Because Telling Another Person They’re Just Wrong Usually Isn’t Helpful

From what I hear, there was a presidential election recently. I’ve also heard that it highlighted (again) some fundamental differences about moral issues that divide the citizenry. Just in case those things are true, and even if they’re not, I thought it would be good to briefly outline a procedure for discussing moral issues with people with whom you might disagree. What I’m about to describe is not a moral theory per se but a way to open and continue a conversation about disputed moral issues.

Let’s start with a basic point of moral philosophy: Good is to be pursued and done, and evil is to be avoided. It’s a really simple statement once you think about it for a minute, and I find that there is hardly ever any dissent about it. Most everyone agrees that we ought to do good and avoid evil.

Careful readers will, of course, note two things about this statement that aren’t straightforwardly clear. First, doesn’t this statement fail to distinguish between “ought” and “is”? Second, what do you mean by “good” and “evil”?

On the first point, the answer is “sort of,” and I’ve been careful to formulate it—actually, I’ve borrowed the formulation from Aquinas—as I have in order to avoid making a commitment about whether you can get an ought from an is. For one, I think that in our everyday conversations about morality, this point isn’t really important. For another, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing to not draw a sharp distinction between ought and is. The verb “to be” in Aquinas’s formulation, for example, is stated as a gerund, which suggests that what goodness is means that one oughtto pursue it. But even here, I’ve gone further afield than is usually necessary. In my experience, most people just understand the statement to be true.

Detail of The School of Athens by Raffaello Sanzio, 1509, showing Plato (left) and Aristotle (right) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On the second point, aye, there’s the rub. What things do you think are good? What things do you think are evil? These questions will raise some hearty disputes, but the disputes that arise from them are important ones. If we are talking to someone with whom we disagree, we should expect disagreement. There may not be a silver bullet way of persuading our interlocutors that they’re wrong, but we cannot lose sight of the point that we must understand what precisely we agree and disagree about.

Here’s a good exercise related to this point (perhaps you can do it in the combox): Set down a short list of kinds of things you think are basically good. Try to keep your list as short as you can, but not too short. It’s not helpful to be Plato in this case. His list of things that are basically good consists of one item: the good itself. Well, thanks, Plato. In like manner, it’s also not helpful, for present purposes, to put down “God.” You’re looking for things that fall between the specificity of “the smell of pizza baking in a wood-fired oven” and the generality of “the good itself.” A traditional list would include some of the following: life, knowledge, friendship, aesthetic experience, and maybe a few others. Really try to keep your list to a manageable size, and don’t simply let it trail off with an “etcetera.” I’ll just mention that one thing that’s often disputed—should it go on the list or not?—is pleasure. Some people treat it as a basic good; others don’t. We should all think about whether it is or not, but not right now.

Suppose you have life on your list. At this point you can go back to the first point—that good is to be pursued and done, and evil avoided—and see how it comes out now that you’ve given it some content: Life is to be pursued and done, and death avoided. You can see that it makes sense to say that life is to be pursued, but what about saying that life is to be done? It’s best to reword that in something like the following way: life-preserving (or life-promoting) actions are to be done. And death-promoting or -dealing actions are to be avoided. Similarly for friendship: Friendship is to be pursued, friendship-promoting and -preserving actions are to be done, and actions that go against or undermine friendship are to be avoided.

From these examples, you might anticipate some complications, and you’d be right.