The Phrase "Moral Blackmail" Has Become A Figleaf For Psychopathy

As has its twin, the phrase emotional blackmail

A new impressively dumb phrase has become ascendant on the American right. That phrase is “moral blackmail”—often conjoined with its twin of identical meaning: “emotional blackmail.” Some on the online right, in a herculean effort to be as obnoxious as the most obnoxious segments of the left, have coopted the strange therapy speak (gaslighting, toxic, triggered, etc), which treats firm criticism as if it’s in some way threatening. Some representative samples of the term’s current deployment are displayed below.

What the hell are these people on about?

What, precisely, is moral blackmail supposed to be? Suppose you tell Ted Bundy that he shouldn’t go around killing people. Is that a form of moral blackmail? How is suggesting that it’s bad to be causing new babies to be born with HIV, by halting foreign aid, any different? Surely it can’t be that all examples of criticizing wrong actions are moral blackmail.

Perhaps the idea is supposed to be as follows: moral blackmail is when you lob frivolous moral concerns. If someone said that not giving them cake on their birthday made you literally Hitler, they would be engaged in something that could be sensibly called moral blackmail. On this definition, moral blackmail is when one raises frivolous concerns to try to get you to behave differently.

But if that is what moral blackmail is supposed to be, then it’s obviously being misused here. Gobry raised the charge of moral blackmail against reporting about 300 extra babies being born with HIV because of the PEPFAR delays. Surely concern about babies getting a highly lethal disease is not frivolous—it’s not like claiming that failing to give you cake on your birthday is evil.

The phrase “moral blackmail” is a classic example of a motte and bailey. In practice, it’s used broadly to shut down any moral concerns raised by those critical of the right. When challenged, the right retreats to “moral blackmail is just when you raise bogus and frivolous moral concerns.”

The worst kinds of phrases are those that function solely to shut down thinking. The phrase “God of the gaps,” for instance, functions just to allow a person to stop thinking about whether God is the best explanation of some phenomenon. Ideological bingo cards serve the same function—when some argument is on your bingo card, you don’t have to think about whether it’s right. You’ve already pattern matched it as “haha, this guy actually said that dumb thing that people on the other side say, which I know is dumb because all my friends sneer at it dismissively.”

But the phrase “moral blackmail” is even worse. Rather than just allowing people to shut off their brains, it allows people to blithely dismiss any moral appeals! It allows them to callously ignore babies getting AIDS; once they’ve labeled concern about that “moral blackmail,” they can disregard it without a second thought.

Gobry appended the word “weaponized” to the beginning of his discussion of moral blackmail. But what precisely is it for moral blackmail to be weaponized? Certainly moral appeals do not come literally equipped with firearms. Things are weaponized when they are used to try to get people to change their behavior—people often complain about weaponizing tragedies, by using tragedies to promote a political agenda.

But in this sense, weaponizing moral appeals is perfectly legitimate. If someone is doing something immoral, they ought to stop. This is what it means for something to be immoral. If you blanketly reject any arguments of the form “this thing is bad and should stop,” you have just completely turned your back on morality. If moral appeals shouldn’t be “weaponized” to get us to change our behavior, what is the point of a moral appeal? Just to allow us to feel superior?

Is it weaponized moral blackmail to tell an axe murderer to stop axe murdering? You are, in some sense, weaponizing moral concerns to get him to change his behavior. But this is perfectly legitimate; morality is the sort of thing that ought to change our behavior!

The other discussions of moral blackmail in the above Tweets were similarly unserious. Vance, for instance, used the phrase to criticize a Tweet of Ro Khanna’s. In the Tweet, Khanna criticized the rehire of a DOGE employee who was let off for racist Tweets. In these Tweets, he said that he wouldn’t marry outside of his race and expressed support for normalizing Indian hate. Ro expressed he was concerned about the rehire “for the sake of both of our kids.”

There’s nothing wrong with that! When having a disagreement with someone, nothing is objectionable about making the issue a bit personal. If you’re talking to someone about immigration, it’s fine to ask them to consider how they’d feel about draconian immigration restrictions if they were an immigrant! When I’m hanging out in da clerb and trying to convince people to care about shrimp welfare, I’ll often tell them to imagine what it feels like to be a shrimp slowly suffocating to death. While I’m genuinely hesitant about firing people for Tweets, these were all from the last year! It’s not unreasonable to think we should not have people who are very probably virulent racists in positions of power.

Now, you can certainly disagree with Ro Khanna that the DOGE employee should have been let off. There’s a reasonable debate to be had about it. But there’s nothing in principle wrong with his argument. Vance’s complaint about emotional blackmail is, once again, just a tool for ignoring morality.

It’s especially ironic that people complain about emotional blackmail when they are equally dismissive and contemptuous towards moral appeals that aren’t emotional. For instance, such people deride highly analytical arguments for caring about shrimp welfare, Longtermism, and other kinds of animal welfare on the grounds that these are the morality of computers. But if you say that any moral argument that elicits an emotional reaction is emotional blackmail, and any that doesn’t elicit an emotional reaction is the morality of a computer, then you have a fully general method for dismissing all moral arguments.

This is, in practice, how such terms are deployed. Any time anyone makes a moral appeal, their pitch is contemptuously dismissed by people like Gobry who have no time for morality if it recommends anything other than their present set of actions. These people do not care about morality one jot. They see morality as a tool for crushing their enemies, not something to be paid much attention to.

Michael Huemer, one of my favorite philosophers, has an article titled “preachy vegans.” In it, he complains about the charge that vegans are preachy. People raise this complaint when vegans advocate that others stop eating meat. But as Huemer notes, vegans think eating meat is seriously immoral. If something is seriously immoral, it makes sense to advocate that other people stop doing it. If you complain when other people point out seriously immoral things you’re doing, on grounds that doing so is preachy, you’re just failing to take morality seriously. Huemer writes:

If [one thinks that eating meat is seriously morally wrong], what should one do? Should one just shut up and drink one’s kale juice in silence – so as to avoid annoying the people who are committing the horrific wrong by momentarily making them feel bad about it?

He ends the article with a rather depressing conclusion—it may be that most people fail, in this sense, to take morality seriously. They don’t regard abstract nonsalient moral conclusions as the sorts of things that should influence one’s behavior:

So, if someone raises serious concerns that a common behavior may be not slightly but extremely wrong, and your first reaction is that this is “preachy”, that is failing to take morality at all seriously. I think it may be that most people fail to take morality at all seriously. They treat morality as a trivial personal preference, see others’ raising of serious moral concerns as an impolite annoyance, and feel disdain toward morally principled behavior.

In my judgment, this neglect of morality is widespread. Most people regard moral appeals as annoyances and don’t take them at all seriously. Even when you convince people that they’re doing seriously immoral things, they mostly just continue doing them and don’t even feel bad about it. But at least many people can be swayed by emotional appeals; most people feel some compassion towards the meek and vulnerable. For this reason, charity is fairly widespread.

But if you treat genuine compassion as something to be expunged and ignored—as a cucked, left-wing tool of influence—all the while ignoring other sorts of moral arguments, then you have decided to stop caring about right and wrong. The fact that this sentiment seems to be becoming increasingly common on the American right is, in my judgment, alarming.

By the way, Gobry has recently been uncovered killing and eating children. And if you complain that I shouldn’t say this publicly when I have no evidence for it, and that lying is wrong, I will remind you that such weaponized moral blackmail was recently defeated at the ballotbox.