It is impossible to make a political argument without also making a moral claim.

The Problem of Neutral Rhetoric

by Brandon McGinley

It is impossible to make a political argument without also making a moral claim. Demanding tolerance often functions as a way to evade robust discourse about the merits of one’s principles.

Every political argument makes a moral claim. This may seem like an obvious statement, but it is one that those who craft our political rhetoric seem determined to obscure. We are inclined to appeal to concepts such as tolerance and freedom—which are, of course, moral concepts—as if they are ways to avoid reflecting on the moral merits of the policies under consideration. In every case, this is either the unwitting burying or the willful disguising of one’s moral and philosophical commitments.

We try to avoid explicitly moral claims in our discourse, because we believe they are controversial; they initiate disagreement and are easily caricatured as pushy or extreme. Since the modern habit of mind is to see moral claims as subjective and largely impervious to practical reason, we see moral discourse as hopelessly mired in disagreement. To make a political argument based on an explicitly moral claim, then, is to appear to abandon objectivity and the hope of consensus.

Fearful of controversy, we shift our appeals away from moral correctness to concepts on which we believe there is consensus, such as freedom, tolerance, and equality. In making such appeals, we hope to free ourselves and our interlocutors from the burden of making a value judgment. The implicit argument is this: if you believe in a particular uncontroversial concept (and who doesn’t!), then you must agree with my policy prescription. Thus, the façade of objectivity and the possibility of consensus are maintained. This approach also makes it easy dismiss and caricature opponents as “enemies of the human race,” as Justice Scalia put it in his Windsor dissent.

Yet all sincere political arguments—that is, all advocacy that is not undertaken knowingly to benefit a private or parochial interest at the expense of society as a whole—contain the express or implied claim that society will be better off if the proposed policy is executed. If the (sincere) advocate did not believe this basic premise, he would not defend the policy. Hence, any argument that obscures this substantive moral claim is either a dodge or a kind of self-deception.


The Appeal to Freedom (...)
The Appeal to Tolerance (...)
The Appeal to Science (...)
Reclaiming Rhetoric (...)

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