Moral Courage, Moral Standards, and Political Polarization
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?
Moral courage is speaking or acting to protest or prevent a wrong, despite strong opposition or the threat of sanction or violence. (Hereafter, I will simply use “act” or “acting” to refer to an outward display of moral courage, whether it is verbal or physical.)
An act of opposition to authority isn’t necessarily an act of moral courage, though it may sometimes be one.
To act with moral courage requires deliberate and self-critical thought about the condition that provokes the urge to speak and act. Specifically, one must ask whether there is a wrong to be protested or simply a condition that displeases one for other reasons (e.g., bruised ego, esthetic offense, dislike of an otherwise moral outcome).
Except in rare circumstances (e.g., an intervention to prevent a beating of shooting), impulsive acts are not acts of moral courage. They are usually acts of petulance and ego-stroking. A person who joins a group in an such an act because it’s the “thing to do” is a moral coward. (A current example is going along with a group that protests supposed wrong-doing by committing futile and destructive acts of vandalism.)
Standing up for the “rights” of a particular group is an act of moral courage only to the extent that the group is being deprived of rights that it could enjoy without trampling on the rights of others. The “right” of a self-proclaimed transgender female (i.e., a biological male) to invade the privacy of biological females is a “right” only in the view of those persons for whom traditional social norms are merely litter to be tossed in the nearest trash bin. A self-proclaimed transgender female (or any other person who identifies as LGBTQ+) has all of the rights enjoyed by every other American, but not the privilege of violating long-standing social norms of the kind that, in their observance, foster mutual trust and respect.
What about a transsexual person born male who has undergone extensive surgery, hormone therapy, and various other medical and psychological procedures so as to mimic female-ness convincingly? There is a saying that is sometimes true: What you don’t know can’t hurt you. There is no offense against privacy unless the offense is felt by the person whose privacy is at stake. (Offenses against privacy that result in actual harm, such as identity theft, are of a different kind than the subject of this paragraph.)
Returning to the main theme of this post, it is necessary to ask whether there are agreed moral standards that can be applied against putative acts of moral courage. There’s the rub. The polarization of political views reflects vast disagreement about morality. Although political views are nominally about what government should and should not do, they are really about what people should and should not do. Every governmental edict either discourages or encourages a private act.
Take the Dobbs decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, for example. That decision didn’t “outlaw” abortion in the United States, as hysterical propagandists and ignoramuses are wont to say, but it did reverse earlier decisions which held that abortion (when it met certain criterea), was a constitutional right throughout the United States. Dobbs merely transferred the question of abortion back to the individual States, each of which was thus empowered (as it was before Roe v. Wade) to determine the legal status of abortion in its jurisdiction.
You will now have grasped the absurdity of the situation. How can the morality of an act be determined by whether the act is committed inside or outside a particular State? It can’t be, which is why many persons (notably, leading Democrats) believe that abortion is moral and seek to make it legal throughout the nation. By the same token, many persons believe that abortion is immoral and seek to make it illegal throughout the nation.
Political polarization — and the culture war that it reflects — is about the clash of moral codes. Political polarization therefore reflects a shattering of what was once something close to a national consensus about morality. That near-consensus had been fraying since the Progressive Era of the late 1800s and early 1900s, but it began to unravel in the 1960s. What it came down to, before the fraying and unraveling, was wide observance of Judeo-Christian morality, especially as enunciated in the final six of the Ten Commandments, and a code of personal responsibility relatively uncorrupted by the welfare state and reinforced by a system of justice that is swifter and harsher than today’s.
The clash of moral codes means that moral courage has become not just a matter of acting against wrong-doing, but also a matter of acting against an array of powerful proponents of wrong-doing who believe that it is right-doing; for example:
teaching white children that they are racists
demanding reparations from persons who are blameless for whatever wrongs supposedly warrant reparations
encouraging and manipulating children into undergoing transgender therapies that they will come to regret
using force and misusing “science” to make people’s lives miserable (e.g., forbidding the use of efficient and relatively inexpensive fossil fuels, dictating useless — and economically and socially destructive — lockdowns and school closings during the pandemic)
killing unborn children
“canceling” and smearing anyone one who dares utter such things instead of debating them with facts and logic (a sure sign of wrong-doing).
But there is a difference between speaking out against the proponents of wrong-doing from the safety of a blog, and speaking out against them when they are in a position to ruin one’s reputation, destroy one’s career, and shred one’s ability to obtain credit. Unlike some peformers, executives, professors, and scientists, I am not exercising moral courage by taking the stances that I do in this blog.
I am truly thankful for the morally courageous persons who risk their fortunes and honor to oppose the rampant wrong-doing of leftists.* The tragedy of our time is that the left has gained enough power in this country to be a threat to anyone.
Of all the beasts which the Lord God had made, there was none that could match the serpent in cunning. — Genesis 3:1
* A good example is Rebekah Koffler, author of Putin’s Playbook. Read it and weep for her and for this formerly great nation.