Black Lives Matter

Why I am not an anarchist

pnrj politics, public policy , , , ,

Feb 28 JDN 2459274

I read a post on social media not long ago which was remarkably thoughtful and well-written, considering that it contained ideas that would, if consistently followed, probably destroy human civilization as we know it.

It was an argument in favor of the radical view “ACAB” (for “All Cops Are Bastards”), pointing out that police officers swear an oath to uphold all laws, not only just laws, and therefore are willfully participating in a system of oppression.

This isn’t entirely wrong. Police officers do swear such an oath, and it does seem morally problematic. But if you stop and think for a moment, what was the alternative?

Should we have police officers only swear an oath to uphold the laws they believe are just? Then you have just eliminated the entire purpose of having laws. If police officers get to freely choose which laws they want to uphold and which ones they don’t, we don’t have laws; we just have police officers and their own opinions. In place of the republican system of electing representatives to choose laws, we have a system where the only democratic power lies in choosing the governor and the mayor, and from that point on downward everything is appointments that the public has no say in.

Or should we not have police officers at all? Anyone who chants “ACAB” evidently believes so. But without police officers—or at least some kind of law enforcement mechanism, which would almost certainly have to involve something very much like police officers—we once again find that laws no longer have any real power. Government ceases to exist as a meaningful institution. Laws become nothing more than statements of public disapproval. The logical conclusion of “ACAB” is nothing less than anarchism.

Don’t get me wrong; statements of public disapproval can be useful in themselves. Most international law has little if any enforcement mechanism attached to it, yet most countries follow most international laws most of the time. But for one thing, serious violations of international law are frequent—even by countries that are ostensibly “good citizens”; and for another, international politics does have some kind of enforcement mechanism—if your reputation in the international community gets bad enough, you will often face trade sanctions or even find yourself invaded.

Indeed, it is widely recognized by experts in international relations that more international law enforcement would be a very good thing—perhaps one of the very best things that could possibly happen, in fact, given its effect on war, trade, and the catastrophic risks imposed by nuclear weapons and climate change. The problem with international governance is not that it is undesirable, but that it seems infeasible; we can barely seem to get the world’s major power to all agree on international human rights, much less get them to sign onto a pact that would substantially limit their sovereignty against a global government. The UN is toothless precisely because most of the countries that have the power to control UN policy prefer it that way.

At the national and sub-national scale, however, we already have law enforcement; and while it certainly has significant flaws and is in need of various reforms, it does largely succeed at its core mission of reducing crime.

Indeed, the exceptions prove the rule: The one kind of crime that is utterly rampant in the First World, with impacts dwarfing all others, is white-collar crime—the kind that our police almost never seem to care about.

It’s unclear exactly how much worse crime would be if law enforcement did not exist. Most people, I’m sure, would be unlikely to commit rape or murder even if it were legal to do so. Indeed, it’s not clear how effective law enforcement is at actually deterring rape or murder, since rape is so underreported and most murders are one-off crimes of passion. So, a bit ironically, removing law enforcement for the worst crimes might actually have a relatively small effect.

But there are many other crimes that law enforcement clearly does successfully deter, such as aggravated assault, robbery, larceny, burglary, and car theft. Even controlling for the myriad other factors that affect crime, effective policing has been shown to reduce overall crime by at least 10 percent. Policing has the largest effects on so-called “street crime”, crimes like robbery and auto theft that occur in public places where police can be watching.

Moreover, I would contend that these kinds of estimates should be taken as a lower bound. They are comparing the marginal effect of additional policing—not the overall effect of having police at all. If the Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns applies, the marginal benefit of the first few police officers would be very high, while beyond a certain point adding more cops might not do much.

At the extremes this is almost certainly correct, in fact: A country where 25% of all citizens were police officers probably wouldn’t actually have zero crime, but it would definitely be wasting enormous amounts of resources on policing. Dropping that all the way down to 5% or even 1% could be done essentially without loss. Meanwhile—and this is really the relevant question for anarchism—a country with no police officers at all would probably be one with vastly more crime.

I can’t be certain, of course. No country has ever really tried going without police.

