As ever, and miraculously, overflowing and comprehensively clear. Thanks Helen.
Choosing a discussion and topic where, in the end, you both basically agree, helps us focus and learn better how to explore implied principles and correct our own or anyone's poor reasoning. Explaining how to reason by clarifying principles is, I think, a rare but most essential core skill for us who follow of #HPLiberalism*. The whole world needs to know: and there's 6000 followers here to help make that happen!*
Other features of liberalism wouldn't work without that core of principled reasoning. We can call for liberal values and free speech; we can bring in the evidence of history or anecdote or thought experiment or research or science or other authorities. But you still don't get far with that without engaged reasoning and principles to unpack it all effectively.
And we see that engaged reasoning takes even more. You need (rare) personal intelligence, skill, time, effort and commitment within the (also rare) context of a particular engaged discussion with others.
Now, we get all that constantly and patiently here from and with you, Helen, even though you've chosen a crazy context where your discussants are potentially billions of others, "the whole world", not just a selection of kindly friends. Hence I say: miraculous.
And, as for * #HPLiberalism, I refer you to my more obscure post on a way we can better promote Helen's overflowings to a world that, we say, so needs this. You'll see that Helen herself isn't persuaded on this one! So I appeal to all Helen's followers to find and use some kind of branding or handle that anyone needs to promote a product. Someone can do better than #HPLiberalism and my rationale for it here:
I will pursue the case for a simple tag or label for the liberalism that Helen explains so brilliantly. We know that. The world needs to know. There has to be a short name for it so it’s not a private game of hunt the thimble to find it. Reluctance may be, like Helen’s, that it’s a process not a thing to be packaged. Here’s my reply to that (from a more obscure corner) :
<< Yes it is a process not a thing. But life is a process too. Everyone knows about life. So a universal word is enough to label it. Many other important specific processes have labels or headings so you can refer to them so that those who don’t know about them can be alerted briefly and search for them. If there’s no tag or heading, the important world-important resource remains only a private interest for those who already know. I say HPLiberalism (or better tag) is too important to hide under a mountain of words. >>
PS I didn't mean there's anything wrong with Helen's "mountain of words". Quite the contrary: I think they're so wonderful and important that there should be signposts to help people tell others about it and to find them. Similarly, I am not suggesting any change in the name of that mountain. The mountain is called "liberalism".
Clarity and principled reasoning matter. But a common failure mode in argument is reducing complex, system-level phenomena to single variables in a way that preserves local logic while obscuring global truth.
Many social problems are not made of independently testable parts. They have emergent properties shaped by interaction, scale, timing, and context, and those properties can vanish when you isolate the parts. The French idea of a “bouquet of evidence” captures this. No single element is decisive, yet the pattern formed by many weak signals can be persuasive when seen together. Some truths are only visible at the right distance.
That is why dismantling a view one variable at a time can miss the target. A system-level intuition can be directionally correct even if no component, on its own, proves the conclusion.
This is what happens in arguments about English-speaking immigrants. The claim “people who move to the UK should learn English” is treated as a single-variable proposition, tested by forcing the speaker to justify it with one stable principle. But the concern is rarely just language. Language is a proxy for a broader pattern involving integration, scale, social cohesion, institutional capacity, consent, and second-order effects.
So when the justification shifts from culture to economics to consent to crime, that is not necessarily incoherence. It is a clumsy attempt to defend a holistic judgment using isolated supports. Your questioning then forces the speaker to defend the bouquet as if it were one flower.
That is why questions like “does speaking English prevent violent or sexual crime?” are logically neat but conceptually irrelevant. No one thinks language is a crime-prevention mechanism. Crime enters as one possible downstream outcome, rightly or wrongly, of large-scale, poorly integrated migration. Refuting any single link does not address the overall pattern claim.
Likewise, pointing to British expats in Spain and demanding symmetry at the individual level ignores scale and context. Systems do not scale linearly. A small, culturally similar, economically self-contained expat minority is not equivalent to mass migration into strained institutions, even if some surface features overlap.
