Making the Moral Case for Health, Without Moral Bullying

In recent months, the notion of making moral arguments in favor of a range of policy goals has been quite visible in the public conversation. This has made me think more carefully about the very notion of making a moral argument and pushed me to consider some key questions: What do we mean by “making a moral argument?” How does one make a moral argument constructively? What does it take to bring people who do not agree with us around to our perspective? And, centrally, how can we make this moral argument without lapsing into moral bullying?

It seems to me that moral bullying is when we let our zeal for what we regard as a righteous cause lead us to behave in ways that are coercive, cruel, or simply insensitive to the concerns of the communities with which we engage. Because we feel our cause is just—otherwise we would not be advocating for it—and because there are real threats to health and genuinely bad faith actors working to advance policies that harm health, we can sometimes overlook when we are ourselves behaving badly in opposition to these forces. Or we can simply find our sense of righteousness becomes, over time, a kind of vanity, as we get so preoccupied with a heroic vision of ourselves that we start to see nothing but that, to the exclusion of an honest reckoning with our faults.

Making a Moral Argument Without Moral Bullying

This urges, I think, some reflection on how we can make a moral argument without moral bullying. I offer three thoughts that emerge, as all this writing does, from trying to reflect on this puzzle, hoping that sharing thoughts is helpful to others.

First, I do not think we should make any moral argument without carefully examining the fundamentals of what we are trying to say and why we are trying to say it. Why do we think the way we do? What are we trying to optimize for? What are we prioritizing, and what are we de-prioritizing? I note that in the obstreperous space of public conversation, these questions are often reduced to caricatures, to assertions that any conceding of ground is somehow itself immoral. Of course I disagree, and I think it is critical that we genuinely interrogate why we are doing what we are doing, and what we are trying to achieve for any such argument we are trying to make. This means being aware of our biases, fully centering the goal of our work—ensuring a dignified life for all—and making sure that what we argue for advances this. That also does not mean giving quarter when we are clear that what we are doing is right. We should also always be able to notice when we are enjoying a bit too much the emotional catharsis that can come with strongly arguing for what we believe is right. There is a feeling that can accompany making such arguments that is deeply satisfying. To the extent that this feeling supports the thoughtful advance of moral arguments, it is to be welcomed. But when it becomes an end pursued for its own sake, it risks being counterproductive.

Second, we must approach any moral argumentation with empathy for those who disagree and disagree strongly. Toward this end, I much encourage the reading of this piece by Rachel Kadish, who encourages her students to write from the perspective of people the students disagree with, to encourage empathy. She points out that when she does this in her class, students can have a difficult time giving empathy to those who strongly feel differently than they do, and that is perhaps the heart of the challenge. We cannot understand how others might feel about a given issue without first trying to understand them at the level of our common humanity. If our goal is to change minds, that is where we must start—not so much with how others think, but with how they feel as a reflection of their fundamental humanity. A humanity that—we should never forget—we all share.

Third, we need to learn how to make an argument over the long term, how to do the incremental hard work of building a moral argument slowly, by bringing along those who disagree, who may indeed be likely to see our argumentation as “coercive” if pushed too much too quickly. This requires discipline and focus on our part, the former to temper our enthusiasm to act too quickly, the latter to maintain our effort. We can see the virtue of this approach in the success of the movement for the acceptance and legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States. For years, advocates of same-sex marriage worked patiently to advance the case that gay couples deserved the dignity and security of being able to legally marry. To many of these advocates, this likely seemed obvious and self-evident, and to engage civilly with those who felt differently—to have to argue in favor of the self-evident—took tremendous discipline. Yet they persisted, eventually winning not just a favorable decision by the Supreme Court, but, ultimately, the bipartisan passage of a law codifying same-sex marriage. We would do well to apply a similar approach in our engagement with other issues.

At the end of the day, we have little choice but to advance both science and argument to implement the work of public health. The question is how to do both. Here I try to suggest how we may do the latter, working to apply moral force without letting that force get out of hand. I look forward to continuing the conversation.

A version of this post also appears on Substack.