What there have been are police strikes: And yes, it turns out that most police strikes don’t result in substantially increased crime. But there are some important characteristics of police strikes that make this result less convincing than it might seem. First of all, police can’t really strike the way most workers can—it’s almost always illegal for police to strike. So instead what happens is a lot of them call in sick (“blue flu”), or they do only the bare minimum requirements of their duties (“work-to-rule”). Often slack in the police force is made up by deploying state or federal officers. So the “strike” is more of a moderate reduction in policing, rather than a complete collapse of policing as the word “strike” would seem to imply.

Moreover, police strikes are almost always short—the NYPD strike in the 1970s lasted only a week. A lot can still happen even in that time: The Murray-Hill riot as a result of a police strike in Montreal led to hundreds of thefts, millions of dollars in damage, and several deaths—all in a single night. (In Canada!) But even when things turn out okay after a week of striking, as they did in New York, that doesn’t really tell us what would happen if the police were gone for a month, or a year, or a decade. Most crime investigations last months or years anyway, so police going on strike for a week isn’t really that different from, say, economists going on strike for a week: It doesn’t much matter, because most of the work happens on a much longer timescale than that. Speaking as a graduate student, I’ve definitely had whole weeks where I did literally no useful work and nobody noticed.

There’s another problem as well, which is that we don’t actually know how much crime happens. We mainly know about crime from two sources: Reporting, which is directly endogenous to police activity(if the police are known to be useless, nobody reports to them) and surveys, which are very slow (usually they are conducted annually or so). With reporting, we can’t really trust how the results change when policing changes; with surveys, we don’t actually see the outcome for months or years after the policing change. Indeed, it is a notorious fact in criminology that we can’t even really reliably compare crime rates in different times and places because of differences in reporting and survey methods; the one thing we feel really confident comparing is homicide rates (dead is pretty much dead!), which are known to not be very responsive to policing for reasons I already discussed.

I suppose we could try conducting an actual experiment where we declare publically that there will be no police action whatsoever for some interval of time (wasn’t there a movie about this?), and see what happens. But this seems very dangerous: If indeed the pessimistic predictions of mass crime waves are accurate, the results could be catastrophic.

The more realistic approach would be to experiment by reducing police activity, and see if crime increases. We would probably want to do this slowly and gradually, so that we have time to observe the full effect before going too far. This is something we can—and should—do without ever needing to go all the way to being anarchists who believe in abolishing all policing. Even if you think that police are really important and great at reducing crime, you should be interested in figuring out which police methods are most cost-effective, and experimenting with different policing approaches is the best way to do that.

I understand the temptation of anarchism. Above all, it’s simple. It feels very brave and principled. I even share the temperament behind it: I am skeptical of authority in general and agree that the best world would be one where every person (or at least every adult of sound mind) had the full autonomy to make their own choices. But that world just doesn’t seem to be feasible right now, and perhaps it never will be.

Police reform is absolutely necessary. Reductions in policing should be seriously tried and studied. But anarchy is just too dangerous—and that is why we shouldn’t be getting rid of police any time soon.

A new chapter in my life, hopefully

pnrj current events, personal, politics , , , ,

Jan 17 JDN 2459232

My birthday is coming up soon, and each year around this time I try to step back and reflect on how the previous year has gone and what I can expect from the next one.

Needless to say, 2020 was not a great year for me. The pandemic and its consequences made this quite a bad year for almost everyone. Months of isolation and fear have made us all stressed and miserable, and even with the vaccines coming out the end is still all too far away. Honestly I think I was luckier than most: My work could be almost entirely done remotely, and my income is a fixed stipend, so financially I faced no hardship at all. But isolation still wreaks its toll.

Most of my energy this past year has been spent on the job market. I applied to over 70 different job postings, and from that I received 6 interviews, all but one of which I’ve already finished. Then, if they liked how I did in those interviews, I will be invited to another phase, which in normal times would be a flyout where candidates visit the campus; but due to COVID it’s all being done remotely now. And then, finally, I may actually get some job offers. Statistically I think I will probably get some kind of offer at this point, but I can’t be sure—and that uncertainty is quite nerve-wracking. I may get a job and move somewhere new, or I may not and have to stay here for another year and try again. Both outcomes are still quite probable, and I really can’t plan on either one.