The flaw, then, is not that the argument “keeps changing.” The flaw is insisting on single-variable sufficiency where the object of concern is multi-causal and pattern-based. To challenge the claim seriously you have to engage the whole picture, not win by disassembling each component in isolation.
But I don’t think it’s a bad argument about language in the sense of being poorly reasoned or misconceived. It only becomes a bad argument when it’s treated in isolation of the broader system-level concern it is standing in for - which is what you did in your initial refutation of the claim “I agree. Do you also believe that Brits who move to somewhere like Spain should learn to speak Spanish?”
Treating the argument as the unit of analysis in order to dismiss it, misframes the concern it is pointing to.
Of course, the option remains for people not to make any kind of reasoned argument and just gesture at broad thematic concerns but then other people who disagree with them don’t have to make any argument either and can just gesture at the broad thematic concerns they have and they can talk past each other in vibes, intuitions and narratives while the rest of us try to make coherent arguments about what the concerns actually are, what material realities and principles are involved and find some common ground and resolutions.
This is an important distinction. Evaluating a systemic intuition one variable at a time risks mistaking the scaffolding for the structure. Holistic judgments often rely on patterns that cannot be reduced without losing meaning.
The challenge is to engage with the bouquet itself, not only its individual flowers—recognizing that directional accuracy can exist even when isolated components don’t carry the weight we expect.
Thank you. I completely agree and this all makes perfect sense.
However, if you are somebody who cares deeply about clarity, consistency and has thought deeply about your own principles, all this is extremely important.
But many people don't care though. They don't have the characters or personality types that make them feel compelled to examine their first principles.
I think people can “learn” to think about these things, but only if they have the drive to do so.
For many, they just see everything as an existential threat that is an emergency.
They are acting on a fight or flight instinct that means they probably feel like such thinking is “too late” or “not enough”.
They feel the time for sensible discourse is gone.
That ship has sailed.
And being emotional and livid is what's needed.
And everything they see in their timelines is making them feel like it's all completely gone to shit.
I think much of what we see is people being pushed into a state of emergency where normal rules no longer apply.
You pressing them on consistency is just an annoyance.
They want your outrage to confirm and match theirs.
I recently engaged with my son in an exchange about a subject and when I disagreed with him he pivoted to accusing me of 'wanting someone to die' which was not at all what I said. When I read this post it detailed exactly the pattern of the discussion. It went from a logic to emotion and I was left surprised and unable to come back.
Yeah, different bases of meaning. So many people look for the emotional and motivational subtext beneath a disagreement because that is what they are speaking from and assume you must be too. “What does this really mean psychologically?” But if you actually mean literally what you said because you are considering ideas and claims as a proposition, that is what you mean and this response is baffling and frequently, infuriating.
Another excellent piece of clear thinking modelled for the rest of us Helen. Thank you. For those, like me, who are very highly motivated to learn how to think in such clear, honest ways more consistently, do you have any recommendations for books/courses which would help people to acquire and practise the sort of thinking you demonstrate in your Substack, perhaps with clear definitions and examples of the sort of conceptual terms you often use e.g. first principles, motivated reasoning etc.?
You could try ' The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion' by Jonathan Haidt - he who is leading the charge on reducing social media/phone use by kids. And of course keep reading HP.
I also like this take - it’s helped me to avoid wasting energy on bad faith actors (you could repace ‘conspiracy theories’ with ‘bad/emotional reasoning’ of the sort your article focuses on):
The first step is to determine whether they are a reliable actor, interested in the world...... or if their interest is merely feeling better about themselves - psychological survival. To the latter, conspiracy theories can have great emotional/psychological appeal - pure, strong copium that eases the pain of problems to do with - self (insecurity, doubt, fear of failure); others (fear, zenophobia); and the World (epistemic matters; the need for certainty in an uncertain world). Specifically, conspiracy theories can supply certainty, where there is overwhelming anxiety (a sure path when one feels lost); prestige, where there are self-esteem problems (‘I possess important information most people do not have) & ability ('I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals'); vindication when one feels besieged (my ‘enemies’ are wrong, morally, scientifically)'; connection when one feels alone; and liberation:, 'If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want'.
