https://josephheath.substack.com/p/moral-responsibility-for-backlash?publication_id=1796678&post_id=156419848&isFreemail=true&r=2smju&triedRedirect=true

Excerpt:

1. Acknowledge reasonable disagreement. It used to be one of the most boring observations in contemporary political philosophy that modern societies are characterized by the “fact of reasonable pluralism” about questions of the good. The idea was fairly simple: In a complex society, different people have different, sincerely held moral views, which lead them to draw different conclusions about important policy questions, but where no one is making any sort of obvious mistake or error in reasoning. In many cases, everyone shares the same general values, but different people assign them different weight. Because of this, you can’t make policy based on the conviction that one of these views is correct and the others mistaken.

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https://josephheath.substack.com/p/moral-responsibility-for-backlash?publication_id=1796678&post_id=156419848&isFreemail=true&r=2smju&triedRedirect=true

Moral Responsibility for Backlash

Is it a thing? Should it be?

Joseph Heath

Feb 03, 2025

149

Suppose that you are committed to a moral value, which has policy implications that you would like to realize. Suppose also that this value is controversial, such that achieving these policy outcomes will generate opposition. Finally, suppose that you are in a position to implement these policies in various ways that are, from the standpoint of your own values, better or worse, but that the further you go in promoting your values, the greater the chance of triggering a backlash from your opponents, who might then succeed in undoing the policies. The interesting question then becomes, what compromises should you be prepared to make, with respect to these policy objectives? Should you be a purist and stick to doing what you think is best? Or should you moderate your stance, in order to avoid the risk of backlash?

These are not entirely speculative questions. As many will have noticed, liberals and progressives in the U.S. are now suffering an enormous backlash against many of the policies that they have championed over the past decade. Not many of them seem to feel much personal responsibility for this outcome. After all, they were just doing what they thought was right. There is a temptation to put the blame entirely on the bad guys who are carrying out the backlash. They are, after all, the proximate cause – if they weren’t acting this way, none of it would be happening. And yet the way that they are acting is hardly unpredictable, nor is it entirely unprovoked. One cannot help wondering whether, if liberals had played their cards a bit smarter, they would not currently be facing such an epochal defeat.

This is the question that I’ve been puzzling over: if I do something that foreseeably provokes someone else to act in a way that I consider highly unethical, how much responsibility do I bear for that outcome? (I am assuming that responsibility comes in degrees, so that even if the other person bears primary responsibility, I might still bear some responsibility, if their reaction was predictable, avoidable, etc.) It’s a good question for Canadians to be asking themselves right now also, given that the big backlash in this country is still impending. My impression, based on work email and occasional CBC listening, is that elites in this country seem to think it’s their job is to keep the flame alive, to make Canada the last bastion of unrepentant wokeness (and then righteously go down with the ship?). So the question for Canadians becomes, is there an obligation to dial things back a bit, in order to reduce the risk or the intensity of the foreseeable backlash?

The issue of responsibility for backlash has attracted some attention from political philosophers, particularly in the area of immigration policy. Many academics think that wealthy countries should accept more immigrants than they presently do, but recognize also that high levels of immigration run the risk of triggering nativist backlash. The example works nicely, because immigration policies can easily be ranked as more or less ambitious, based on the number of migrants that are admitted to the country. Most Western countries have a reasonable level of tolerance for a relatively low number of migrants (e.g. rates less than 1% of population per year), but opposition grows as this number is increased. There are also important threshold effects, where opposition does not scale up linearly with the inflow, but may reach critical mass at certain points. (Similarly, opposition may drive support for far-right parties, which may be relatively unimportant until it surpasses a threshold that allows them to obtain political power.)

The interesting question that arises is whether the desire to avoid this sort of backlash constitutes a good argument for moderating one’s policy stance. The question can be answered quite simply if one adopts a straightforwardly maximizing stance with respect to one’s values. Suppose there are three policy options, A, B and C, all of which are better than the status quo, but where (from my point of view) C is best, B is second best, and A is only a slight improvement. Suppose that all three proposals are opposed by others, but that mobilizing against them involves some fixed cost, as a result of which A can be expected to “fly below the radar,” evoking no overt opposition, B will evoke opposition, and so has some probability of being reversed, whereas C may generate backlash, in the sense that not only will it be opposed, but that opposition may lead to the implementation of policies worse than the status quo. Which policy option should I choose? Simple maximization tells me to make up a little table outlining all the possible outcomes, give each one a score indicating how good or bad it is, and then, for each action available to me, figure out the probability that it will result in different outcomes, multiply through and add up the expected values, then choose the action that has the highest score.

