But that’s also how so many others in the past made grave moral errors.

Right now, it seems important to make an assertion that is so obvious that one shouldn’t have to say it: Even in a war, all militaries/armed groups should be very careful to avoid unnecessarily killing ordinary people who are just going about their lives.

Of course, there’s no one value that’s infinitely valuable, so in wild situations, there can hypothetically be times when killing is justified. But the vast majority of the time, when groups have claimed that not being careful to avoid killing innocent civilians is justified, they were wrong.

Sadly, being very careful not to kill innocent civilians is not the same as killing zero civilians. The horrible reality is that war in areas with lots of civilians nearby will almost always lead to dead civilians even when a lot of care is taken not to kill them. But taking great care should lead to many fewer civilians dead than would have occurred otherwise.

When groups PURPOSELY kill innocent people to achieve their ends, I believe that more than 99.9% of the time they were morally in the wrong taking that action.  And if you find yourself advocating for PURPOSELY killing innocent people, it is a very strong red flag that you’re advocating that other people do something very immoral. There are incredibly strong moral priors that say you should take great precautions to avoid murdering innocent people.

In my view, one of the only potentially-valid justifications for killing innocent civilians is to save a much larger number of other innocent civilians. But, also, that calculus should be used with great care – I believe that most of the time, when it ends up getting used in real life, it is actually misused, and ends up (accidentally) becoming a justification for immoral behavior.

This piece was first written on October 17, 2023, and first appeared on this site on October 26, 2023.

Healthy vs. Unhealthy Emotional Validation 

I would say that the main difference between the healthy validation of emotions and the unhealthy version is that the healthy version is based on genuine compassion, caring, authenticity, honesty, and interest in the other person’s experience, whereas the unhealthy version involves a willingness to sacrifice those things in an attempt to make the other person immediately feel good.

At a more detailed level, I think the healthy way to validate other people’s feelings involves expressing the following ideas (but ONLY when these ideas are true).

Healthy Emotional Validation

1) Care: I care about you.

2) Willingness: I’m totally okay with you feeling this emotion right now in front of me.

3) Acceptance: I don’t think badly of you for feeling what you’re feeling.

4) Interest: I am interested in learning more about what you are feeling and why you are feeling it.

5) Compassion: I have compassion and/or empathy for your suffering and want you not to suffer (unless you want to suffer right now, in which case I want you to suffer only insofar and in the ways that seem appropriate to you, such as the suffering that most people feel is right to feel after the loss of a loved one).

6) Understanding of facts: I understand the facts of what happened in this situation (and if I don’t, I’m going to ask open-ended questions in an effort to understand it).

7) Understanding of feelings: I understand why you’re feeling this way (and if I don’t, I’m going to make an effort to understand it).

8) Legitimization of feelings: I think it is totally reasonable that this combination of your situation, your beliefs about this situation, your thoughts, and your past experiences causes you to feel this way right now (and if I don’t see how the combination of your situation, beliefs, etc., lead to your emotion, I’m going to make an effort to understand it).

While some of this is helpful to say aloud when a friend or loved one is upset, much of it will typically be expressed through body language, attention, attitude, presence, tone of voice, and so on. The main thing is that these ideas get expressed in a way that the other person receives them, whether that expression is verbal or non-verbal, explicit or implicit.

On the other hand, I think that it’s usually unhealthy to attempt to validate emotions when it’s done expressing the following ideas.

Unhealthy Emotional Validation 

1) Disingenuousness: you say things that you don’t really mean or believe, such as supporting their claims about what happened when you don’t believe those claims are true.

2) Emotional reasoning: you support the idea that whatever their emotional response is to the situation is a perfect guide to what actually occurred (e.g., if they feel angry at someone, that implies the other person must have done something objectively harmful, or if they feel they’ve lost someone they had a fight with, that means that person is gone forever).

3) Justification: you support or encourage harmful or self-destructive actions they took or are considering taking as a consequence of their negative feelings (e.g., normalizing them taking revenge on the person they are angry about or justifying why it is okay that they did so).