If I do actually get a job, this will open a new chapter in my life—and perhaps I will finally be able to settle down with a permanent career, buy a house, start a family. One downside of graduate school I hadn’t really anticipated is how it delays adulthood: You don’t really feel like you are a proper adult, because you are still in the role of a student for several additional years. I am all too ready to be done with being a student. I feel as though I’ve spent all my life preparing to do things instead of actually doing them, and I am now so very tired of preparing.

I don’t even know for sure what I want to do—I feel disillusioned with academia, I haven’t been able to snare any opportunities in government or nonprofits, and I need more financial security than I could get if I leapt headlong into full-time writing. But I am quite certain that I want to actually do something, and no longer simply be trained and prepared (and continually evaluated on that training and preparation).

I’m even reluctant to do a postdoc, because that also likely means packing up and moving again in a few year (though I would prefer it to remaining here another year).

I have to keep reminding myself that all of this is temporary: The pandemic will eventually be quelled by vaccines, and quarantine procedures will end, and life for most of us will return to normal. Even if I don’t get a job I like this year, I probably will next year; and then I can finally tie off my education with a bow and move on. Even if the first job isn’t permanent, eventually one will be, and at last I’ll be able to settle into a stable adult life.

Much of this has already dragged on longer than I thought it would. Not the job market, which has gone more or less as expected. (More accurately, my level of optimism has jumped up and down like a roller coaster, and on average what I thought would happen has been something like what actually happened so far.) But the pandemic certainly has; the early attempts at lockdown were ineffective, the virus kept spreading worse and worse, and now there are more COVID cases in the US than ever before. Southern California in particular has been hit especially hard, and hospitals here are now overwhelmed just as we feared they might be.

Even the removal of Trump has been far more arduous than I expected. First there was the slow counting of ballots because so many people had (wisely) voted absentee. Then there were the frivolous challenges to the counts—and yes, I mean frivolous in a legal sense, as 61 out of 62 lawsuits were thrown out immediately and the 1 that made it through was a minor technical issue.

And then there was an event so extreme I can barely even fathom that it actually happened: An armed mob stormed the Capitol building, forced Congress to evacuate, and made it inside with minimal resistance from the police. The stark difference in how the police reacted to this attempted insurrection and how they have responded to the Black Lives Matter protests underscores the message of Black Lives Matter better than they ever could have by themselves.

In one sense it feels like so much has happened: We have borne witness to historic events in real-time. But in another sense it feels like so little has happened: Staying home all the time under lockdown has meant that days are alway much the same, and each day blends into the next. I feel somehow unhinged frrom time, at once marveling that a year has passed already, and marveling that so much happened in only a year.

I should soon hear back from these job interviews and have a better idea what the next chapter of my life will be. But I know for sure that I’ll be relieved once this one is over.

I dislike overstatement

pnrj core principles, ethics, personal, politics , , , , , , , , ,

Jan 10 JDN 2459225

I was originally planning on titling this post “I hate overstatement”, but I thought that might be itself an overstatement; then I considered leaning into the irony with something like “Overstatement is the worst thing ever”. But no, I think my point best comes across if I exemplify it, rather than present it ironically.

It’s a familiar formula: “[Widespread belief] is wrong! [Extreme alternative view] is true! [Obvious exception]. [Further qualifications]. [Revised, nuanced view that is only slightly different from the widespread belief].”

Here are some examples of the formula (these are not direct quotes but paraphrases of their general views). Note that these are all people I basically agree with, and yet I still find their overstatement annoying:

Bernie Sanders: “Capitalism is wrong! Socialism is better! Well, not authoritarian socialism like the Soviet Union. And some industries clearly function better when privatized. Scandinavian social democracy seems to be the best system.”

Richard Dawkins: “Religion is a delusion! Only atheists are rational! Well, some atheists are also pretty irrational. And most religious people are rational about most things most of the time, and don’t let their religious beliefs interfere too greatly with their overall behavior. Really, what I mean to say that is that God doesn’t exist and organized religion is often harmful.”

Black Lives Matter: “Abolish the police! All cops are bastards! Well, we obviously still need some kind of law enforcement system for dealing with major crimes; we can’t just let serial killers go free. In fact, while there are deep-seated flaws in police culture, we could solve a lot of the most serious problems with a few simple reforms like changing the rules of engagement.”

