“Toolbox” articles delve into a new way of looking at values, with a view to using these techniques in future articles.
What are the values that drive political discourse in liberal democracies? As outlined on this website, people operate, to varying degrees, according to six moral values:
- care/harm (it’s morally right to help people and wrong to hurt them);
- fairness/cheating (outcomes should be equitable and/or proportional to contributions);
- liberty/oppression (freedom is a moral good);
- loyalty/betrayal (people have special moral responsibilities to those in their group);
- authority/subversion (it’s morally right to follow those in positions of authority); and
- sanctity/degradation (some actions are inherently corrupting and dirty, and therefore, wrong).
Given that these six values are important to people, you might guess that all six could help justify policy choices. Perhaps your average politician would rely on one central value to make a point, and then bolster that idea with appeals to the others. For example, imagine an American civic leader from the 1960s advocating for the end of Jim Crow and saying the following:
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men – yes, black men as well as white men – would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds. […]
There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, when will you be satisfied? We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. […]
This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning: My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims’ pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.
And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that, let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
Of course, I didn’t write this speech as a thought experiment. These are sections of perhaps the most famous speech of all time: Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream. And it is no wonder why this speech has gone down in the annals of history. It touches on all six of the moral values (see bolded passages above), ensuring that every listener will find something persuasive in it.
The speech opens with appeals to the loyalty/betrayal value by referencing the acts of great Americans from the past – Abraham Lincoln and the founding fathers – and aligning Martin Luther King Jr. with this long, illustrious history. However, the promises of these great men were faulty; they signed a “bad check” that couldn’t be cashed by the Black population. Of course, signing a bad check is fundamentally unfair, which causes these remarks to bring attention to a clear violation of the fairness/cheating value.
Martin Luther King Jr. then pivots to the care/harm value by illustrating the plight of Black people in the U.S. in detail. He tugs on our heart strings with references to the “unspeakable horrors of police violence” or the fact that Black people at the time couldn’t travel safely in their own country. These vivid vignettes are a main way that public speakers target the care/harm value. It humanizes the subjects, allowing the audience to empathize with their pain. I have only copied two examples in the fourth paragraph, but I encourage readers to review the entire speech for more.
In addition, references to the sanctity/degradation value are prominent throughout the speech. For example, America’s responsibilities to its Black citizens are not just important, they are a sacred obligation. It’s God’s children who will benefit from racial equality. Among a religious population, this is a winning strategy, as it resonates with both the sanctity/degradation value and the authority/subversion value (as God is an authority to them) in one stroke.
To conclude the speech, the civil rights icon hammers on one of the most important values to the American worldview: liberty/oppression. “Let freedom ring” in the “sweet land of liberty,” indeed.
Many books have been written about the roots of Martin Luther King Jr.’s success. Much has been made of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “moral clarity”, but perhaps a complementary trait might be moral responsiveness. “Moral clarity” suggests that Martin Luther King Jr. knew what was right and pursued it relentlessly. This certainly applies, but the above speech demonstrates that he was also able to appeal to a broad set of values. There were enough stories of mistreatment of Black Americans in the 1960s to fill countless books, and Martin Luther King Jr. could have simply given heart wrenching accounts of these events on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. However, that wouldn’t have been a particularly effective speech (much less a historic one), as such a strategy would have relied almost exclusively on appeals to the care/harm value. Some members of the audience would have found his words to be extremely powerful and persuasive, but not others.
However, Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t do this. He was responsive to people’s moral matrices. Some people may not have been convinced by his appeal to conditions in Black neighborhoods, but they may have been persuadedby his discussion of the rich American tradition and its obligations to all citizens, regardless of colour. This strategy makes this speech more effective, and a similar approach can be applied to current communication challenges.
Polite and Impolite Arguments
Unfortunately, current debates are rarely morally responsive. In fact, contemporary political discourse has become narrow and consistently fails to respond to all six values. Rather, mainstream moral arguments tend to revolve almost exclusively around the care/harm value, with a sprinkling of appeals to fairness/cheating and liberty/oppression when the subject demands it (and it often doesn’t). The three values most strongly held by conservatives (loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and especially sanctity/degradation) are often considered weak arguments in debate or even denigrated as logical fallacies.
To be clear, there is a difference between “polite” and “impolite” arguments. Polite arguments are rational, measured, and logical. They are taught at universities and found in the opinion section of the New York Times, on the news, or in a government briefing note. In addition, they are almost exclusively based on the care/harm value, as in they show how a certain policy leads to greater harms (or lesser benefits) than the alternative. For example, “rent control raises overall housing prices” or “long prison sentences do not deter crime” are both polite arguments, because they comment on the overall impact of the policies on people in a tangible sense. Interestingly enough, these arguments don’t always drive political decision-making, despite their dominance in public debate.
