Dear Prudence: Moral DIsagreements

[minoanmiss]

How do I respond to a person doing something I morally disagree with that they are very excited about? I’ve found myself in many conversations over the past year where acquaintances, coworkers, distant family, or other not-close friends give me an update that makes me uncomfortable.

Examples include: “I’m visiting Hawaii during a drought,” “I’m trying to adopt a baby and fighting the birth mother for custody,” and “I’m going on a mission trip to Uganda to convert people to Christianity.” These are all things I don’t super agree with, but the person speaking often sees as positive or totally innocent. Do I just say good luck? Do I share my concerns? I feel like a self-righteous buzzkill if I react honestly, and like I’m silently endorsing their actions if I don’t.

—Paralyzed By Politeness

Dear Paralyzed,

This is hard to answer because it’s not about the words you say in conversation. It’s about the relationship you want to have with people who do things that you find morally objectionable. And only you can make the calculation about where certain actions fall on the “I would have made a different choice” to “Wow, you’re actually a force for evil and I don’t want to be close to you” spectrum in your mind. I’m guessing that a friend making a poor choice for the environment in a world where we could all stand to interrogate our actions might not rise to the same level as someone committing to a legal fight that you see as seriously hurting a specific child. But I don’t know! Either way, here is your guide.

If you think what the person is doing is so messed up that it makes you question whether you even really want to be friends with them: “Wow, that actually sounds kind of wrong to me!”

If you disagree with the action but not enough that it changes your opinion of the person or your desire to have a relationship with them: “Wow, how long will the flight be?”

Comments

[melannen]

Your question is something I have faced myself more-or-less, because I'm from a subculture that is all about hand-me-downs, and is also, let's say, politically mixed.

But it is not that unusual for me to hear "cousin's ex's aunt wants to get rid of $thing and we thought of you, could you use it?" (And vice versa - "We have $thing that is theoretically valuable but very few people can use, I remember that a person you used to invite to your Christmas parties was into $thing, I don't remember their name but you probably have contact info, do you think they'd be interested?") Passing things around that way does have some effect on social ties, don't get me wrong, but they are (often deliberately) very weak social ties, and it's more of a pay-it-forward than pay-it-back sort of transaction. In that sort of situation I probably wouldn't think twice about anyone's political affiliations or moral choices.

I also sometimes think that maintaining those sort of weak social ties with people who have bad politics can be an ethically good act, not a violation of my integrity at all. Interacting in positive ways with people whose ideology opposes reality is often a key part of giving them the tools to crawl out of their echo chamber, and having those interactions be based around really weak social ties like mutal-aid sorts of things is a way to do that without having to actually, you know, listen to them talk about it, or staking any of your own emotional well-being or integrity on them not being assholes.

On the other hand there are people who aren't used to that same sort of culture who use that sort of gifting as a starting point to try to build a stronger relationship, or who will think of it as a debt owed, and that's an entirely different situation.

So I guess the point I am rambling toward is that if you think "put you back in contact" means "this person wants to rebuild the friendship back to where it was and wants to start with a gift", it's a different question than "we know the friendship is attenuated, but this is the sort of interaction it can still support along that tiny remaining thread, and we just want to find somebody anywhere in our extended network who can use $thing".