Sam Harris is particularly fond of this formula, so here is a direct quote that follows the pattern precisely:

“The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and to innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.”

Somehow in a single paragraph he started with the assertion “It is permissible to punish thoughtcrime with death” and managed to qualify it down to “The Afghanistan War was largely justified”. This is literally the difference between a proposition fundamentally antithetical to everything America stands for, and an utterly uncontroversial statement most Americans agree with. Harris often complains that people misrepresent his views, and to some extent this is true, but honestly I think he does this on purpose because he knows that controversy sells. There’s taking things out of context—and then there’s intentionally writing in a style that will maximize opportunities to take you out of context.

I think the idea behind overstating your case is that you can then “compromise” toward your actual view, and thereby seem more reasonable.

If there is some variable X that we want to know the true value of, and I currently believe that it is some value x1 while you believe that it is some larger value x2, and I ask you what you think, you may not want to tell me x2. Intead you might want to give some number even larger than x2 that you choose to try to make me adjust all the way into adopting your new belief.

For instance, suppose I think the probability of your view being right is p and the probability of my view being right is 1-p. But you think that the probability of your view being right is q > p and the probability of my view being right is 1-q < 1-p.

I tell you that my view is x1. Then I ask you what your view is. What answer should you give?


Well, you can expect that I’ll revise my belief to a new value px + (1-p)x1, where x is whatever answer you give me. The belief you want me to hold is qx2 + (1-q)x1. So your optimal choice is as follows:

qx2 + (1-q)x1 = px + (1-p)x1

x = x1 + q/p(x2-x1)

Since q > p, q/p > 1 and the x you report to me will be larger than your true value x2. You will overstate your case to try to get me to adjust my beliefs more. (Interestingly, if you were less confident in your own beliefs, you’d report a smaller difference. But this seems like a rare case.)

In a simple negotiation over dividing some resource (e.g. over a raise or a price), this is quite reasonable. When you’re a buyer and I’m a seller, our intentions are obvious enough: I want to sell high and you want to buy low. Indeed, the Nash Equilibrium of this game seems to be that we both make extreme offers then compromise on a reasonable offer, all the while knowing that this is exactly what we’re doing.

But when it comes to beliefs about the world, things aren’t quite so simple.

In particular, we have reasons for our beliefs. (Or at least, we’re supposed to!) And evidence isn’t linear. Even when propositions can be placed on a one-dimensional continuum in this way (and quite frankly we shoehorn far too many complex issues onto a simple “left/right” continuum!), evidence that X = x isn’t partial evidence that X = 2x. A strong argument that the speed of light is 3*108 m/s isn’t a weak argument that the speed of light is 3*109 m/s. A compelling reason to think that taxes should be over 30% isn’t even a slight reason to think that taxes should be over 90%.

To return to my specific examples: Seeing that Norway is a very prosperous country doesn’t give us reasons to like the Soviet Union. Recognizing that religion is empirically false doesn’t justify calling all religious people delusional. Reforming the police is obviously necessary, and diverting funds to other social services is surely a worthwhile goal; but law enforcement is necessary and cannot simply be abolished. And defending against the real threat of Islamist terrorism in no way requires us to institute the death penalty for thoughtcrime.

I don’t know how most people response to overstatement. Maybe it really does cause them to over-adjust their beliefs. Hyperbole is a very common rhetorical tactic, and for all I know perhaps it is effective on many people.

But personally, here is my reaction: At the very start, you stated something implausible. That has reduced your overall credibility.

If I continue reading and you then deal with various exceptions and qualifications, resulting in a more reasonable view, I do give you some credit for that; but now I am faced with a dilemma: Either (1) you were misrepresenting your view initially, or (2) you are engaging in a motte-and-bailey doctrine, trying to get me to believe the strong statement while you can only defend the weak statement. Either way I feel like you are being dishonest and manipulative. I trust you less. I am less interested in hearing whatever else you have to say. I am in fact less likely to adopt your nuanced view than I would have been if you’d simply presented it in the first place.

And that’s assuming I have the opportunity to hear your full nuanced version. If all I hear is the sound-byte overstatement, I will come away with an inaccurate assessment of your beliefs. I will have been presented with an implausible claim and evidence that doesn’t support that claim. I will reject your view out of hand, without ever actually knowing what your view truly was.

