why you shouldn't (and probably can't) support anyone '100 per cent'

piece number 1 (part 2 of 2)

This is the second part of a two-part introductory piece. In the first part, I explained why I set up this Substack, and tried to convince you to read it. Here, I’m going to discuss a recent opinion column, partly because I strongly disagreed with it, and partly because it offers me the opportunity to explain the name of this Substack. In future, my pieces will be less meta!

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TLDR:

• It’s probably not possible to support someone else ‘100 per cent’, and trying to do so is disrespectful.

• Consequentialism is super-seductive because it offers a seemingly simple route to moral truth. But its evaluations depend on an overly reductive and damagingly instrumentalist account of what matters.

• Even when we face terrorists, our relative goodness doesn’t afford us moral impunity. Even if the world seems about to end, we’re not justified to do ‘whatever it takes’ to try to save it. 

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I began the first part of this piece by admitting I rarely read opinion columns, any more. I did read one by Matthew Syed last weekend, however, which has been annoying me ever since. Generally, I’ll avoid over-focusing on any particular piece of writing or writer, here. But as I see it, Syed’s column, which gained wide-ranging support online, exemplifies the increasingly pervasive click-baitism I criticised in the first part of this piece. It also offers me a route into discussing something that’ll be an underlying theme of this Substack, as you might’ve guessed from its name.

Syed makes the case that we should morally evaluate the ins and outs of international conflict, including the Russia-Ukraine war and what’s happening in the Middle East, by answering one question: “Who do you want to win?” This is hardcore click-bait. It’s crowd-seekingly reductive and contrarian, to a point well beyond moral grimness and into nihilistic incoherence. Of course, I’m aware this harsh brief summary may sound like click-bait, itself! But I’ll make several arguments in my defence.

Let’s start with a claim Syed makes early on: “In the conflagration that is coming, I back Israel 100 per cent, the West 100 per cent, civilisation 100 per cent, progress 100 per cent.” This might seem a straightforward statement. Indeed, he prefaces it with the “hope” he’s not making a “simplistic point”. But you don’t have to think for long to realise that the idea of ‘giving 100 per cent backing’ isn’t just morally scary: it’s confusing. Mainly, because it’s hard to conceive of anyone actually doing it.

For starters, I bet you can’t think of any person (never mind government, or politico-geographical grouping) you’d back ‘100 per cent’. Even your best friend. Even your sweet loving granny! First, because you and your granny would be robots if your values and preferences and evaluatory processes overlapped entirely, in the way necessary for you genuinely to support 100 per cent of her actions 100 per cent of the time. But also because you’d be seriously failing your granny, if you tried to do so!

You’d be failing her because you wouldn’t be able to attend properly to what she actually decided and did, if you’d already determined what your response should be (“You’re right! As always!”). And you’d be failing her because, since the two of you aren’t robots and you are humans, you both sometimes make mistakes, in your actions and evaluations and most other things. You make mistakes because you have complex psychology, because you’re epistemically fallible, because you don’t have full control over all your desires and beliefs and actions, and because of many other things about being human, and about the world we live in — things that can be wonderful, but also often aren’t.

Most obviously, however, you’d be failing her because, when you care about someone — and even when you don’t — you’re sometimes morally obliged to tell them you think they’re wrong. You don’t have to go all the way on this, all the time. You don’t have to become someone who sees social situations as opportunities for argument-testing, and argument-testing as justification for criticism. Often, this isn’t required and it isn’t good, and — as discussed in the first part of this piece — those of us who have tendencies towards it should hold back and do better. If we don’t, we’re often failing in other obligations.

Nonetheless, we all have to speak up, sometimes! Not to offer perfect objections, or destroy imperfect conclusions. But to take other people seriously. To take them seriously as thinkers and actors, whose thoughts and actions are morally significant, in their formation, content, and consequences. And this is why we shouldn’t back anyone ‘100 per cent’, if doing such a thing is possible.

That said, there’s an obvious alternative interpretation of Syed’s ‘100 per cent backing’ claim. He might well say, in response to my criticism, “Hey, I’m not talking about individual actors and individual actions!” He might say, “No, my references to civilisation and progress show that what I’m really talking about is human betterment, morality, the good!” In other words, he might say that I’m missing the mark: that I should set aside his references to a specific country and politico-geographical area, and take him to be claiming that our ‘100 per cent backing’ should be for moral progress, itself. I think probably, on a deep level, this is indeed what he’s saying.

On that deep level, however, I have a further problem with the ‘100 per cent’ idea. This problem goes beyond the fact that an 100 per cent backing of moral progress can’t reduce to an 100 per cent backing of any one person or group of people, not least because people make mistakes. It also goes beyond my strong conviction that when people hold political power, we should be particularly attentive to their risk of mistake-making! Rather, it relates to the crudely consequentialist reasoning that Syed seems to be applying here, and throughout the column.

You might have gleaned that I don’t like consequentialism from the title of this Substack. ‘The ends don’t justify the means’ is a classic criticism of the consequentialist family of moral theories, which most famously includes utilitarianism. And I’ll admit that I am planning to use this Substack, sometimes, to attempt to further my life goal of countering consequentialist reasoning. (I have many consequentialist friends, and I love them, but they are wrong!) Generally, I’m going to avoid too much meta-ethical critique here, however. I’m also going to be more ‘pro’ than ‘anti’: instead of persistently bashing consequentialism, or crowingly searching out its pernicious influence on the world, I’m hoping to focus more on the crucial question: ‘If the ends don’t justify the means, then what does?’.