4) Absolving: you encourage the idea that they made no mistakes or behaved perfectly or that someone else is 100% to blame for the situation (unless, of course, you really believe this to be true). On this point, it is often the case that victims of crimes did nothing at all wrong, but this is much less commonly the case when it comes to, for instance, interpersonal conflict between romantic partners, which usually involves both parties having behaved imperfectly, though not necessarily to the same degree.

To recap, people often want emotional validation from their friends and loved ones when they are feeling upset. People are often confused, though, about what this means exactly. There are both healthy ways and unhealthy ways to do emotional validation. 

The healthy version is not always easy to do, but I think it is what we should aspire to when a friend or loved one wants emotional validation. 

To do the healthy version, aim to imbue your responses to their emotions with genuine compassion, caring, authenticity, honesty, and interest in their experiences. And avoid sacrificing those things just to make the other person feel good.

This piece was first written on October 1, 2023, and first appeared on this site on October 11, 2023.

For example, you have rooms corresponding to aspects of your moral philosophy. On top of these rooms, supported by your moral philosophy, are rooms corresponding to your political philosophy. On top of these are still other rooms, corresponding to your beliefs about political parties. And on top of these, more rooms, containing your beliefs about political candidates. These stack in a tower of politics.

The various rooms and towers of your temple represent everything that you believe. Each room is supported by its columns, and supports the rooms above it. High up rooms rely on many rooms beneath them.

Suppose that you ask someone why he supports a certain political candidate. His brain runs a search algorithm of sorts, looking for an answer that rings true to him that you might also accept. A justification is identified, corresponding to one of the columns in a high up room that contains beliefs about that political candidate.

He tells you this reason. You then point out, rightly, that it is not logically sound. He realizes that you are right (respecting logic, as he does), and the column collapses. Does the whole room of his support for that candidate then collapse? No. There are still twenty other columns in that room, and the one that he showed you was barely supporting any weight. As soon as it was removed, the ceiling of the room merely shifted a centimeter, and the excess weight was redistributed across the remaining columns. You’ve won a fight with no significance, knocked over a non-weight-bearing column. If you ask him why he still supports this candidate, his brain searches again, and provides a different column now as the justification. You could spend hours kicking over columns, without ever putting the structural integrity of the room in jeopardy.

Now, suppose that you locate a critical column in his belief structure. One low in his temple, that carries a great deal of weight. If this column were removed, the nearby columns would not be strong enough to take over its burden. The ceiling of its room would collapse, and the rooms above that are supported by it would have to come crashing down as well. Knocking over this column could destroy an entire tower of his belief structure.

So what happens when you attack this critical column with logic? It doesn’t move. This column is carrying so much weight that it is almost impossible to budge. And while he is mostly unbothered by you kicking down non-weight-bearing columns, he hugs this column tightly as you try to knock it down, and won’t let go. He is not willing to see that tower fall. It took so much work and investment to build it. He doesn’t have any tower that can replace it. His social circle approves of that tower. He’s not sure what life would be like without it. He’s not sure he would be the same person without it. If he doesn’t have logic to use against your argument, he won’t hug the column any less tightly. He’ll resort to logical fallacies, rationalizations, claims that “truth is relative”, cached thoughts, insults, or plugging his ears.

Suppose, however, that before jeopardizing the structural integrity of that tower, you help him build a new one right next to it. This tower is in the same architectural style as the first, but new and clean and sleek. Each room in the old tower corresponds to one of the new tower’s rooms, but the content is different. This new tower has more solid foundations, built on beliefs about the importance of gathering evidence, thinking very carefully, verifying predictions, opening ideas up for criticism, and testing theories.

Now, suppose that when he sees that the construction of this new tower is going well, you point out that he’ll eventually need to clear away the old tower to make enough space to finish the new construction. Then, when he is ready, you help him as he pulls down the old tower’s critical column. Together, you pull, and watch the old tower fall to make way for the new. To help him teardown his tower, you helped him build a new one first.