Furthermore, I know that many others who are listening are not as thoughtful as I am about seeking out detailed context, so even if I know the nuanced version I know—and I think you know—that some people are going to only hear the extreme version.

Maybe what it really comes down to is a moral question: Is this a good-faith discussion where we are trying to reach the truth together? Or is this a psychological manipulation to try to get me to believe what you believe? Am I a fellow rational agent seeking knowledge with you? Or am I a behavior machine that you want to control by pushing the right buttons?

I won’t say that overstatement is always wrong—because that would be an overstatement. But please, make an effort to avoid it whenever you can.

Why nonviolence?

pnrj core principles, current events, ethics , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 16 JDN 2459078

You are no doubt aware that there are widespread protests going on right now. You may even have marched in some of them. Nearly 30 million Americans have participated in the Black Lives Matter protests, located in cities all around the country; this makes them quite likely the largest protests in American history.

The right wing is of course making much of the isolated incidents of violence that have occurred, often but not always actually provoked by the police or federal agents assigned to quell the protests. They have also made much of the property destruction caused by riots that have emerged from the protests, typically eliding the distinction between property destruction and violence. Since there has been far more property destruction than actual violence, this allows them to effectively inflate the level of violence.

In reality, the total deaths caused by these protests over two months and counting is clearly less than the number of Americans who are shot by police in an average week. And the total amount of property destruction is clearly less than the tens of billions of dollars per year that are stolen in wage theft, let alone the hundreds of billions of dollars per year that are stolen by white-collar crime. If violence and loss of property are really what you care about, these protests should not be your main concern.

Yet, I am concerned that too many on the left are too willing to accept violence. I have seen far too many people sharing and endorsing this quote:

“Dr. King’s policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That’s very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”

~ Stokely Carmichael

Nonviolence does work. Nonviolence did work for the civil rights movement. No, it doesn’t depend upon your opponent having a conscience—it only depends upon bystanders having a conscience. (Also, “the United States has no conscience” is only true insofar as socially constructed institutions don’t have feelings. Clearly most of the people in the United States—probably even most of the people in the US government—have a conscience!)

In fact, nonviolent protest is typically more effective than violent protest. When protesters turn to violence, they alienate the public whose support they need, and they allow the government to feel justified in responding with even more force. Campaigns of nonviolent civil resistance have been historically more effective than violent revolutions, even against authoritarian governments. On average, nonviolent protests are twice as likely to achieve their goals than violent protests.

Even worse than the Carmichael quote are the memes that have been shared saying things like this: “You want to fix the system, but not use violence; so, by magic?”

Nonviolence doesn’t mean politely asking for rights. It doesn’t mean being calm and non-confrontational. It doesn’t mean waiting patiently.

Nonviolence doesn’t even mean following the law or never damaging property. Some of the most important and effective acts of nonviolent protest involved breaking laws and damaging things—Rosa Parks was breaking the law, and does the Boston Tea Party ring a bell?

Nonviolence doesn’t even mean that nobody gets hurt; it often means strategically placing your own people in harm’s way knowing that the government’s violent overreaction will stir support for your cause. It’s a kind of ethical and political judo: Instead of directly resisting your stronger opponent, you maneuver so that their own power ends up damaging them. You use the government’s repression as a weapon for your own cause.

What does nonviolence mean?

Nonviolence means you don’t hurt people.

It sounds so simple and obvious, but a lot of people still don’t seem to get it. They seem to think that our only choices are “ask nicely” or “start a civil war”. Asking nicely obviously would not be effective; only someone deeply naive could imagine otherwise. Working legally within the system can sometimes be effective, but when really deep reforms are needed urgently it is often not enough. Starting a civil war might work—it has sometimes worked in the past—but it would come at a horrendous cost, probably thousands if not millions of lives.

Fortunately, these are not our only options. We don’t have to ask nicely; we don’t even have to obey the law. We can even break things. We just need to not hurt people. That still allows for a variety of forms of protest, confrontation, civil disobedience, and direct action. Jacobin, oddly enough, gets this right.

