"Moral misdirection, as it interests me here, is a speech act that functionally operates to distract one’s audience from more important moral truths. It thus predictably reduces the importance-weighted accuracy of the audience’s moral beliefs."
At face value, this implies that it is virtually impossible to deliberately engage in moral misdirection, since almost no one sets out to knowingly reduce the accuracy of others moral beliefs- Don for example thinks he is increasing the accuracy of his audiences moral beliefs.
"It’s disheartening to consider how rare this form of intellectual integrity seems to be, even amongst intellectuals (in part because attention to the question of what is truly important is so rare). By drawing explicit attention to it, I hope to make it more common."
The complexity here is that none of us are anyone's sole interlocutor. Don could say, for example "sure, I only tell people about the crimes immigrants commit. That's fine, I'm just like a prosecutor in a trial. Immigrants have plenty of defence lawyers to tell their side of the story." Perhaps slightly more plausibly, consider someone who says "look, obviously wokeness isn't the worst thing in America, but someone has to tell the story of how fucking annoying it is- that's my job. I don't claim to be the font of all wisdom, I'm just pushing a particular angle that I think has merit". I agree that a lot of these broken records on wokeness are very irritating, but capturing exactly what they're doing wrong is hard, given that plausibly no individual has an obligation to individually be fair and balanced guide to the world.
I wonder if it's important to specify a norm against moral misdirection that doesn't leave listeners off the hook for their own epistemic negligence.
I might be in a context where, for example, if I say that Trump's criminal sentencing reform bill was good, it will be taken as a sign that I endorse Trump, that I will vote for Trump, that Trump was a good president, etc., etc. when all of those things are in fact untrue. But it seems to me that there could be cases where I would be under no obligation to correct this misdirection, even if it would be a good thing for me to do. Intuitively, it feels to me that a theory of moral misdirection needs to account for the fact that sometimes it is better to hold listeners liable for their misunderstandings than the speakers who have 'misdirected' them.
I am reminded of a recent article I wrote about the ethics of polygenic embryo screening. My mind also jumped to vaccines. The main point I wanted to make was that for a selection method, couples need some way to select between the available options and so ethical critiques should be relative, but articles too often side step this. They list MANY reasons why they are concerned and then conclude that polygenic embryo screening should not be offered. But they don't mention the fundamental question of whether it passes a cost benefit analysis. I found this frustrating.
Analogizing to vaccines, I thought: look you can list reasons why it's not 100% proven or there could be potential downsides (rare adverse reactions), but the reality is that there are major downsides to NOT getting the vaccine. We need to do a cost benefit anaysis. I don't think the critics of polygenic embryo selection are doing this on purpose, but it seems like some inadvertent moral misdirection. I think that they don't have a clear idea about what exactly they think is ethical, whereas you do -- utilitarianism.
Would a lot of leftist critiques of sweatshops count as moral misdirection?
While concerns about safety and abuse are important, these critiques often leave out the most salient facts - we are talking about people living in extreme poverty who very much want these jobs and who will be benefitted significantly from them.
One extremely common example of moral misdirection is talking about benefits and harms of an action purely from an human standpoint, while neglecting the impacts on animals (farmed or in the wild).
However, as animals are very numerous, and it is likely that they can feel pain and suffering, it's really easy to miss the big picture by not talking about them.
Of course, this is understandable, as we live in a human society while most harms caused to animals are mostly hidden. It's also uncomfortable, to hold this conclusion and I personally did not think about things from this angle for a very long time (most people I care about are humans, after all).
But when we talk about the 'good' or 'bad' of any event (an election, a recipe, a wildfire, climate change, technological progress in the last 50 years), it would (at least theoretically) make sense to dedicate a large amount of time on the impact of most moral patients, which are animals.
I think I thought of a particularly egregious example of moral misdirection. There is a worrying trend of public profiles of individuals or descriptions basically consisting of the WORST things that person has ever said--sometimes with little context. For example, Rational Wiki says I am "a eugenicist who supports embryo selection and has criticized trans rights." and links to some article I wrote a few years ago about ambiguous use of language to bolster moral intuitions (e.g. saying "my existence is threatened" by not recognizing trans identity, describing embryo-selection against deafness as "genocide"). I feel like this is used to make me look like a bad guy, rather than explain who I am as a writer, but few people are going to read the whole thing and say "that's an unfair description of the article" to recalibrate their moral evaluation of me. Such is the price to pay for talking about a hot-button issue like transgenderism--which I will probably never write about again for this reason.
"Moral misdirection, as it interests me here, is a speech act that functionally operates to distract one’s audience from more important moral truths. It thus predictably reduces the importance-weighted accuracy of the audience’s moral beliefs."