This sort of analysis is fine, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t really tell you much about moral obligation. If you think C is the right thing to do, that others are wrong to oppose it, and that they bear responsibility for their own actions, then it isn’t really your responsibility to worry about what they might do in response to C. So you might feel an obligation to promote C even if it is not likely to produce the best results. (In the context of debates over immigration, the objection to taking into consideration the likely response of others is sometimes expressed in terms of the “bigot’s veto.” According to this view, if you think that the country should double the number of migrants, and yet you recognize that this will cause a racist backlash, this should not deter you from pursuing such a policy. Doing so would amount to giving racists a veto over immigration policy. The solution is not for you to moderate your policy ambitions, but rather for the racists to stop being racist. If they persist in being racist, the resulting backlash is their fault, not yours.)

Although this sort of reasoning is quite common, there is something about it that I find unsatisfactory. Most obviously, it involves helping oneself to the claim that one’s own view is good and one’s opponent’s evil, which is of course how one is inclined to view those who reject one’s values, but is often question-begging. Most contentious political issues are not straightforward, but involve rather several different values, which people may weigh in different ways. Many controversial recent political issues, like immigration policy, COVID restrictions, affirmative action, and abortion policy, involve balancing competing concerns. This should be acknowledged in the way that one goes about advancing one’s own agenda. If one fails to do so, and as a result provokes a backlash, it seems to me that one must bear some responsibility for this outcome.

A wise man once told me that, in order to win an argument, it wasn’t enough just to have the correct position, you must also give your opponent a face-saving way of accepting that position. If you leave your opponent no option but to say “you were right, I was wrong,” that person will never back down. You need to say things like “I can see what you are thinking, and if the situation was of type x I would agree with you, but I think we’re in more of a type y position…” Policy disputes are roughly the same. It is important to give one’s opponent the option of honorable defeat. In many cases of backlash, however, it seems to me the policies that have been implemented, or the way they have been implemented, have made this impossible.

In terms of the current political environment, the right-wing commitment to “owning the libs” is clearly not intended to foster honorable compromise. At the same time, many liberals and progressives seem to be unaware of how unnecessarily provocative their own behavior has been, especially over the past ten years. In order to remain blameless, in the face of backlash, it seems to me that there are at least three things one should be doing:

1. Acknowledge reasonable disagreement. It used to be one of the most boring observations in contemporary political philosophy that modern societies are characterized by the “fact of reasonable pluralism” about questions of the good. The idea was fairly simple: In a complex society, different people have different, sincerely held moral views, which lead them to draw different conclusions about important policy questions, but where no one is making any sort of obvious mistake or error in reasoning. In many cases, everyone shares the same general values, but different people assign them different weight. Because of this, you can’t make policy based on the conviction that one of these views is correct and the others mistaken.

Take, for example, the issue of abortion. Almost everyone involved in these debates grants that there is something of value in the life of the fetus, just as there is something of value in women’s bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom. Philosophers refer to these as pro tanto values, which means that they provide a morally relevant consideration, but not one that necessarily overrides other such considerations. In order to make an all-things-considered judgment, one must assemble all of the pro tanto considerations, balance them against one another, and decide which option comes out on top. Most people who are pro-choice endorse the position, not because they deny that the life of the fetus is valuable, but because they think that in the early stages of pregnancy its value is not great enough to outweigh the mother’s autonomy.

Issues like affirmative action have the same structure. On the one hand, there is clearly a value of procedural neutrality or fairness involved in the competitive allocation of advantageous scarce positions (which is why we all spend so much time worrying about discrimination and bias). On the other hand, there is an outcome-based concern about who is winning these competitions and what effect this has on the broader distribution of advantages in society. Up to a certain point these two concerns are compatible – modest affirmative action will promote both greater procedural fairness and more representative outcomes – but when pushed too hard they easily come apart, at which point one starts to see reasonable disagreement about the relative value of the two concerns (and thus, over the merits of more outcome-oriented affirmative action initiatives).

There are, of course, a certain number of fanatics on all sides of these issues. (A fanatic, for our purposes, can be defined as someone who assigns all weight to a single value, with complete indifference to the others.) I don’t think the actual number of fanatics is that large, but in the heat of political confrontation, many advocates for one side or another often wind up sounding like fanatics. When dealing with an opponent who assigns greater value to a particular concern, it’s rhetorically much simpler to deny the force of that concern than to claim that its importance has been overstated. This has the unfortunate effect, however, of making one’s own position seem ridiculous, as though it were based not on weighing, but rather on denying the force of certain self-evident values. In order to avoid this, it is important to emphasize that one is not blind to the moral values that motivate one’s opponent, one simply disagrees about their relative importance.