In reality, any movement is going to have extremists who act violently. A protest movement can still be considered nonviolent as long as such incidents of violence can be kept to a minimum, and never condoned by the leaders of the movement. Thus far, Black Lives Matter has absolutely fit that description—indeed, impressively so, given the sheer scale of the protests.

Some degree of self-defense can even be consistent with nonviolence, though it must be of a very minimal sort. Wearing armor and carrying a shield is entirely consistent with nonviolence. Hitting back after you are hit is a finer line. This is morally still nonviolence as long as you use only the minimal necessary force—but politically it will only work if the public clearly knows that you are not the ones who hit first.

The ethical case for nonviolence is simple, but worth repeating: Human lives have intrinsic value. Yes, even if those human beings work willingly for a corrupt and evil system. Yes, even the average Nazi was a sentient being of intrinsic moral worth.

The only people who really deserve to die are the psychopaths at the top pulling the strings—and they are almost never the ones on the front lines getting shot or bombed. If you had a plan to kill Donald Trump, I would have no particular moral objection. I think such a plan would be very unlikely to succeed, and I would never attempt such a thing myself; but does Donald Trump deserve to die for his brazen authoritarianism, overwhelming corruption, and depraved indifference for over 160,000 dead Americans? Yes. But how does that justify killing random police officers?

Nonviolence also has another great advantage, which is that it works better when you are on the right side. The effectiveness of violence is proportional to your firepower; the effectiveness of nonviolence is proportional to your righteousness. Why in the world would you, who are righteous but have little firepower, want to use violence against an enemy that is unrighteous and has more firepower?

Nonviolent protest actually works best when your enemy is violent and repressive; it is precisely that contrast between your nonviolence and their violence that wins people to your cause. Probably the smartest thing a government could do to respond to nonviolent protests would be to sit back and calmly watch them, then make whatever was the minimal level of concessions in order to make the protests lose momentum. When you bring out the tear gas, you have basically already admitted that you are on the wrong side of history. But repressive governments don’t think that way; if they did, they would have given those same concessions before the protests even gathered steam. They imagine that by simply cracking down harder they will be able to win—but they are usually wrong.

And even if the ethical case for nonviolence means literally nothing to you, please consider the strategic case: The empirical data says quite clearly that nonviolent protest works better. In many ways, violence is the default; it’s the conflict revolution mechanism that we evolved to use, largely unmodified from the same instincts that motivate any other primate. Nonviolence is a recent invention, a high-tech solution to this ancient problem. Violence is easy; just about anyone can do it. Nonviolence is hard; it requires strategic cleverness, unwavering vigilance, and deep moral courage.

This is not to say that violence is never necessary: Against a truly totalitarian regime that is willing to murder people simply for speaking out against the government, violence may well be the only option. I certainly do not begrudge the French Resistance for using violence against the Nazis. But violence should be a last resort, not simply for ethical reasons—but also for strategic reasons.

Moral disagreement is not bad faith

pnrj cognitive science, core principles, current events, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jun 7 JDN 2459008

One of the most dangerous moves to make in an argument is to accuse your opponent of bad faith. It’s a powerful, and therefore tempting, maneuver: If they don’t even really believe what they are saying, then you can safely ignore basically whatever comes out of their mouth. And part of why this is so tempting is that it is in fact occasionally true—people do sometimes misrepresent their true beliefs in various ways for various reasons. On the Internet especially, sometimes people are just trolling.

But unless you have really compelling evidence that someone is arguing in bad faith, you should assume good faith. You should assume that whatever they are asserting is what they actually believe. For if you assume bad faith and are wrong, you have just cut off any hope of civil discourse between the two of you. You have made it utterly impossible for either side to learn anything or change their mind in any way. If you assume good faith and are wrong, you may have been overly charitable; but in the end you are the one that is more likely to persuade any bystanders, not the one who was arguing in bad faith.

Furthermore, it is important to really make an effort to understand your opponent’s position as they understand it before attempting to respond to it. Far too many times, I have seen someone accused of bad faith by an opponent who simply did not understand their worldview—and did not even seem willing to try to understand their worldview.

In this post, I’m going to point out some particularly egregious examples of this phenomenon that I’ve found, all statements made by left-wing people in response to right-wing people. Why am I focusing on these? Well, for one thing, it’s as important to challenge bad arguments on your own side as it is to do so on the other side. I also think I’m more likely to be persuasive to a left-wing audience. I could find right-wing examples easily enough, but I think it would be less useful: It would be too tempting to think that this is something only the other side does.