Bit scared to suggest it, but I think there is a possibility of feeling positive about controlled numbers of wealthy skilled migrants who contribute and large numbers of destitute unskilled migrants arriving in an uncontrolled manner from cultural systems which do not align with our rights and freedoms, entering a system where there is no requirement to integrate and an awareness of significant harms done by persons from that same culture/belief system. I think it would be reasonable to feel a sliding scale of positive views towards these two situations which would to some extent likely correlate with the adjectival attributes of said group. And of course baseline human is to reject the other so we are pushing against our ape brains as we decide to update ancient wiring (or not) depending on perceived threat level and many other extrinsic and intrinsic factors.
Thank you, Helen. Debate used to serve the purpose of training us to argue rationally and consistently. Unfortunately, at least in the States, high school and college debate have largely been perverted so that the "right" side in the judges' minds win. What a terrible loss.
Great article. Does this type of argument style have an official fallacy name? If not it needs one. I feel like I see conversations like the example you gave every single day. Being able to snap back and point out this type of patchwork gish galloping thing people do in a very succinct way would be helpful.
This is a precise articulation of why coherence matters. Moral intuitions are unavoidable, but reasoning built to work on its own terms is what prevents principled positions from sliding into inconsistency or being dismantled by surface-level challenges.
Caring about your values requires more than feeling them; it requires giving them arguments that can withstand scrutiny.
“We just have to be able to justify those intuitions with a well-reasoned argument.”
But, as Popper argued, justifications are logically impossible because they lead to an infinite regress (each justification requires a further justification and so on…). All we can do is criticize moral intuitions we believe are faulty and then see if our criticisms withstand criticisms in turn.
But that's just coherent. I am explicitly arguing from a liberal framework so I do evaluate things as good or bad depending on whether they are liberal or not. That's what I consider to have merit. There is no objective marker of merit outside of an ethical framework. Things have to be good for something or bad for something. In the same way, you could not ask someone's whose ethical framework is Christian to evaluate something as morally good or bad on its own merits outside of whether it is Christian. That would be to evaluate it by some other framework or somebody else's idea of merits.
No, anybody showing porn to children needs to be prosecuted. We just can’t ban things that adults can do consensually in case children access them illegally.
I get your point, but in my experience a misunderstanding of Liberalism as meaning "anything goes" is rather commonplace in Conservative circles.
And in the US, Democrat has become synonomous with Liberal, even though eg pushing Males into Women's female-only spaces is clearly Illiberal as it erodes Women's rights. I reject "TWAW" but otherwise support adult individuals freedom of choice.
As a Liberal myself, one could probably say that I become somewhat conservative when it comes to preserving the value system in our liberal democracies. As such, I'm against uncontrolled/massive immigration from cultures with highly authoritarian ideas, structures and value systems - eg fundamental Islam, as such risks eroding the liberal democracies themselves. That said, to elaborate on the example of Islam, I know that Liberal Muslims exist (and some of my friends are such), but I think we need to be more cautious in who we finally accept as citizens, as a majority from certain countries are typically fundamentalists.
The above position doesn't mean I'm not a Liberal, but it means that I can, in the specific topic of immigration, find some common ground with moderate Conservatives.
Yes, to be liberal is always to be, in some sense, conservative because it requires taking action to conserve liberalism, and in some sense progressive, because it involves advancing knowledge and human rights.
Thank you once again for something one can sink one's teeth into.
Thanks for your article on being right for the wrong reasons. I can’t afford $10 a month, but likely could 6 or 7.
Thank you!
As ever, and miraculously, overflowing and comprehensively clear. Thanks Helen.
Choosing a discussion and topic where, in the end, you both basically agree, helps us focus and learn better how to explore implied principles and correct our own or anyone's poor reasoning. Explaining how to reason by clarifying principles is, I think, a rare but most essential core skill for us who follow of #HPLiberalism*. The whole world needs to know: and there's 6000 followers here to help make that happen!*
Other features of liberalism wouldn't work without that core of principled reasoning. We can call for liberal values and free speech; we can bring in the evidence of history or anecdote or thought experiment or research or science or other authorities. But you still don't get far with that without engaged reasoning and principles to unpack it all effectively.