Unfortunately, all of these points about reasonable disagreement, which used to be considered somewhat obvious, have become increasingly unobvious to many people. With students, in particular, I find myself now having to dedicate a lot more time to explaining this idea, and I encounter a great deal more resistance. This is mainly because left-wing students have all mastered a set of rhetorical moves designed to make their preferred political positions seem outside the space of reasonable disagreement. One can see this playing out, for example, in the way that the term “genocide” gets used in contemporary debates, in an attempt to close down discussion. (For example, here is a major opinion columnist at Canada’s most important newspaper openly supporting criminalization of speech that can be construed as “condoning, denying, justifying or playing down the harm caused by residential schools in Canada…” Her argument is that since “all members of Parliament recognized that the Indian residential school era provided cover for genocide,” it is no longer necessary to tolerate any debate over the magnitude of the harms caused, or the culpability of those involved. Suggesting that it was not in fact a genocide would presumably also be subject to criminal prosecution. It is not difficult to see how the word “genocide” is being invoked here like a magical talisman, to create a state of exception from all of the usual objections to censorship.)

Calling one’s opponents racist is often just another version of this strategy. Since racism, as conventionally understood, is an unmitigated evil, there is simply no reason to grant any deference to one’s opponent’s views if they can be characterized as racist. So with respect to immigration, there is no reason to grant any weight to the concern that people have for the integrity of their own culture, religion, or communal practices, if one can dismiss their concerns as racist. Again, while perhaps rhetorically powerful, this argumentation strategy also has the effect of making supporters of immigration sound like fanatics. In other words, it makes us seem as though we don’t care at all about something that is profoundly important to our fellow citizens. This encourages backlash, to the point where it has become completely counterproductive as a political strategy. Calling one’s political opponents racist has become equivalent to sticking your fingers in your ears and saying “la la la” while they’re talking. If I had my way, there would be a ten-year moratorium on the use of the term in political debate.

2. Do not demand symbolic affirmation. An important piece of worldly wisdom involves the recognition that the way things work in practice does not always align with the representations we have of how things work. Because of this, it is often possible to get a particular policy implemented in practice, without requiring that everyone recognize or acknowledge it at the level of explicit representation. The Canadian federation offers a particularly striking example of this, where it functions in practice as a system of asymmetric federalism, but where every attempt to achieve constitutional recognition of this practice has failed. (In practice, Quebec has special status in all sorts of ways. But if anyone tries to provide formal acknowledgment of this, all the other provinces rebel and demand the same treatment, which is unworkable.) People often get a lot more worked up over symbolic issues, and apply stricter principles to them, than they do over actual states of affairs, where they are willing to overlook departures from those principles.

Because of this tendency, it is often good politics to toss a bone to your opponents on the symbolic front, if it helps you to get your way in practice. Imagine two policies, where with B you get 95% of what you want, but that missing 5% per cent allows your opponent to save face, and C, which gives you 100% of what you want, and so gives your opponent no option but to acknowledge defeat. Insisting on C may be strategically unwise, but it also seems to me morally objectionable. On this point, everyone should take a moment to reacquaint themselves with Bunny Colvin’s “brown paper bag” speech:

One can see this style of “civic compromise” being eroded in the current state of affirmative action in Canadian universities. For several decades, job advertisements have featured a set of relatively standard phrases that signal the degree of preference that will be accorded to applicants from various disadvantaged groups (this document provides an overview of what used to be standard practice in my field). In the past few years though, this language has been thrown overboard in favour of advertisements that are overtly discriminatory (e.g. that advertise the position as being “open” only to members of a listed set of identity groups). This was actually driven by the federal government, through its research chairs program, but it set off a bit of a mania within universities for overt race restrictions on various desirable positions, awards and opportunities.

It is important to emphasize that these changes in language accomplish nothing, or very close to nothing, in practice. There was already such intense affirmative action going on that the prevailing practice imposed a de facto quota on the number of white men getting various positions. And yet from a policy perspective, it was like option B above, in that it offered at least a symbolic concession to the principle of procedural neutrality. (For example, when we our department advertised a chair in Jewish philosophy many years ago, it was understood that we were only going to be hiring someone Jewish, we didn’t need to come right out and say it. Indeed, everyone thought it was really funny when I recommended a colleague of Asian heritage for the position — funny as in no one took it seriously.) Now, however, the university insists that certain job advertisements contain explicit exclusions. This seems to me equivalent to throwing away the brown paper bag. Given that it doesn’t change anything in practice and is not necessary for the attainment of any reasonable policy objective, it starts to look like a stupid game, of the sort that produces stupid prizes.

3. Control your extremists. I’ve been talking so far about cases in which everyone who shares one’s values supports all three policy options, A, B, and C. In reality, support tends to decline as the policy becomes less moderate. It is often the case that the coalition of individuals committed to the course of action is just large enough to get a majority in support of A, but that far fewer support B, and only a small minority support C. We can think of the C-supporters as the extremists in one’s coalition. For the majority that supports A, they can create something of a dilemma, since they often support the right view for the wrong reasons (as witnessed by their willingness to take things too far).

