Moral outrage

The term “moral outrage” is misleading. The subjects are not selected for their moral basis but for their immediate emotional appeal. The progressive enterprise is not a twilight struggle between good and evil, it is a ceaseless campaign of emotional bullying. Strident emotional appeals are used, not because there is some moral principle in need of a champion, but because the tactic is a useful to those whose ultimate goals are political power.

H.L. Mencken observe that “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless stream of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” “Moral outrage” is simply a newer version of this same principle. Now the premise is that the “good” people are in constant moral peril from the “bitter clingers” who will not see the light and therefore must have their views delegitimized.

Plaintiff’s lawyers are quite transparent about the underlying principle. A good number of them have adopted the “Reptile Strategy”, so named because it appeals to the emotional “reptile” part of jurors’ brains, rather than the more troublesome, rational part. Recall that, after the Sandy Hook shootings that gun control advocates explicitly demanded that action be taken before passions cooled. Emotions tend to override reason in the short term and therefore emotional appeals demand immediate action. Emotions also tend to be notoriously bad counselors, and the strategy of using them to whip up the populace has a rather shameful pedigree: lynchings, pogroms, riots, and revenge massacres.

As practiced in modern politics, the “moral outrage” gambit has a few distinguishing characteristics:

1.) Being an emotional appeal, it cannot bear rational scrutiny; something must be done now without reflection. The science after all, is settled; the counter arguments are invalid because they were advocated by the Cato Institute or heard on Fox News (the ad hominem fallacy); “Reagan did something similar” (the tu quoque fallacy,) “a new poll says that….” (argumentum ad populum), “Experts say…” (argumentum ad verecundiam), etc., etc., If you are appealing to emotion, fallacies are your friend.

2.) There is a clearly defined, malevolent other. Dissent can only be based in bad character with no room for good faith disagreement. The goal is not to persuade but to divide and demonize. “We” are entitled to have our way because we ‘think right’.” If the opponents words are insufficiently outrage inducing, resort to one of President Obama;s favorite rhetorical device, “there are those who say…,” the straw man fallacy; there can be no good faith disagreement.

3.) Because the other is defined solely by their opposition, consistency of the proponent’s arguments is unnecessary. Therefore, President Obama can “evolve,” Senators can be for something before they are against, and we can take credit for successes that we actively opposed. It doesn’t matter if Elizabeth Warren, or Diane Feinstein, or Al Gore has one set of rules for themselves and another for everyone else, because the contest is between “us and them,” not between differing concepts of what is best for the country.

4.) People who do not think right should be banned from participating in civic life. “Moral outragers” like to ban things. Support traditional marriage, lose your job. Question global warming or campus rape statistics, face expulsion from professional institutions. Show insufficient fealty for the emotional play of the day and endure death treats on Twitter. “Moral outrage” does, and always has created a lot of ugliness; bigotry pretending to unearned virtue.

This is not to say that there are not true moral outrages. The proper response however requires a resort to reason and not emotion; to think, and not merely to feel. It is a real tragedy when moral people do immoral things because they are “outraged.”