Last week, we discussed the difference between polite and impolite arguments. In public debate, there are rules around the types of arguments that are acceptable. Polite arguments are considered rational, and they usually show how certain policies lead to greater benefits (or fewer harms) in a tangible sense. “Policy X would lead to billions of dollars in savings, or enough money to treat thousands of cancer patients” is an example of a polite argument, which are almost exclusively based morally on the Care value (i.e. causing pain is wrong, especially to the vulnerable).
Although polite arguments may be dominant in educated society, they don’t always drive real decision-making. Instead, many people use other types of emotional appeals (i.e. impolite arguments) to guide their political beliefs. “Flag burning is an insult to the nation and should be punished” is an example of an impolite argument based on the Loyalty value (i.e. people have special moral responsibilities to in-group members). This argument is impolite because it is hard to show how the burning of a piece of cloth leads to tangible harms. Such an argument in unlikely to win a Munk debate, but it will certainly receive likes on social media.
Impolite arguments can draw on any of the six moral values, but the most impolite arguments are explicitly based on the three conservative values (Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity), which are considered by many non-conservatives to be backwards and jingoistic. Why is this? First, public discourse is led by educated people (the folks who do most of the serious writing that frames political issues). Since educated people are more likely to hold left-wing views and left-leaning people don’t rely on conservative values in their moral judgements, it is no surprise that this leads to a collective moral blind spot. Second, awful regimes (the Nazis immediately come to mind) have relied heavily on impolite appeals to the three conservative values to justify atrocities, so this rhetorical strategy is not politically correct.
Third, for all their moral power, the three conservative values are not particularly well suited to reasoned debate. As mentioned in previous articles, System 1 thinking (i.e. quick, intuitive, prone to error) drives our moral decision-making, and these reactions are only later rationalized with System 2 thinking (i.e. slow, logical, methodical). In other words, your morals come from your gut, and your head is tasked with working backwards to invent good-enough justifications that allow you to sleep at night.
However, polite debate generally rewards strong System 2 reasoning, and not all moral intuitions can be easily justified with System 2. The Care value is easily the most easily explained – what rational being would prefer pain to pleasure? Everyone accepts this point without much discussion. In fact, educated people are trained to base their argumentation on the Care value. Think back to school or university: what mark would you get on a paper that simply declares a certain action to be sacred and inviolable (relying on the Sanctity value) without any supporting argumentation that references harms, impacts, or effects? You’d probably receive an F.
As a result, no matter the topic, arguments like “it’s morally correct to do X because the authorities tell us to” or “behaviour Y is intrinsically degrading and wrong” aren’t considered to be particularly convincing arguments in polite debate – even if they drive moral decision-making.
Ain’t Get No Respect
This can create huge social fissures, as it leaves many people with a problem (particularly on the right of the political spectrum): they have strong moral reactions against certain views or policies, but they struggle to create polite arguments to defend their views in public. Their System 2 thinking needs to work overtime to fabricate politically correct reasoning that can be used to justify their pre-existing moral beliefs.
If these individuals fail to create polite arguments, they’re unlikely to be taken seriously by gatekeepers. For an example, here’s an Election night 2021 interview with the Executive Direction of the People’s Party of Canada (the interview begins at about 2:20:00). The interviewer asks for a summary of the People’s Party’s core message, and the response is the following:
[The People’s Party has] seen extreme growth over the last year, and a big part of it has been the absurd actions by governments – Provincial, Federal – infringing on our Constitutional rights. And fortunately, Canadians have a voice in Federal politics, pushing against these ridiculous restrictions and standing up for our Constitutional rights. So that has seen people get disillusioned by the establishment parties, realize that there is deep rot, deep corruption in all of these larger parties and look for another option.
This is normal populist fare, but the Executive Director clearly believes his arguments carry moral weight. There are several values that are operational in this quote. The primary driver is obviously Liberty (i.e. freedom and autonomy are moral goods), as lockdowns and other public health restrictions violate most Canadians’ conception of liberty, even if many people believe such infringements to be justified in the circumstances. As well, the references to corruption play upon a few values, including Fairness (it’s unfair for public representatives to line their pockets) and Authority (corrupt politicians misuse their power for selfish reasons).
No Care arguments though. As expected, the gatekeepers of public debate – in this case, journalists – gave the People’s Party little consideration. Moderator Rosemary Barton remarked,
Just to point out that some of the things that the People’s Party of Canada is protesting against are, of course, public health measures put in place to keep you safe during a worldwide pandemic.
Her tone made it clear that she found the People’s Party’s arguments to be baseless (although, to be fair, Rosemary Barton often sounds that way). Since the public health measures keep Canadians safe, they align clearly with the Care value, and therefore, are morally justified. That’s all there is to it. The polite argument wins. The Care argument wins.
Of course, there is so much more to morality than Care. The Executive Director of the People’s Party could respond by arguing that Constitutional rights are more important than public health; he could argue that the Liberty value is the most important value in this context. Even if the loosening of public health restrictions would lead to more harm, it would also give people their liberty, which would fully justify the costs. This is a morally plausible point (even if you disagree) that would be attractive to libertarians, who emphasize the liberty/oppression value over all others.
In this situation, however, the ‘more liberty, more harm’ strategy is unlikely to be successful, because the Care value is the foundation of public debate. This would be an uphill battle for the Executive Director of the People’s Party. He’d be pushing a Liberty argument in a format that structurally favours the Care value. Good luck!