At face value, this implies that it is virtually impossible to deliberately engage in moral misdirection, since almost no one sets out to knowingly reduce the accuracy of others moral beliefs- Don for example thinks he is increasing the accuracy of his audiences moral beliefs.
"It’s disheartening to consider how rare this form of intellectual integrity seems to be, even amongst intellectuals (in part because attention to the question of what is truly important is so rare). By drawing explicit attention to it, I hope to make it more common."
The complexity here is that none of us are anyone's sole interlocutor. Don could say, for example "sure, I only tell people about the crimes immigrants commit. That's fine, I'm just like a prosecutor in a trial. Immigrants have plenty of defence lawyers to tell their side of the story." Perhaps slightly more plausibly, consider someone who says "look, obviously wokeness isn't the worst thing in America, but someone has to tell the story of how fucking annoying it is- that's my job. I don't claim to be the font of all wisdom, I'm just pushing a particular angle that I think has merit". I agree that a lot of these broken records on wokeness are very irritating, but capturing exactly what they're doing wrong is hard, given that plausibly no individual has an obligation to individually be fair and balanced guide to the world.
Thanks for this very resonant piece.
I wonder if it's important to specify a norm against moral misdirection that doesn't leave listeners off the hook for their own epistemic negligence.
I might be in a context where, for example, if I say that Trump's criminal sentencing reform bill was good, it will be taken as a sign that I endorse Trump, that I will vote for Trump, that Trump was a good president, etc., etc. when all of those things are in fact untrue. But it seems to me that there could be cases where I would be under no obligation to correct this misdirection, even if it would be a good thing for me to do. Intuitively, it feels to me that a theory of moral misdirection needs to account for the fact that sometimes it is better to hold listeners liable for their misunderstandings than the speakers who have 'misdirected' them.
Nice article.
I am reminded of a recent article I wrote about the ethics of polygenic embryo screening. My mind also jumped to vaccines. The main point I wanted to make was that for a selection method, couples need some way to select between the available options and so ethical critiques should be relative, but articles too often side step this. They list MANY reasons why they are concerned and then conclude that polygenic embryo screening should not be offered. But they don't mention the fundamental question of whether it passes a cost benefit analysis. I found this frustrating.
Analogizing to vaccines, I thought: look you can list reasons why it's not 100% proven or there could be potential downsides (rare adverse reactions), but the reality is that there are major downsides to NOT getting the vaccine. We need to do a cost benefit anaysis. I don't think the critics of polygenic embryo selection are doing this on purpose, but it seems like some inadvertent moral misdirection. I think that they don't have a clear idea about what exactly they think is ethical, whereas you do -- utilitarianism.
https://www.parrhesia.co/p/contra-the-acmg-on-polygenic-embryo
Would a lot of leftist critiques of sweatshops count as moral misdirection?
While concerns about safety and abuse are important, these critiques often leave out the most salient facts - we are talking about people living in extreme poverty who very much want these jobs and who will be benefitted significantly from them.
Interesting discussion. Deceiving others with true statements has been called “paltering”. I just talked about it here: https://www.optimallyirrational.com/i/142688541/deception-with-plausible-deniability-paltering
Good thoughts! Moral misdirection is ubiquitous.
One extremely common example of moral misdirection is talking about benefits and harms of an action purely from an human standpoint, while neglecting the impacts on animals (farmed or in the wild).
However, as animals are very numerous, and it is likely that they can feel pain and suffering, it's really easy to miss the big picture by not talking about them.
Of course, this is understandable, as we live in a human society while most harms caused to animals are mostly hidden. It's also uncomfortable, to hold this conclusion and I personally did not think about things from this angle for a very long time (most people I care about are humans, after all).
But when we talk about the 'good' or 'bad' of any event (an election, a recipe, a wildfire, climate change, technological progress in the last 50 years), it would (at least theoretically) make sense to dedicate a large amount of time on the impact of most moral patients, which are animals.
I think I thought of a particularly egregious example of moral misdirection. There is a worrying trend of public profiles of individuals or descriptions basically consisting of the WORST things that person has ever said--sometimes with little context. For example, Rational Wiki says I am "a eugenicist who supports embryo selection and has criticized trans rights." and links to some article I wrote a few years ago about ambiguous use of language to bolster moral intuitions (e.g. saying "my existence is threatened" by not recognizing trans identity, describing embryo-selection against deafness as "genocide"). I feel like this is used to make me look like a bad guy, rather than explain who I am as a writer, but few people are going to read the whole thing and say "that's an unfair description of the article" to recalibrate their moral evaluation of me. Such is the price to pay for talking about a hot-button issue like transgenderism--which I will probably never write about again for this reason.
What’s the best example of moral misdirection on the left?
Absolutely excellent, excellent!