Example 1: “Republicans Have Stopped Pretending to Care About Life”

The phrase “pro-life” means thinking that abortion is wrong. That’s all it means. It’s jargon at this point. The phrase has taken on this meaning independent of its constituent parts, just as a red herring need not be either red or a fish.

Stop accusing people of not being “truly pro-life” because they don’t adopt some other beliefs that are not related to abortion. Even if those would be advancing life in some sense (most people probably think that most things they think are good advance life in some sense!), they aren’t relevant to the concept of being “pro-life”. Moreover, being “pro-life” in the traditional conservative sense isn’t even about minimizing the harm of abortion or the abortion rate. It’s about emphasizing the moral wrongness of abortion itself, and often even criminalizing it.


I don’t think this is really so hard to understand. If someone truly, genuinely believes that abortion is murdering a child, it’s quite clear why they won’t be convinced by attempts at minimizing harm or trying to reduce the abortion rate via contraception or other social policy. Many policies are aimed at “reducing the demand for abortion”; would you want to “reduce the demand for murder”? No, you’d want murderers to be locked up. You wouldn’t care what their reasons were, and you wouldn’t be interested in using social policies to address those reasons. It’s not even hard to understand why this would be such an important issue to them, overriding almost anything else: If you thought that millions of people were murdering children you would consider that an extremely important issue too.

If you want to convince people to support Roe v. Wade, you’re going to have to change their actual belief that abortion is murder. You may even be able to convince them that they don’t really think abortion is murder—many conservatives support the death penalty for murder, but very few do so for abortion. But they clearly do think that abortion is a grave moral wrong, and you can’t simply end-run around that by calling them hypocrites because they don’t care about whatever other issue you think they should care about.

Example 2: “Stop pretending to care about human life if you support wars in the Middle East”

I had some trouble finding the exact wording of the meme I originally saw with this sentiment, but the gist of it was basically that if you support bombing Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, and/or Syria, you have lost all legitimacy to claiming that you care about human life.

Say what you will about these wars (though to be honest I think what the US has done in Libya and Syria has done more good than harm), but simply supporting a war does not automatically undermine all your moral legitimacy. The kind of radical pacifism that requires us to never kill anyone ever is utterly unrealistic; the question is and has always been “Which people is it okay to kill, when and how and why?” Some wars are justified; we have to accept that.

It would be different if these were wars of genocidal extermination; I can see a case for saying that anyone who supported the Holocaust or the Rwandan Genocide has lost all moral legitimacy. But even then it isn’t really accurate to say that those people don’t care about human life; it’s much more accurate to say that they have assigned the group of people they want to kill to a subhuman status. Maybe you would actually get more traction by saying “They are human beings too!” rather than by accusing people of not believing in the value of human life.

And clearly these are not wars of extermination—if the US military wanted to exterminate an entire nation of people, they could do so much more efficiently than by using targeted airstrikes and conventional warfare. Remember: They have nuclear weapons. Even if you think that they wouldn’t use nukes because of fear of retaliation (Would Russia or China really retaliate using their own nukes if the US nuked Afghanistan or Iran?), it’s clear that they could have done a lot more to kill a lot more innocent people if that were actually their goal. It’s one thing to say they don’t take enough care not to kill innocent civilians—I agree with that. It’s quite another to say that they actively try to kill innocent civilians—that’s clearly not what is happening.

Example 3: “Stop pretending to be Christian if you won’t help the poor.”

This one I find a good deal more tempting: In the Bible, Jesus does spend an awful lot more words on helping the poor than he does on, well, almost anything else; and he doesn’t even once mention abortion or homosexuality. (The rest of the Bible does at least mention homosexuality, but it really doesn’t have any clear mentions of abortion.) So it really is tempting to say that anyone who doesn’t make helping the poor their number one priority can’t really be a Christian.