And we see that engaged reasoning takes even more. You need (rare) personal intelligence, skill, time, effort and commitment within the (also rare) context of a particular engaged discussion with others.
Now, we get all that constantly and patiently here from and with you, Helen, even though you've chosen a crazy context where your discussants are potentially billions of others, "the whole world", not just a selection of kindly friends. Hence I say: miraculous.
And, as for * #HPLiberalism, I refer you to my more obscure post on a way we can better promote Helen's overflowings to a world that, we say, so needs this. You'll see that Helen herself isn't persuaded on this one! So I appeal to all Helen's followers to find and use some kind of branding or handle that anyone needs to promote a product. Someone can do better than #HPLiberalism and my rationale for it here:
https://www.hpluckrose.com/p/liberalism-as-a-higher-order-value-5e8/comment/199135628
I will pursue the case for a simple tag or label for the liberalism that Helen explains so brilliantly. We know that. The world needs to know. There has to be a short name for it so it’s not a private game of hunt the thimble to find it. Reluctance may be, like Helen’s, that it’s a process not a thing to be packaged. Here’s my reply to that (from a more obscure corner) :
<< Yes it is a process not a thing. But life is a process too. Everyone knows about life. So a universal word is enough to label it. Many other important specific processes have labels or headings so you can refer to them so that those who don’t know about them can be alerted briefly and search for them. If there’s no tag or heading, the important world-important resource remains only a private interest for those who already know. I say HPLiberalism (or better tag) is too important to hide under a mountain of words. >>
PS I didn't mean there's anything wrong with Helen's "mountain of words". Quite the contrary: I think they're so wonderful and important that there should be signposts to help people tell others about it and to find them. Similarly, I am not suggesting any change in the name of that mountain. The mountain is called "liberalism".
Clarity and principled reasoning matter. But a common failure mode in argument is reducing complex, system-level phenomena to single variables in a way that preserves local logic while obscuring global truth.
Many social problems are not made of independently testable parts. They have emergent properties shaped by interaction, scale, timing, and context, and those properties can vanish when you isolate the parts. The French idea of a “bouquet of evidence” captures this. No single element is decisive, yet the pattern formed by many weak signals can be persuasive when seen together. Some truths are only visible at the right distance.
That is why dismantling a view one variable at a time can miss the target. A system-level intuition can be directionally correct even if no component, on its own, proves the conclusion.
This is what happens in arguments about English-speaking immigrants. The claim “people who move to the UK should learn English” is treated as a single-variable proposition, tested by forcing the speaker to justify it with one stable principle. But the concern is rarely just language. Language is a proxy for a broader pattern involving integration, scale, social cohesion, institutional capacity, consent, and second-order effects.
So when the justification shifts from culture to economics to consent to crime, that is not necessarily incoherence. It is a clumsy attempt to defend a holistic judgment using isolated supports. Your questioning then forces the speaker to defend the bouquet as if it were one flower.
That is why questions like “does speaking English prevent violent or sexual crime?” are logically neat but conceptually irrelevant. No one thinks language is a crime-prevention mechanism. Crime enters as one possible downstream outcome, rightly or wrongly, of large-scale, poorly integrated migration. Refuting any single link does not address the overall pattern claim.
Likewise, pointing to British expats in Spain and demanding symmetry at the individual level ignores scale and context. Systems do not scale linearly. A small, culturally similar, economically self-contained expat minority is not equivalent to mass migration into strained institutions, even if some surface features overlap.
The flaw, then, is not that the argument “keeps changing.” The flaw is insisting on single-variable sufficiency where the object of concern is multi-causal and pattern-based. To challenge the claim seriously you have to engage the whole picture, not win by disassembling each component in isolation.
Well, I think that’s what I said. Get at the underlying moral intuition rather than trying to make bad arguments about language.
But I don’t think it’s a bad argument about language in the sense of being poorly reasoned or misconceived. It only becomes a bad argument when it’s treated in isolation of the broader system-level concern it is standing in for - which is what you did in your initial refutation of the claim “I agree. Do you also believe that Brits who move to somewhere like Spain should learn to speak Spanish?”
