The folly of principles

The distance illusion

Being called a man of principle is a generous compliment that speaks to a good character and high integrity. Having principles is often taken to be roughly the opposite of egotism or opportunism. In the sense of favoring neutrality over favoritism, principles are invaluable for reducing conflict. People who feel they are being treated fairly tend to cause much less trouble than those who fancy themselves slighted.

But sometimes the obsession with principles goes much too far. From dealing with nearly any practical problem, people know that reality is nearly always complicated. It would have been nice if we could mechanically consult a list of principles instead of actually having to think about things - that way, we could have outsourced our problems to monkeys rather than consultants - but things are seldom that simple. Only when discussing in the abstract, far removed from all the troublesome details, do people forget about this. Such is the luxury of not having to implement the supposed solutions oneself.

This is essentially the same illusion Tacitus pointed out a very long time ago, but with regard to simplicity:

Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.

Principles are territorial

The fundamental problem with principles is that they keep getting into fights with each other. Thou shalt not kill might be the most popular and least controversial of all principles, but only fundamentalist Jains seem willing to go through with it. Principled non-violence looks like a good idea, viewed from the very top of the ivory tower, but what about, say, the right to self defense? Does killing someone to prevent him from committing mass murder violate the principle?

The problem with principles is that it is very difficult to be principled about them. There are only two choices - either you need a strict hierarchy of fundamental and subordinate principles, with a predetermined mechanism for resolving the conflicts which arise when different principles overlap and pull in different directions. Failing this, the other possibility is to allow people to pick and choose which principle trumps the others in these situations.

The first choice seems perfectly impossible - it would entail that we have to reduce our moral intuitions to a decision tree. No one seems to be willing to actually jot one down. The second choice, on the other hand, is catastrophic, because it reduces the whole of the enterprise of principles to a sham. The value of principles is in eliminating subjectivity in favor of objectivity - getting rid of the temptation to apply a different set of rules to yourself and others. If you are going to allow bias back in at a later point, you are back where you started - if maybe with a pretense of neutrality - and people can subscribe to the exact same set of principles, yet disagree vehemently.

Controversial examples are the best

A common example is that of free abortion - the so called pro-life side rallies behind the banner of All life is sacred, a sort of variation on the Thou shalt not kill. The reformulation is easier to apply to fetuses without getting bogged down in discussions about whether abortion ought to count as murder. The pro-choice side, of course, has principles of its own, perhaps best summarized as A woman has the right to her own body.

It should be blindingly obvious that this debate will never be resolved by trying to weigh principles against each other. Arguing from principles does not merely fail to address the meat of the issue - it actively steers the discussion away from where it needs to be. It lets the pro-choice adherents paint their opposition as misogynist relics of the pre-war era who don't trust women to take responsibility for themselves, while pro-life activists imagine those in favor of abortion has so little regard for human lives that they will slippery slope towards selective abortion and infanticide.

Of course, as we can see from the high rate of Down syndrome abortions, not all of it is empty rhetoric.

Non-trivial solutions

Nearly every meaningful point of contention is non-trivial, in the sense that there will be sensible principles pulling in multiple directions. Discussions grounded in an assumption that certain principles are perfectly inviolable will inevitably fail to find common ground, and without fail, moving the focus slightly will reveal that nobody really thinks their principles are quite that sacred.

If a woman were truly the empress of her own body in the sense that pro-choice arguments assume, then they would certainly have to support month eight abortions. It is hard to see why the capability of independent life is all that relevant, insofar as the fetus is going to remain in its mother's womb unless aborted, and the concept of independent survival is nowhere near well-defined. We also know that pro-life proponents don't all seem to consider the sanctity of human life a knock-down argument against warfare, the right to bear arms and capital punishment.

These disagreements all tend to be about sensible principles that everybody values coming in conflict with each other. The real discussion to be had is about how to properly weigh various valuable principle against each other. More often than not, people don't even disagree on which outcomes are ultimately preferable - that is, they agree on which futures are better and worse, but they disagree on which future would actually follow from which policy.

Generally, time would be better spent discussing this empirical question than painting your detractors as unprincipled and ergo evil. Unfortunately, the hardest part still remains:

It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.