However, there’s another strategy on the table that might be more effective: the Executive Director could attempt to prove that the public health lockdowns actually cause more harm than the alternative. In other words, he could play the game according to the Care rules and attempt to win on Care grounds. He could make a polite argument.
The People’s Party has indeed tried this strategy, for example, in this press release on COVID-19 lockdowns. It identifies major harms that flow from lockdowns, such as the impacts on youth employment, the financial distress of small businesses, and potential effects on Canadians’ mental and physical health. Although there is a bit of conspiracy mongering in this document, it’s broadly an intelligent one. It selectively uses data (just like every other political party does), but it presents a clear Care-based case against COVID-19 lockdowns. It’s polite.
But judging by their performance in the 2021 election, most Canadians weren’t convinced. When the Omicron wave was heating up, a clear majority of Canadians supported additional lockdown measures. Even now, a plurality of Canadians seem to support further lockdowns, although public opinion is shifting quickly. Considering that lockdowns are almost exclusively justified on Care grounds (they save lives!), it’s clear that the People’s Party lost the debate during the 2021 election.
Enter Misinformation
Although the People’s Party was on its best behaviour in writing the press release cited above, other anti-lockdown activists use misinformation to bolster their polite arguments with the hope of winning the public debate over lockdowns. Arguments based on the Care value can be proven through the use of data, but when such data doesn’t exist or is ambiguous, one option is to fudge the numbers in support of a particular goal. This does not always reflect malicious intent, but rather an attempt to ‘speak the language’ of public debate. One area that proved fertile for fabricated data, anecdotal evidence, and downright sophism is the impact of the pandemic on suicide rates.
Anti-lockdown websites have suggested that public health restrictions have caused a major increase in the number of suicides around the world. Alt-right “news” site Breitbart published a large number of articles on this topic, suggesting that lockdowns caused an epidemic of suicide in Spain and five times as many children killed themselves as died of COVID-19 in the UK in the first year of the pandemic. In Canada, Rebel News misinterpreted a scenarios analysis exercise (possibly on purpose) as a projection that suicide rates would jump 27% due to lockdown-induced unemployment. Even true American hero Tom Brady parroted this claim.
It’s easy to see why this argument seems true: it’s intuitive. Lockdowns probably have a negative impact on people’s mental health, although the jury is still out on the severity of the effect. It seems to follow that a widespread deterioration in mental health would lead to an increase in suicide rates. These sorts of intuitive arguments are convincing, as they take advantage of the brain’s System 1 thinking processes. At first glance, this seems like powerful evidence to suggest that lockdowns cause significant harm. If more lives are lost because of suicide than are saved because of lockdowns, the entire rationale for such restrictions (i.e. they save lives) would collapse.
One problem: the entire argument is wrong. And not just a little bit wrong; it’s completely false. Suicide became rarer in just about every country where good data is available in 2020. In Canada, suicides fell by 32%. In the UK, there may have been a short-term increase in child suicides during the first lockdown, but this did not translate into higher child suicide rates in 2020 overall. Full data from 2021 has yet to be released, but there is no reason to expect rates in 2021 to be much higher at this point.
Fake News as a Form of Moral Translation
In short, these articles that selectively use data to suggest suicide rates are climbing due to lockdowns are misinformation. But this misinformation serves an important function: it creates an evidence base that allows opponents of lockdowns to build polite arguments to justify impolite impulses.
Keep in mind, opposition to lockdowns is often rooted in deep moral conviction, primarily drawing on the Liberty value. As soon as lockdown opponents are forced to justify their beliefs publicly, they need ammunition. But references to liberty and freedom just aren’t going to cut it. They’ll receive the same sort of dismissal that the Executive Director of the People’s Party got from Rosemary Barton. In order to avoid this, activists employ misinformation that provides and generate “facts” that can bolster their arguments. Fake news helps translate moral outrage into usable arguments.
So What?
To sum up, fake news isn’t always driving moral beliefs; it sometimes responds to pre-existing values-based judgements. It’s a tool to justify and defend moral beliefs to a public that elevates care/harm arguments above all others, to make emotional judgements appear rational, to translate System 1 judgements into System 2 explanations, and to translate moral values into the language of polite political debate.
This model of misinformation has considerable explanatory power. First, it explains why there is such a major market for fake news. Anyone who has a moral reaction to a political issue needs to develop polite arguments and data points to discuss the matter publicly. This is a huge customer base for peddlers of fake news.
Second, it clarifies why misinformation appears to be more prevalent on the right side of the political spectrum. People on the left of the political spectrum already rely heavily on the Care value to guide their moral compasses, so it’s an easy transition from personal belief to political argument in a system that operates according to the same values matrix. In contrast, conservatives are more likely to draw on values that are considered invalid in public debate, so they have a greater need to manufacture evidence to defend their moral views.
Third, this model explains why correcting misinformation often has no effect on people’s beliefs. Misinformation doesn’t cause beliefs in the first place. Values and intuitions do. Consequently, debunking fake news doesn’t make a bit of difference. Fact checking doesn’t get to the root of the belief. It’s treating the symptom, not the cause.
To be clear, emotional reactions drive people’s responses to events, no matter where they are located on the political spectrum. And there is nothing inherently wrong with this – it happens to all of us. Furthermore, this article is not arguing that conservative values are only defensible with misinformation. Rather, I’m arguing that current political discourse disadvantages appeals to certain values (rightly or wrongly) that drive political decisions and moral reactions, and these values are more likely to be held by conservatives. This encourages the production and use of misinformation.
Next week, I’ll explore the implications of this model for misinformation and government policy.