To kick off this Substack, however, I can’t resist emphasising the badness and wrongness of Syed’s consequentialist-reasoned conclusion. Not least because I see it as a cartoonishly extreme version of a similarly harmful weaker conclusion that’s often touted about by people in positions of political power. As I interpret it, Syed’s conclusion is that since moral progress is the most important thing, then we’re excused in doing whatever it takes to hold back the forces that threaten it or prevent its advancement.

One problem, however, is that ‘moral progress’ is too slippery a concept to treat as the ‘most important thing’. By saying this, I’m not revealing myself as a moral relativist! I’m a firm believer in objective moral truth. I also firmly believe it’s a matter of fact that humankind has made moral progress in many important domains. This is seen most obviously in the now almost-universal acknowledgement that slavery is bad and wrong. (Indeed, I’d guess that nowadays even most of the people who actively enslave others have some deep awareness of the badness and wrongness of doing so.)

But the valuable thing or things that moral progress tracks cannot be moral progress, itself! Whether we’re referring to moral progress as a goal or an evaluation — and whether we’re using it as an aggregate notion (‘humankind must continue to make moral progress!’) or something more specific (‘he’s recently made some moral progress on this!’) — the valuable thing that moral progress tracks is not societal development. It’s not even good societal development. Rather, at heart, it’s the deeply good thing or things that, before moral progress was made, had not been sufficiently realised.

That is, at the heart of why someone has made moral progress when they come to recognise that slavery is bad and wrong, is that slavery egregiously offends against many deeply good things, including freedom, equality, and justice. These deeply good things are objectively and irreducibly valuable: they are valuable ‘for’ us, as a matter of moral fact, whether or not we express their value ‘to’ us; and they don’t depend on anything underlying for their value. Whereas moral progress, which is surely an objectively good thing, nonetheless does depend on other deeper good things for its value. And failing to recognise this distinction — instead, taking moral progress as ‘the most important thing’ — weakens Syed’s position on the following two fronts.

First, it damagingly instrumentalises the other good things Syed claims to support, aside from moral progress itself. He writes elsewhere in the column that we should ’stand with’ freedom.¹ And I’m definitely with him on this — in the sense that we should actively value freedom, seeking to protect and promote it. But we should value freedom because it’s good in itself, as well as because it’s importantly instrumental to bringing about many good ends. We shouldn’t treat freedom simply as a means to the valuable end of moral progress! Moreover, we should ‘stand with’ freedom clear-sightedly: if the thing you’re doing brings an overall increase in freedom (whatever that means) but involves holding back some freedom along the way, then what you’re doing can’t be neatly reduced to ‘standing for freedom’. When the pursuit of valuable things depends on doing bad things, then minimally, you must acknowledge this. Often, you’re obliged to stop.

Second, whilst freedom is valuable in this deep sense — as an objective and irreducible good — there are other such good things, too. The good isn’t reducible to the slippery notion of moral progress, and it isn’t reducible to the single concrete (albeit conceptually contested) value of freedom! We also have to make room for justice and knowledge and friendship, and other deeply good things. And this means that any goal-directed evaluatory approach that’s focused on one thing — whether moral progress, or freedom, or whatever — is overly thin. It’s overly thin because it fails to acknowledge other good things, and because it fails to acknowledge that, often, the pursuit of one of these things can come into tension with the pursuit of another.

One reason, therefore, that we can’t use an acknowledgement of the deep value of freedom as a defence for doing bad in its name, is because freedom isn’t the only important value. And one reason we can’t do ‘whatever it takes’ to bring about moral progress is that moral progress isn’t the only important societal goal. And even if moral progress were the only important societal goal, then that wouldn’t justify doing ‘whatever it takes’ in order to reach it! Indeed, thinking of the end result of any kind of ‘whatever it takes’ approach as ‘moral progress’ seems almost as incoherent as thinking that you’re backing your friend by ‘backing them 100 per cent’.

Taking a more pluralistic, less teleological, alternative kind of approach to moral evaluation is hard, however. Consequentialism, in all its forms, is super-seductive. As well as embracing something of undeniable moral importance (the consequence), consequentialism seemingly offers a neat easy route to moral truth. Whereas, alternative approaches don’t present us with textbook equations and the promise of numbers to balance everything up. They don’t purport to enable us to calculate the right action, or offer us grace to delegate hard moral work to some other person because they’re smarter than us.

The alternative approaches I’m referring to — including the approach underlying my arguments here — don’t allow us to bask in the monolithic defence of the good end, therefore. They don’t tell us that because consequences are undeniably morally important, that consequences are the only thing that matters. That just because something is deeply good, we should optimise our actions to maximise its presence in the world.

Rather, they tell us that even when we’re facing terrorists, our relative goodness doesn’t afford us moral impunity. That even when the world seems about to end, we’re not justified in doing ‘whatever it takes’ to try to save it. And that all people — including those openly committed to doing evil things to us and others — are worthy of basic moral respect, because they’re our fundamental equals as fellow human beings. And this means their lives can’t be traded away on a calculus, even when we’re justified in defending ourselves against their threats and bad actions through lethal force. It means that if we don’t factor their moral significance into our decision-making, then we fail both them and ourselves.

We don’t back our friends, when we back them ‘100 per cent’. And we don’t back the good when we use its pursuit as a defence of ‘whatever it takes’.

1. It’s wrong and risky to try to claim values for particular politico-geographical areas: to suggest, e.g., that because more people in ‘the West’ live freer lives than elsewhere, that therefore freedom is ‘Western’ in some substantive sense. I’m happy to accept this isn’t what Syed is implying. But I wanted to emphasise that values like freedom are 'Western’ in nothing more than a contingent descriptive sense. They aren’t grounded in our land or history or practices; they are matters of moral truth, accessible to all humankind through reason.