In contrast, impolite arguments are emotional, guttural, and irrational. Professors don’t often use them in class, but they might on social media, which is the home turf of the impolite argument. Unlike polite arguments, their impolite doppelgangers can draw from any of the six moral values. “Violent criminals deserve to be beaten in prison (or worse)” is an impolite argument based on fairness/cheating, just as “taking a knee during the national anthem is an affront to the nation” is one based on loyalty/betrayal. Even the care/harm value can be employed: “it’s sad that we live in a society where children are malnourished.” Will these arguments get likes on Facebook? Sure. But don’t write any of those lines on your Political Science 101 finals.
I don’t mean to suggest that polite arguments are better than impolite arguments. They’re just different. Polite arguments are more rational and that brings important advantages. They should form an important foundation of policymaking. However, impolite arguments are intuitive and persuasive, making them extremely attractive to most people. Unsurprisingly, impolite arguments often form the basis of people’s political beliefs, educated folks included.
Are Polite Arguments More Prevalent in Public Discourse?
My previous articles have provided a significant evidentiary base for the dominance of polite arguments in modern discourse, but I’d like to return to U.S. gun control as an example. Polite arguments made in the public sphere on U.S. gun control focus intensely on care/harm considerations (i.e. whether or not wide gun ownership contributes to public safety). Lots of ink has been spilled on this particular topic – just Google “does gun ownership reduce crime” for a deluge of sources, studies, and polemics. Whenever there is a mass shooting, these types of arguments tend to rise to the top and get on the front page of media outlets.
Make no mistake: these are important arguments that add to the public debate about gun control, and there is nothing wrong with the care/harm paradigm. However, there is much less focus on arguments rooted in other moral values, especially the values that are often employed in impolite arguments. For example, as demonstrated in my previous articles on gun control, there is a significant subset of American citizens who view gun ownership as a fundamental part of American identity (and there is research to back it up). But when this fact is raised, it is usually done to illustrate a problem with this viewpoint(see here, here, and here), as if this worldview is wrong and “we” have to combat it.
Let’s set the stage: a group of American public servants (read: educated, left-leaning individuals who have been trained to interpret every policy issue through the care/harm value) hold a town hall meeting on a gun control measure. A pro-gun citizen stands up in the audience and says that gun ownership is an important part of their identity as an American (as 50% of gun owners believe), so gun control measures are, to this individual, un-American by definition. Consequently, the gun control measure is wrong.
This person would probably not be taken seriously, and the public servants in attendance may attempt to “correct” the speaker (at least in their minds). Un-American? Sounds like modern McCarthyism to me. Haven’t they read the statistics about the number of people killed by guns every year? And of course, there are plenty of Americans who don’t own guns. Are they less American? Have you heard of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy? Have you really thought through this issue?
However, the pro-gun citizen did nothing wrong. They presented their honest moral assessment of the measure under review. But they would have broken an important taboo held by the educated classes, a taboo against making appeals to the three conservative values (loyalty/subversion, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation) in public debate. Such arguments are often considered jingoistic, narrowminded, and exclusionary (either rightly or wrongly). In other words, impolite.
But these are real moral values that guide people’s decisions (and their interactions with government). Demeaning them will not make them disappear, so effective policymaking must take them into account. Doing so doesn’t mean that policymakers accept the argument; in the same way, accounting for the political views of opposition parties or stakeholders in policymaking doesn’t mean that the government subscribes to these views. Good policymaking can consider an array of possible moral reactions without advocating for a certain worldview.
In fact, public servants should always have a limited role in determining which moral arguments should be accepted. That’s for democratic processes to handle. The values that should and should not drive policy are selected by elected representatives, who are chosen by the people. They are the only individuals who have the authority to make moral decisions for the government on a day-to-day basis.
However, the exclusive focus on arguments rooted in the care/harm value in public debate means that policymaking does not account for the moral compasses of large subsections of the population. Such policymaking is not morally responsive, so the resulting policies are less likely to be acceptable, internalized, and followed. In other words, policies can be ineffective precisely because they are not morally responsive.
How does this Relate to Misinformation?
Before Christmas, I wrote an article on misinformation, where I demonstrated that the six moral values can serve as drivers for fake news articles. Misinformation can easily play on our moral biases, which brings attention to inaccurate articles and encourages the rapid dissemination of such information. I promised at the end of that article to return to the topic of fake news, and after a brief interlude about Djokovic, here I am writing about Martin Luther King Jr., moral responsiveness, and unspoken taboos. What does this have to do with fake news?
Well, quite a lot actually. Next week, I’ll explain how these two ideas connect.
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