Treating the argument as the unit of analysis in order to dismiss it, misframes the concern it is pointing to.
Of course, the option remains for people not to make any kind of reasoned argument and just gesture at broad thematic concerns but then other people who disagree with them don’t have to make any argument either and can just gesture at the broad thematic concerns they have and they can talk past each other in vibes, intuitions and narratives while the rest of us try to make coherent arguments about what the concerns actually are, what material realities and principles are involved and find some common ground and resolutions.
I am suggesting people get at the concern it is pointing to
This is an important distinction. Evaluating a systemic intuition one variable at a time risks mistaking the scaffolding for the structure. Holistic judgments often rely on patterns that cannot be reduced without losing meaning.
The challenge is to engage with the bouquet itself, not only its individual flowers—recognizing that directional accuracy can exist even when isolated components don’t carry the weight we expect.
Thank you. I completely agree and this all makes perfect sense.
However, if you are somebody who cares deeply about clarity, consistency and has thought deeply about your own principles, all this is extremely important.
But many people don't care though. They don't have the characters or personality types that make them feel compelled to examine their first principles.
I think people can “learn” to think about these things, but only if they have the drive to do so.
For many, they just see everything as an existential threat that is an emergency.
They are acting on a fight or flight instinct that means they probably feel like such thinking is “too late” or “not enough”.
They feel the time for sensible discourse is gone.
That ship has sailed.
And being emotional and livid is what's needed.
And everything they see in their timelines is making them feel like it's all completely gone to shit.
I think much of what we see is people being pushed into a state of emergency where normal rules no longer apply.
You pressing them on consistency is just an annoyance.
They want your outrage to confirm and match theirs.
I recently engaged with my son in an exchange about a subject and when I disagreed with him he pivoted to accusing me of 'wanting someone to die' which was not at all what I said. When I read this post it detailed exactly the pattern of the discussion. It went from a logic to emotion and I was left surprised and unable to come back.
Yeah, different bases of meaning. So many people look for the emotional and motivational subtext beneath a disagreement because that is what they are speaking from and assume you must be too. “What does this really mean psychologically?” But if you actually mean literally what you said because you are considering ideas and claims as a proposition, that is what you mean and this response is baffling and frequently, infuriating.
Brits who move to Spain should learn to speak Spanish!!!
My brother lives in Sweden with his Swedish wife, and he is progressing well at learning Swedish.
That being said I thoroughly enjoyed your essay.
On the hijab I'm generally pluralist, but I do think there is a veritable laundry list of good reasons for banning it in schools for the under 16s.
Another excellent piece of clear thinking modelled for the rest of us Helen. Thank you. For those, like me, who are very highly motivated to learn how to think in such clear, honest ways more consistently, do you have any recommendations for books/courses which would help people to acquire and practise the sort of thinking you demonstrate in your Substack, perhaps with clear definitions and examples of the sort of conceptual terms you often use e.g. first principles, motivated reasoning etc.?
Thank you, Julian!
You could try ' The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion' by Jonathan Haidt - he who is leading the charge on reducing social media/phone use by kids. And of course keep reading HP.
Oh, yes, of course! And Jonathan Rauch’s Kindly Inquisitors. These aren’t primers for reasoning but do cover the main problems we run into.
Edited to correct to "Rauch." There are also good books on the subject by people not called "Jonathan."
I’ve just discovered that the book Kindly Inquisitors is currently available on KindleUnlimited.
Thanks, I’ll look into the other Jonathan.
I also like this take - it’s helped me to avoid wasting energy on bad faith actors (you could repace ‘conspiracy theories’ with ‘bad/emotional reasoning’ of the sort your article focuses on):
The first step is to determine whether they are a reliable actor, interested in the world...... or if their interest is merely feeling better about themselves - psychological survival. To the latter, conspiracy theories can have great emotional/psychological appeal - pure, strong copium that eases the pain of problems to do with - self (insecurity, doubt, fear of failure); others (fear, zenophobia); and the World (epistemic matters; the need for certainty in an uncertain world). Specifically, conspiracy theories can supply certainty, where there is overwhelming anxiety (a sure path when one feels lost); prestige, where there are self-esteem problems (‘I possess important information most people do not have) & ability ('I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals'); vindication when one feels besieged (my ‘enemies’ are wrong, morally, scientifically)'; connection when one feels alone; and liberation:, 'If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want'.
