believe that people moving to the UK should speak English unless the government supports migration and makes it easy?”

“The government is not listening to the people! Nobody voted for mass migration! UK culture is compatible with Spanish culture! Expats are not forming criminal gangs and grooming gangs!” (We’ve now moved to very serious criminal subcultural issues and well away from language skills)

Me: “Do you believe that speaking English prevents people from committing violent and sexual crime?”

………

What is happening here is a kind of leaping about from argument to argument to try to bolster an original claim which is based not on a consistent principle but a moral intuition. Each time a principle fails, it is quietly replaced with another—cultural, economic, legal, criminal—without acknowledging that the original claim has collapsed. People frequently use this kind of ‘patchwork’ approach when their reasoning hits up against a flaw, as though we feel we can patch up holes in one argument by bringing in elements of another argument. The result is patchy, incoherent reasoning.

These conversations broke down with claims that I was the one missing the point. I was also suspected of believing in open borders and the acceptance of massive numbers of migrants who not only don’t speak English but are also antagonistic to Britain, commit violent and sexual crime, take up social housing and claim large amounts of benefits. People felt that I was missing their point because their point was something they were feeling, but not actually saying. They assumed that I must feel differently to them because I was questioning their reasoning. This was not the case. I too think that it is important for people moving here to speak English, get jobs and contribute and integrate into the existing culture and that we should have policies that consider cultural compatibility carefully and have zero tolerance for criminal behaviour. All of the issues raised were valid but the reasoning was incoherent when it did not need to be so. It was too easily picked apart and gets in the way of discussing real issues.

It matters that our arguments work, not only for convincing people who disagree with us (we all see reasoning flaws in arguments we disagree with much more easily than those we agree with), but also for being clear in our own thinking and understanding what is at the root of our concerns and being able to articulate it. The people above had defensible views but they were responding to how it made them feel when people in England did not speak English.

We do well to interrogate those feelings and write down what is at the root of them. In this case, it could be “I want people in my country to value the culture of my country.” “I am morally opposed to some of the values found in other cultures.” “I object to free-riders.” “My religion/traditions/culture is important to me and I feel it is devalued in relation to those of minority groups.” “I feel frightened when I encounter people whom I cannot understand and whose intentions towards me I cannot read.” “I feel angry and misjudged when my concerns about this are dismissed as racist or xenophobic.” All of these concerns are valid and can form the basis of first principles that can be argued for consistently, but this cannot happen if people reason incoherently and jump about thematically based on feelings of anxiety and moral concern. It not only makes their communications a mess, but their thinking too. This leads them to become ethically inconsistent and slide about depending on the situation and also be at risk of drifting into stances they would formerly have recognised as radical and unethical.

Too often people taking positions based on moral intuitions which they have rationalised after the fact are inclined to assume that people questioning their reasoning oppose their stance. Quite often they do and this is why they are picking holes in the argument. This is not the only reason for addressing sloppy reasoning, though. It is also important to do so when we agree with somebody else’s stance and think it matters. When somebody is arguing badly for a good cause, they are likely to undermine that cause and make it easier to dismantle and dismiss.

Being right for the wrong reasons is still being wrong.

I have repeatedly argued with people who oppose corporal punishment of children and who argue against this on the grounds that it is illegal to strike other adults. This quite clearly does not work, because it is also illegal to take away other adults’ phones or confine them to your home against their will (and the latter would likely result in an even longer prison sentence). Invariably, when I point this out, people respond by assuming I am defending the corporal punishment of children. I also see this as morally wrong, but that argument for why simply does not work. I think we do better to argue that, for example, having a taboo against the use of violence except in cases of self-defence is a valuable social norm that we would do well to uphold consistently and raise our children with. Or that teaching by fear is harmful, or by providing evidence of corporal punishment being counterproductive or resulting inadvertently in serious injury. I believe that attempts to convince other parents of this will work better if we do so along these lines rather than by making bad arguments comparing our responsibilities to our children with our responsibilities to other adults that are easily dismantled on their own terms.

I recently argued against gender critical feminists who claimed that their feelings of disgust were sufficient reason to say that it is morally wrong for men to wear dresses. Given that disgust feelings have also been used as justification for banning homosexuality, mixed race marriages and menstruating women being out in public, this argument does not work. On this occasion, I do not share the moral intuitions of these allegedly gender critical feminists (genuinely ‘gender critical’ people do not believe in sex-specific dress codes), but my reason for pointing out that their argument was flawed was because it was. If they wished to convince me or anybody, they’d need to make an argument that worked. Note that pointing out that disgust is an unreliable moral guide does not mean that there is no utility to moral disgust intuitions. Frequently, our intuitions are making us aware of a danger or threat. We just have to be able to justify those intuitions with a well-reasoned argument.