So remember:

• Sometimes the reasons why people claim they believe are not the reasons that actually matter.
• People will often fight vigorously to prevent their belief structures from crumbling, even in the face of strong evidence against their beliefs.
• Sometimes you need to give a person new beliefs before tearing down their old ones.

Notice that in the situation described above the only information given so far that differentiates Tom’s argument from Sally’s is that Tom’s mind labeled his own argument true whereas Sally’s mind labeled hers as true. Both of them are aware of this. In order for this difference to be a good reason for Tom to believe his own belief rather than Sally’s, he must be able to explain why things that are labeled true by his mind are more reliable than things that are labeled so by hers.

If it were the case that Tom’s mind was more reliable at correctly identifying truth than Sally’s (in the particular topic area of their discussion), then he might be able to justify believing his own belief rather than hers on these grounds. But if that were the case, and he and Sally both knew it, then she would also have the same reason to believe his belief rather than her own. On the other hand, if her mind were more reliable at discovering truth than his, that would be a justification for her believing her own belief rather than his, but it would also give him the same reason to believe her idea and not his own. In other words, if it is mutually understood that one of the two is a more reliable truth identifier than the other, then they both have that as a reason to trust the ideas of whoever is better.

But what happens if Tom and Sally disagree about who is better at determining the truth on this subject? That is, what if she thinks her truth identification is superior and Tom thinks his is? Now the question of who is right has been raised one level higher than before. Why should Tom believe that he is better than she is at determining who is a better truth identifier? How can Tom justify using his own view of his truth-finding abilities rather than hers? Unless they both agree that Tom is better at identifying who is a better truth identifier, the problem is raised yet another level higher! Occasionally, one can settle this question fairly objectively, by asking how often each person has proven to be correct on past predictions related to this subject. But in the general case, there may be no resolution.

So far, all of the information that has been presented has been symmetric in that if it causes Tom to believe something, it should cause Sally to as well and vice versa, so long as it is known to them both. But one thing that differentiates Tom’s argument from Tom’s perspective and Sally’s argument from Tom’s perspective is that Tom at least knows that he is not purposefully deceiving himself. From his perspective though, he can’t be sure that Sally really believes what she claims to, and can’t rule out the possibility that she is fabricating evidence. So in situations where Sally’s is likely to be deceitful, Tom may be justified favoring his argument on those grounds (keeping in mind that people do deceive themselves all the time, though at least they rarely do so on purpose).

Perhaps the best reason Tom can have to favor his argument over Sally’s, however, is if he can confirm that she is using reasoning processes that don’t reliably lead to truth, but neither she nor he is able to make the same claims about his arguments. For instance, while applying the rule “If A implies B then not B implies not A” will lead to valid conclusions, applying the rule “if A implies B then not A implies not B” will generally not lead to valid conclusions. So her argument is problematic if it relies on a point like “if something violates a human right, it is generally considered to be wrong, but this does not violate a human right, so it isn’t generally considered wrong.” Pure logical fallacies are not the only non-truth generating type of argument though. Some other types of arguments which can (at least in many cases) be non-truth producing are those that rely on:

• sketchily defined words (e.g. “A fetus is not yet a human.”)
• emotional reasoning (e.g. “I feel that he has wronged me, therefore he has”)
• intuition (e.g. “It’s obviously true from my experiences that I make decisions, therefore I have free will”)
• metaphors (e.g. “Taxing a person is like robbing them, and we all agree robbery is immoral so we must agree that taxes are too.”)
• facts that themselves are left undemonstrated (e.g. “Although you have nothing in common, you should go on a date because opposites attract.”)

So if you find yourself in a factual debate and it continues to go unresolved, ask yourself:

• “by objective 3rd party measures (like prediction accuracy), am I a more reliable truth identifier in this situation than she is?”
• “How likely is it that she is deceiving me about what she really believes or knows?”
• “Does her argument rely on procedures that don’t reliably produce the truth? Does mine?”

You need good reasons to believe your own beliefs. You are not justified in believing your own thoughts over other people’s merely because they are your own!