Bit scared to suggest it, but I think there is a possibility of feeling positive about controlled numbers of wealthy skilled migrants who contribute and large numbers of destitute unskilled migrants arriving in an uncontrolled manner from cultural systems which do not align with our rights and freedoms, entering a system where there is no requirement to integrate and an awareness of significant harms done by persons from that same culture/belief system. I think it would be reasonable to feel a sliding scale of positive views towards these two situations which would to some extent likely correlate with the adjectival attributes of said group. And of course baseline human is to reject the other so we are pushing against our ape brains as we decide to update ancient wiring (or not) depending on perceived threat level and many other extrinsic and intrinsic factors.
Thank you, Helen. Debate used to serve the purpose of training us to argue rationally and consistently. Unfortunately, at least in the States, high school and college debate have largely been perverted so that the "right" side in the judges' minds win. What a terrible loss.
Great article. Does this type of argument style have an official fallacy name? If not it needs one. I feel like I see conversations like the example you gave every single day. Being able to snap back and point out this type of patchwork gish galloping thing people do in a very succinct way would be helpful.
This is a precise articulation of why coherence matters. Moral intuitions are unavoidable, but reasoning built to work on its own terms is what prevents principled positions from sliding into inconsistency or being dismantled by surface-level challenges.
Caring about your values requires more than feeling them; it requires giving them arguments that can withstand scrutiny.
This is bang on and I fear a lot of internet pundits use this to make short form content to 'win' arguments all too often.
Doing the Wrong Thing Righter....Russ Ackoff
The righter we do the wrong thing, the wronger we become.
When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger.
When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter.
Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.
“We just have to be able to justify those intuitions with a well-reasoned argument.”
But, as Popper argued, justifications are logically impossible because they lead to an infinite regress (each justification requires a further justification and so on…). All we can do is criticize moral intuitions we believe are faulty and then see if our criticisms withstand criticisms in turn.
But that's just coherent. I am explicitly arguing from a liberal framework so I do evaluate things as good or bad depending on whether they are liberal or not. That's what I consider to have merit. There is no objective marker of merit outside of an ethical framework. Things have to be good for something or bad for something. In the same way, you could not ask someone's whose ethical framework is Christian to evaluate something as morally good or bad on its own merits outside of whether it is Christian. That would be to evaluate it by some other framework or somebody else's idea of merits.
I shall continue to fanatically leave other people alone unless they’re hurting anyone else.
No, anybody showing porn to children needs to be prosecuted. We just can’t ban things that adults can do consensually in case children access them illegally.
I get your point, but in my experience a misunderstanding of Liberalism as meaning "anything goes" is rather commonplace in Conservative circles.
And in the US, Democrat has become synonomous with Liberal, even though eg pushing Males into Women's female-only spaces is clearly Illiberal as it erodes Women's rights. I reject "TWAW" but otherwise support adult individuals freedom of choice.
As a Liberal myself, one could probably say that I become somewhat conservative when it comes to preserving the value system in our liberal democracies. As such, I'm against uncontrolled/massive immigration from cultures with highly authoritarian ideas, structures and value systems - eg fundamental Islam, as such risks eroding the liberal democracies themselves. That said, to elaborate on the example of Islam, I know that Liberal Muslims exist (and some of my friends are such), but I think we need to be more cautious in who we finally accept as citizens, as a majority from certain countries are typically fundamentalists.
The above position doesn't mean I'm not a Liberal, but it means that I can, in the specific topic of immigration, find some common ground with moderate Conservatives.
That was my own short rant 😊
Have a good day!
Yes, to be liberal is always to be, in some sense, conservative because it requires taking action to conserve liberalism, and in some sense progressive, because it involves advancing knowledge and human rights.