For example, I think it was pretty obvious during the COVID pandemic that there were some people who liked lockdown, in part because it gave them greater control over their neighbours. This was evidenced by their willingness to go far beyond what any reasonable public health consideration might recommend. (Consider, for example, the zealots who tried to close down the streets they lived on, to stop people from walking or driving down them.) Modern urban environments can be chaotic, noisy, intrusive, sometimes dangerous, and many people find them a bit overwhelming for those reasons. The opportunity to assert control, to get everyone lined up, taking turns, to close down the noisy playgrounds and get the kids off the street, to make sure no strangers enter one’s neighbourhood, was really appealing to some people. They were not a majority in the public health coalition, but anyone who is being honest will acknowledge that they were definitely there.

These extremists may create problems for people with more widely shared views, because their support is often essential for getting even moderate options, like A, implemented. With immigration, for example, there are clearly some supporters who simply despise the majority culture and hope that migration will disrupt it. With affirmative action, there are some people who are clearly motivated by animus toward whites, or the desire to avenge their ancestors. With climate change policy, there are some people who actually do want to destroy the economy (i.e. achieve “degrowth”). The numbers who support these views may be relatively small, but again, anyone who is being honest will acknowledge that people with these views are part of the progressive coalition. The problem is that opponents of that coalition will often pick up on statements made by these extremists and portray them as though they represented the standard view among those who support A. So moderates need to find some way to distance themselves from the extreme view, but they are often not in a position to burn that constituency, because they still need their support to get the moderate position passed.

This is a tricky balancing act, but I suppose a minimal constraint worth imposing would be that you not let the reluctance to criticize your own extremists become so strong that you actually start letting them dictate policy or dominate communications. For example, with DEI policies in the U.S., liberals allowed the discourse over racial justice to be hijacked by individuals with self-evidently extreme views. Within the progressive coalition, most people knew that most people didn’t really believe the stuff that Ibram X. Kendi was saying, but they nevertheless allowed him to become the standard-bearer for racial justice in America. They certainly failed to articulate an alternative vision, much less insist upon it in public.

Similarly, with affirmative action, many U.S. institutions allowed these policies to be used, not just to achieve equal representation, but to blow right past that into overrepresentation of minorities. Before the Supreme Court abolished affirmative action in admissions, Harvard University was proudly advertising the fact that their incoming class was 18% Black (in a country where Blacks make up less than 14% of the population). Just the other day, in a New York Times article lamenting the terrible effects that Trump’s elimination of DEI programs would have on the U.S. federal government workforce, the writer dropped this astonishing sentence: “In a work force that is nearly 20 percent Black, many employees said there could be another consequence of the moves: making the federal government whiter and less diverse.” (Some writers need to stop and think for a moment about what they’re saying. So DEI is not about achieving equal representation, or about creating institutions that “look like America,” but rather about ensuring that whites remain underrepresented in the federal workforce? Because that’s what the sentence says. How then can one be shocked when these programs generate backlash?)

Summary: I have a couple more suggestions along these lines, but the post is already too long so I’ll give it a rest. Personally, I’ve just been astonished over the past few years at the willingness of people who have objectively unpopular views, or who claim to be defending the interests of vulnerable minorities, but who happen to occupy a position of some influence and authority, to engage in what can only be described as rage-baiting the majority of the population. In some cases, their moral sanctimony is so great that they probably fail to perceive it this way. In other cases, it just seems to me a clear failure to think strategically about their policy goals. For example, if the policy you are pitching is contrary to the self-interest of the majority of the population, and so you must appeal to their moral sentiments (e.g. guilt, sense of fair play, etc.) in order to garner sufficient support, you should probably try to avoid making those who do support your policy look like suckers. This just seems like common sense.

And yet I also have the intuition that there is something morally culpable about the violation of these precepts. For example, last summer I installed CBC’s Gem app on my TV, because I was hoping to watch the NHL playoffs. I didn’t realize at the time that I couldn’t watch hockey on CBC Gem. There was no explanation or apology for this, instead I was greeted by the following set of options on the home screen:

This all happens to align with my political sympathies, but at the same time, I couldn’t help thinking that they must be trying to get themselves defunded. (“Shame on you for wanting to watch hockey, when there is so much injustice in the world!”) Keep in mind, this is the public broadcaster, an organization that is supposed to at least feign political neutrality. When the Conservatives get elected, and start firing CBC leadership and cutting their funding, are we supposed to get all upset and rush to the barricades to defend them? Obviously the axe, when it falls, will be a foreseeable consequence of their actions. But won’t it also be, at some level, their own fault? Is it merely culpable stupidity, or is it moral culpability? This is the philosophical question that I’ve been pondering.

contention

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Moral Responsibility for Backlash

Is it a thing? Should it be?

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