Post 1 - Stevesplaining Weighing Principles versus Outcomes, or when to be a shrill Purist or a wishy-washy Compromiser. Now with 100% more Shitlib!

So.  John McCloy is spared my wrath once more.  I was in a discussion in a Discord and this bit, and reactions to it, provoked some discussion that echoes in my befogged noggin.

The following tweets are from a YouTube commentator/influencer/whatever-you-call-it known as "Shaun", he of the cranial bone avatar and prim English-accented delivery as dry as the Sahara.  I have seen (well, listened) to a few of his videos.  I do not always agree with him but he is at least thought provoking.  And has spared me any interest in reading or watching Harry Potter, which my overburdened Need-to-Watch/Need-to-Read list is very grateful for.

Anyway, to the main point.



Now, I think you can probably guess Shaun's political persuasions by this twitter thread.  He is, by my experience, on the left side of the aisle.  Significantly so.  And here he is, advocating people to refuse to vote for Biden next year if Biden does not call for a ceasefire in Gaza.  Now, you might be thinking that as he is British Shaun may not be aware of how the US political system works, but I'm fairly certain he understands it enough to recognize the likely outcome of Biden losing key swing states: the victory of Trump.  Not exactly the preferred choice for the left wing, right?  So why?


Now in some cases you could think this makes him an "accelerationist" leftist.  That is, he wants the worst to win because they'll wreck things and give an opening for a more preferable system to arise from the ashes.  You can see this train of thought in various far left circles, epitomized arguably by the Posadists and the idea that a world-shattering nuclear war would be a good thing because the survivors could build a proper socialist society in the rubble (and make contact with the socialist space aliens the Posadists believed were already out there… no, that's not a joke).

But I am not convinced Shaun is a Posadist or an accelerationist of any stripe.  So we go back to the question: why would an avowed leftist promote an outcome where an avowedly right-wing leader like Trump would take power over the most powerful nation-state existing today?

While I cannot speak for Shaun, I imagine the answer would come down to a fundamental ethical conflict that you find in politics and other fields, which I will term as Principles versus Outcomes.  I'm sure actual political philosophers and other people who actually have degrees would have far more precise terminology for it, but I'm not one of those folks, so I'll go with this term.

Essentially… where do you draw the line between someone or something being too immoral to stomach even if it brings something you find preferable. In this example, Shaun's essentially arguing to others (particularly his fellow leftists) that Biden's refusal to call for a ceasefire is his line.  Biden's action, or lack thereof, is an act of moral cowardice or depravity too great for Shaun to believe he can be supported at the ballot box, and so he's calling for folks not to give Biden their votes.  Unsaid, though clearly implied, is that if you still vote for Biden, you too hold a degree of moral culpability over the US government's implicit approval of Israel's actions in Gaza.  You have chosen to still give Biden your support, after all.

Now, the theoretical Biden supporter could retort with the obvious consequences of not voting for Biden.  Trump winning will most likely not do anything for the Palestinians in Gaza or elsewhere, and his avowed plans for a second administration are unlikely to be healthy for American democracy or for the stability of the world.  In short, whether or not you like what Biden's doing in this crisis, Trump would be worse, so not voting for Biden means you would be contributing in some way to that "getting worse" part.

This is not a new conundrum for people.  It's undoubtedly why Bismarck once famously compared politics to sausages — "If you want to enjoy it, don't think about what goes inside" — and has long fueled debates. Off the top of my head, I can easily name the Garrisonians of the antebellum abolitionist movement, who spent years eschewing involvement in federal politics, with the Constitution derided as a 'covenant with Hell" and "No Union with slaveholders!" as a battle cry.  Because to them, slavery was inherently approved of and supported by the existing American federal power, ergo to involve yourself with it was to tacitly approve of its defense of slavery, even if you sought to overturn it.  And you're never going to do that within the system, with all its compromising and dealmaking.