But the world is more complicated than that. People can truly and deeply believe some aspects of a religion while utterly rejecting others. They can do this more or less arbitrarily, in a way that may not even be logically coherent. They may even honestly believe that every single word of the Bible to be the absolute perfect truth of an absolute perfect God, and yet there are still passages you could point them to that they would have to admit they don’t believe in. (There are literally hundreds of explicit contradictions in the Bible. Many are minor—though still undermine any claim to absolute perfect truth—but some are really quite substantial. Does God forgive and forget, or does he visit revenge upon generations to come? That’s kind of a big deal! And should we be answering fools or not?) In some sense they don’t really believe that every word is true, then; but they do seem to believe in believing it.

Yes, it’s true; people can worship a penniless son of a carpenter who preached peace and charity and at the same time support cutting social welfare programs and bombing the Middle East. Such a worldview may not be entirely self-consistent; it’s certainly not the worldview that Jesus himself espoused. But it nevertheless is quite sincerely believed by many millions of people.

It may still be useful to understand the Bible in order to persuade Christians to help the poor more. There are certainly plenty of passages you can point them to where Jesus talks about how important it is to help the poor. Likewise, Jesus doesn’t seem to much like the rich, so it is fair to ask: How Christian is it for Republicans to keep cutting taxes on the rich? (I literally laughed out loud when I first saw this meme: “Celebrate Holy Week By Flogging a Banker: It’s What Jesus Would Have Done!“) But you should not accuse people of “pretending to be Christian”. They really do strongly identify themselves as Christian, and would sooner give up almost anything else about their identity. If you accuse them of pretending, all that will do is shut down the conversation.

Now, after all that, let me give one last example that doesn’t fit the trend, one example where I really do think the other side is acting in bad faith.


Example 4: “#AllLivesMatter is a lie. You don’t actually think all lives matter.”

I think this one is actually true. If you truly believed that all lives matter, you wouldn’t post the hashtag #AllLivesMatter in response to #BlackLivesMatter protests against police brutality.

First of all, you’d probably be supporting those protests. But even if you didn’t for some reason, that isn’t how you would use the hashtag. As a genuine expression of caring, the hashtag #AllLivesMatter would only really make sense for something like Oxfam or UNICEF: Here are these human lives that are in danger and we haven’t been paying enough attention to them, and here, you can follow my hashtag and give some money to help them because all lives matter. If it were really about all lives mattering, then you’d see the hashtag pop up after a tsunami in Southeast Asia or a famine in central Africa. (For awhile I tried actually using it that way; I quickly found that it was overwhelmed by the bad faith usage and decided to give up.)

No, this hashtag really seems to be trying to use a genuinely reasonable moral norm—all lives matter—as a weapon against a political movement. We don’t see #AllLivesMatter popping up asking people to help save some lives—it’s always as a way of shouting down other people who want to save some lives. It’s a glib response that lets you turn away and ignore their pleas, without ever actually addressing the substance of what they are saying. If you really believed that all lives matter, you would not be so glib; you would want to understand how so many people are suffering and want to do something to help them. Even if you ultimately disagreed with what they were saying, you would respect them enough to listen.

The counterpart #BlueLivesMatter isn’t in bad faith, but it is disturbing in a different way: What are ‘blue lives’? People aren’t born police officers. They volunteer for that job. They can quit if want. No one can quit being Black. Working as a police officer isn’t even especially dangerous! But it’s not a bad faith argument: These people really do believe that the lives of police officers are worth more—apparently much more—than the lives of Black civilians.

I do admit, the phrasing “#BlackLivesMatter” is a bit awkward, and could be read to suggest that other lives don’t matter, but it takes about 2 minutes of talking to someone (or reading a blog by someone) who supports those protests to gather that this is not their actual view. Perhaps they should have used #BlackLivesMatterToo, but when your misconception is that easily rectified the responsibility to avoid it falls on you. (Then again, some people do seem to stoke this misconception: I was quite annoyed when a question was asked at a Democratic debate: “Do Black Lives Matter, or Do All Lives Matter?” The correct answer of course is “All lives matter, which is why I support the Black Lives Matter movement.”)

So, yes, bad faith arguments do exist, and sometimes we need to point them out. But I implore you, consider that a last resort, a nuclear option you’ll only deploy when all other avenues have been exhausted. Once you accuse someone of bad faith, you have shut down the conversation completely—preventing you, them, and anyone else who was listening from having any chance of learning or changing their mind.