The Moral Double-Dip

Or, Wishing does not make Kantianism and utilitarianism always deliver the same result

I am childless by choice. From a very young age, I knew I did not want to have children, and I found a partner who shares that conviction. I view parenting as a nightmarish prospect on every level — above all, the sense that it is impossible to do “right.” And it seems like that sense of impossibility is only increasing amid the proliferation of competing sets of parenting “best practices.” As far as I can tell, at least among the educated professional set whose parenting practices I am most likely to witness, there has been a decisive shift toward a much more demanding and interactive approach to parenting, where the parents are expected to basically be constantly yammering at the children about the rationale behind every behavioral norm or expectation.

It’s exhausting to watch, and it must be even more exhausting to do. Nor does it seem to result in better behavior, at least of the type that someone like me would prefer to see—namely, that children would just kind of be quiet or go play among themselves and leave the adults alone. But of course, that’s no longer the goal. And maybe rightly so! I don’t know! Nor, I should hasten to add, do I have any particular nostalgia for the less gentle childrearing expectations that I came up under. Indeed, I distrust my negative gut reaction to witnessing contemporary parenting techniques as reflecting a kind of envy that today’s children don’t have to suffer as my cohort did. The point of this post is not to pass judgment on anyone’s parenting or presume to offer them advice on how to do something that I have made a decision never to do myself. I promise!

With all that in mind, then, you can predict I read today’s New York Times article about the backlash to American-style parenting in France with some interest. One aspect of the “positive parenting” advocates’ rhetoric that interested me was their repeated assertion that punishment is not only wrong, but counterproductive. One expert baldly asserts: “Punishment of any kind, including time out, is not an effective way to change behavior.”

That cannot possibly be true. I don’t even believe that the experts themselves actually believe that punishment cannot change behavior. That does not match up with my experience at all, nor does it make any intrinsic sense. The idea of “avoid a behavior to avoid a negative consequence” is just—a mistake? A dud? As a child, did you never self-regulate your behavior out of fear of “getting in trouble”? More broadly, why did natural selection give us pain receptors? If punishment always produced the exact wrong result, as one expert in the article purports, then life on earth simply would have died out. It could very well be the case that the damage attendant on punishment is not “worth it” or that there are better ways to change children’s behavior, but it just cannot be true that punishment doesn’t work at all, ever. In fact, I would venture the guess that punishment or the threat of punishment is indeed very effective at producing the kind of passive and submissive behavior that was once expected of children in adult spaces—but no longer is expected by many parents, in part precisely because it requires that kind of punitive approach to produce it.

And this brings me to what I really want to pass judgment on—namely, this kind of moral “double dip,” which is absolutely pervasive in mainstream liberal culture. If something is immoral, it is also always ineffective. It’s like they want to be Kantians and utilitarians simultaneously—and somehow the math always works out, even though anyone who has taken an ethics class knows that they are famously incompatible positions. A great example is the constant refrain that doing something morally necessary will actually help the economy. Responding to climate change will create jobs! Giving people financial support actually boosts GDP! Single-payer healthcare would make the job market more dynamic! In every case, the utilitarian claim undercuts the properly moral principle, because it opens the possibility that the speaker would take the immoral position if the benefits did not accrue. What if providing a robust welfare state did produce a drag on economic growth? What if single-payer healthcare or coping with climate change would lead to structurally higher unemployment? Would they be the wrong thing to do?

The absurdity compounds when we look at more morally weighty matters. For instance, during the War on Terror, we frequently heard from liberals that torture was not only wrong, but ineffective, because it never produced reliable information. I absolutely, unequivocally reject torture on a moral level. The mainstreaming of torture—which for many years was a staple of prime time TV drama!—was one area where people consistently underrate how corrosive the Bush administration’s impact on the country really was. And yet I acknowledge that torture can produce actionable information. The critics of torture’s effectiveness point out that people will say anything to stop the agony, including whatever the torturer wants to hear. But you know what the torturer presumably wants most to hear? Something verifiably true! Bullshitting might get them to stop in the moment, but it will likely lead to a repeat session when they realize what you’ve said is false. Giving them all the actual information you have is the only way to reliably bring it to an end. Acknowledging this reality does not undercut my moral stance—it underlines its seriousness. Sometimes information really is available through torture that would not be obtainable any other way, but no information is worth torturing for. Adding “plus, it doesn’t give you information anyway” does not reinforce the claim but undercuts it.

We hear similar things about political violence, which is not only morally wrong but always precisely backfires by turning the victim into a “martyr” whose cause becomes invincible. But is that really true? Obviously not. The deaths of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, for instance, did not help the Civil Rights Movement—they were devastating blows. And surely no one can believe that conditions would be somehow even worse if the assassination attempt against Trump had been successful! Worse than masked thugs invading U.S. cities? Worse than letting Elon Musk loose to gut the federal government? Worse than a pointless global trade war? Worse than threats to take over Greenland or Canada? Worse than a unilateral war that has closed down a global economic chokepoint? The death of Trump would have somehow produced someone even worse and even more effective, with even more of a grip on the Republican Party? That’s stupid. No one can believe that, any more than anyone believes that the assassination of Hitler would have automatically brought into existence an all-powerful MegaHitler. The reason political assassination is wrong isn’t that it always magically backfires. The reason that it’s wrong is that it’s wrong. Murder is evil, and political murder is antidemocratic. Violence is not the way we should make our collective decisions. Self-selecting vigilantes do not get a veto on who represents us.

In short, pick a lane! If we’re debating matters of principle, stick to the level of principle. If we’re talking about cost-benefit analysis, be honest about the costs and benefits. The attempt to cross streams is always a lose-lose. It fails on Kantian grounds, because it’s logically inconsistent to ask someone to support a program on extrinsic grounds if they oppose it in principle. And it fails on utilitarian grounds because, as far as I can tell, no one is ever actually convinced by such arguments. In fact, it seems more likely that they would be insulted at the implication that they could be bought so easily. But maybe, as with the complaint that contemporary parenting is not producing quiet well-behaved children, the mistake is mine. Maybe the goal of these arguments is not to persuade at all, but a kind of in-group signalling, a ritual performance of nuance and savvy. Indeed, maybe the goal is to reassure listeners that the speaker would never be so crass as to actually believe in something. If so, then: mission accomplished.