Others tried, of course.  And arguably they did light a very long fuse that eventually exploded into the end of slavery with the American Civil War, given the sectionalism exacerbated by both their petitions and by the Southern reaction to these "Fiends of Hell".  So you can argue the Garrisonians were wrong to take the tack they did.  But were they?  It's not like the US ended slavery constitutionally through peaceful voting and the losers accepting the reform.  The US ended slavery through violence, unleashed by the sectional conflict the Garrisonians contributed to setting off, which was given a constitutional support after the fact through the 13th Amendment.  And while initially pacifists, even the Garrisonians had come over to the violent method by the time of the war, with Garrison himself supporting the Union's efforts.  Of course, this debate cropped up again during that war, with Garrison and many others venting furiously when Lincoln, making his own principles vs. outcome calculations, refused to embrace the abolitionist cause until strategy made it both unavoidable and survivable.  To sum it up, this was not merely a case of the outcome-focused people being right and the principles-focused ones being wrong.

I could cite other cases — German Communists refusing to caucus with the Social Democrats to oppose the Nazis in 1932 for instance — but I want to move on.  So far, I imagine I make the Outcome side look better.  And it's a natural reaction; principles aren't material after all.  As a Ray Liotta character put it in one movie, "Being right's not a bulletproof vest!"  Compromising your principles to achieve a superior outcome is altogether reasonable and logical, one would even argue a more ethical way to go about things. Saving lives or making things better should matter more than purity.

But there's a trap on this consequentialist path, a trap that can and has turned plenty of people into agents of injustice and far worse.  It's the trap of assuming the outcome is all that matters; that there's no consequences to crossing llines in your own morality or view of ethics in the name of a superior outcome.  That's the path of justification for all kinds of crimes: torturing prisoners, killing civilians that get in your way, supporting brutality you ordinarily condemn.  Depending on the scope of your perceived outcome and the alternatives, this mindset can even blind you to calculating the actual merits of a situation so that you sacrifice principle for outcome needlessly.  And the next thing you know, you decide that the current situation means that maybe this guy who was convicted for crimes against humanity involving mass enslavement and the abuse of the slaves is useful for resisting another totalitarian system. So you act and instead of making him serve his sentence, you manipulate courts and ensure he gets his sentence vacated, and lo and behold, Alfried Krupp is free to reclaim his family company before the decade ends, and you're that rat bastard John McCloy who worked to free him… what, did you think I was letting you walk away McCloy?  Fool, my wrath is not so easily escaped!

…Where was I?

This is a complicated topic for precisely this reason.  It's easy to say "the outcome is what matters, if you have to sacrifice your principles for it, that's just life".  But principles matter.  They're a part of who we are, and the more we compromise them, the more we damage ourselves mentally and spiritually.  More than that, the easier we make it to self-justify doing terrible things, and the easier we lose sight of any principle.  Not only does this enable us to be corrupted, it makes us easier to manipulate.  There's nothing we can't be talked into supporting in the name of that superior result that everything else is being sacrificed for.

There is no easy answer to this.  Both sides of the line are dangerous if pushed too far.  You can become such a purist you cause evil because you've let perfect become the enemy of good enough, or you become such a compromiser that you'll swallow any evil because it's the practical thing to do.  Every situation, every issue, is different, unique, and shifts.  Today compromise may be the best choice but tomorrow standing fast may merit the best result.  All you can do, in the end, is make the choice and own the results.  To return to the above example, you can choose to agree with Shaun and not vote for Biden, accepting the consequence may be Donald Trump becoming President of the United States once more even if you consider such a terrible thing.  Or you can choose to disagree, which means accepting that the lives of Palestinians and Israelis in Gaza is not as important to you as the outcome of the upcoming US elections.  Choose, accept what it means honestly, and hope for the best.


Post-Script: Yes, we can probably argue whether Biden calling for a ceasefire publicly would lead to Bibi being influenced, but I wanted to focus on the structural issue of favoring principles or favoring outcomes.  As of latest reporting at time of writing, November 19th, the US may be close to brokering a ceasefire, but it's still uncertain.  I'll leave it to the future to see whether this happens and whether we ever learn the truth of what Biden's been doing behind the scenes to influence this matter.


Post-Post-Script: Having read and tweaked this a couple of times, I'm not pleased with it, but I've no idea on how to improve it.  I think I've hit the salient points, and I'm not sure how to better explain the mechanics involved in the choice being referenced.  So I'm a bit disappointed and I'm on the fence about whether to bother posting it tonight, though I likely will since itt's already written and the "Well, why not?" effect will sway me.