Today, I encountered, yet again, a claim that people who have ethical objections to the hijab but not to a nun’s wimple are really just rationalising their bigotry. This argument does not work because the objection is not literally to women covering their hair. The two garments have different symbolism reflecting different beliefs. Both can be argued against but not on the same grounds. Objections to the wimple is an objection to a symbol of ‘holy orders’ within the Catholic tradition and is typically an objection to that denomination of Christianity, Christianity or religion more broadly. It is made almost exclusively by non-Catholics. Objections to the hijab is typically an objection to a sex-specific modesty code for Muslim women and coercion of women born into Muslim communities to wear it. It can be an objection to Islam born of anti-Muslim bigotry, but is most commonly criticised by Muslim women. This, therefore, is the fallacy of false equivalence. It typically stems from a well-intentioned moral intuition against criticising a minority religious group comprised of people who are usually also racial minorities, but the argument does not work. It therefore undermines good arguments against anti-Muslim bigotry while throwing Muslim and ex-Muslim feminists and liberals under the bus.

Arguments must work on their own terms. This is not just pedantic nitpicking. It is about both effectiveness in persuasion and our own ethical coherence and consistency. The danger of intuition-based motivated reasoning is that it is both bad reasoning and therefore generally easily dismantled and inconsistent reasoning that prevents us from being truly aware of what we actually believe and why and being consistently principled about it. The moral intuition may well be justified but the way to demonstrate this is by justifying it in well-reasoned argument.

Making bad arguments based on moral intuitions that don’t even work on their own terms is highly counterproductive to one’s aims. We are typically arguing with people who have different moral intuitions and the same capacity for using motivated reasoning in support of them. A battle on these grounds is a battle of narratives where people speak past each other while accusing each other of having bad motivations. The result is that nobody is convinced to change their mind, but they do now feel more antipathy towards their interlocutor and polarisation grows. Using coherent arguments that do work on their own terms while representing the other person’s argument accurately and charitably may not change any minds either, but it has the best chance of doing so, if not immediately, then in later reflection or among observers. Even when positions do not change, people who have entered into good faith disagreement with someone else who is also operating in good faith are likely to have a better understanding of the opposing position and less likely to believe that people who hold it are just evil.

Possibly even more important than convincing other people of our arguments, however, are the benefits of being able to make coherent arguments that use sound reasoning for one’s own self-understanding and ethical consistency. When we function on moral intuitions, vibes and narratives, we may never honestly interrogate our own motivations and principles but simply move arguments and narratives about to fit whatever we feel to be right in any situation.

We frequently hear accusations of ‘hypocrisy’ thrown at those who make good arguments for, say, freedom of speech when it is speech they agree with but suddenly decide that language is violence or that no-platforming is just quality control when it is speech they do not agree with. I do not think people doing this are usually being knowingly hypocritical. I think they are being inconsistent because they have moral intuitions as their basis and are forming arguments around what feels right without having stopped to consider whether this is consistent with their previously stated principles. Again, we all do this and this is why it is much better to assume unintentional inconsistency than moral hypocrisy. (I am certainly much more likely to respond positively to someone pointing out an inconsistency I am not aware of than accusing me of hypocrisy). It is also something we can mitigate ourselves to a certain extent by being aware of it, thinking principles through and caring about ethical consistency. We should make every effort to do that. However, this will always be inadequate without engaging with other people whose moral intuitions lead them in contrary directions and addressing their arguments in good faith. This is how to test our own ideas and change our minds when warranted.

This not only helps us to avoid contradicting previously stated principles and becoming incoherent and vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy. It also enables us to recognise when we are sliding into increasingly radical or extreme views and consider whether this is warranted. This is particularly important right now as we become more polarised and siloed off into echo chambers, and prominent voices within them increasingly fall prey to the pressure of ‘audience capture.’ It is very easy to let one’s principles gradually slide without conscious intent if they are intuitions-based and one does not stop regularly to think them through and ensure they have remained consistent or, if they have changed, that this was a conscious, deliberate change of mind that can be ethically justified.

I often think of this as having a kind of ‘constitution of oneself.’ By regularly asking ourselves what we think is ethically right and why and, ideally, writing this down, we can think through and examine our own principles and make sure we are applying them consistently. The good thing about constitutions is that they can be amended but this does not happen by accident or for temporary convenience. It happens through a conscious process of realising that one’s previous views were wrong or in need of qualifying and having a strong understanding of why a change of mind was warranted and being able to articulate it. This makes for better and more consistent arguments that work on their own terms and better and more consistent habits of thinking. This makes for better public discourse and ultimately a better society.

If we care about effectiveness and ethical consistency and want to play our part in stemming the degradation of public discourse, coherence is not optional. It is the commitment and discipline that enables genuinely intellectually honest and productive discussions to take place across political divides and prevents our values from dissolving into vibes, intuitions and narratives that serve us in the moment.

If we care about our values, we owe them good arguments