Different people have different principles, and trading off between these principles can result in conflict. This essay is musing about why that happens even between people who look like they should be on the same side.

I. Okay, but why might principles conflict?

Principle. \ prin-sə-pəl \ n 1: A general fundamental law, doctrine, or assumption 2 : a rule or code of conduct; also: devotion to such a code

- The Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Being principled is good. Or, rather, being principled is an applause light and being unprincipled is a boo light. I’m calling it good descriptively because people use it that way, not prescriptively because I’m sure it’s right.

One can have principles that other people vehemently disagree with. My problem with the Ku Klux Klan wasn’t that they didn’t have principles, it was that those principles led them to hurt people. For a less extreme example, I expect the Pope is pretty principled about everything in the Nicene Creed, and since I’m not Catholic I don’t believe the Pope is correct about the world. It’s very easy to imagine a principled Catholic and principled Hindu finding their principles are different. 

Principles are also a matter of emphasis. I’m an American and broadly on board with the constitution and its amendments, but it’s common enough for amendments to conflict. How do we compromise between someone’s first amendment right to a pastor’s freedom of religion, and the fourteenth amendment’s equal protection under the law if gay or poly people ask to be married? The principle of freedom of speech gets regularly curtailed by the right to a fair trial, with jury members prohibited from talking to journalists or reading news about the case.

The more principles you have the more likely they are to come into conflict. Because of this, I think it makes more sense as an individual to have fewer principles, to have one or two, maybe three.

II. Okay, but why can’t people be reasonable about them?

A principle is kind of supposed to be something you’re unreasonable about. The most principled people I know are really stubborn about their core values. No, more stubborn than that.

Consider the archetype of a principled advocate of the second amendment. The kind of person who has multiple fully automatic rifles at their house and favourite pistols. I get why a metropolitan city wouldn’t want anyone walking down the street with a Barrett M107 slung over their shoulder, but cities also have to actually write rules saying you’re not allowed to do that because otherwise some people totally will.

That’s a gun someone actually made.

Most principled second amendment advocates will compromise with the state apparatus and not have illegal firearms. They’ll just snark a lot about how they think the laws are dumb and should be changed. This is in part because the state apparatus is more responsive to this particular norm violation than it is to most. Some people totally do build up illegal stockpiles of firearms though.

To put another picture in your head, take the principle of being honest, and the principle of being kind. Both codes someone might hold to. Both principles usually don’t conflict; it’s both true and kind to tell my coworker that they did a good job on a project that went well, or to tell my partner that they're beautiful. And yet in the limit, I have seen people who fail to say true bad things about other people because it would be unkind, and boy howdy have I seen people say hurtful things claiming it’s important to be honest.

For one more example, Kurt Vonnegut once wrote a story called Harrison Bergeron, about a dystopian society where all were made equal. People who were stronger than others were made to wear heavy weights. People who were more beautiful than others were made to wear ugly masks. People who were smarter than others were made to wear earpieces that interrupted their thoughts with loud buzzing noises. It’s satire, and fictional evidence to boot, but the point it’s making is that the principle of equality can be taken too far.

Guns. Truth. Equality. Individual liberty. Devotion to religion. Loyalty to one’s boss. All principles one can argue for, which can improve individual lives or be part of a good person, and all principles whose most ardent supporters will take to extremes the rest of society might dislike.

This is a handgun. Someone sat down, thought about it, and deliberately made that thing. Plausibly that person isn’t doing it out of deep principles. Maybe their motive was being so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think about whether they should. But I’ve met people that would make something like this out of sincere principle. Be careful when saying someone is only claiming to care about a principle.

III. Okay, but won’t people realize my principles are the right ones?

Hahahahaha no.

III b. Okay, seriously, why won’t they agree with my principles once I explain it to them?

I mean, maybe they will, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

The important concept at play here is that principles are fundamental. They’re the starting point we use to build other moral intuitions on. That makes arguing against principles a bit like arguing against values, in that if you have an argument implying their principle is wrong they might decide that’s a problem with your argument. People can use principles as moral premises; after all, if a clever arrangement of claims and statements implies that 2 is 3 or a good thing is bad, aren’t you suspicious it’s the claims and statements that are wrong?

In formal logic, you can sometimes prove that one of several premises are false. 

1. All apples are green 
2. All apples are red
3. Apples are only ever one colour. 

One of these three statements must be false. 

1. If it’s raining then the ground is wet
2. The ground is not wet 
3. It’s raining. 

Contradictions exist: but which premise is false is harder. 

So if I’m starting from the premise that truth is the most important thing, how exactly do you plan to convince me otherwise? You could try explaining that truth could hurt people, either emotionally or by somehow leading lots of people to come to physical harm. You could argue there are times where lying to people for their own good saves lives. 

And I want to point out that even if you are right, you have rested your argument on a principle that hurting people or letting them die is bad. It isn’t incoherent for me to say I care about truth more than life. It may well be that I also have a principle or value about human life, but I want to point out that explaining truth can hurt people completely fails to address the principle of truth on its own terms. That’s the kind of thing that’s very easy to do when starting from one set of principles and trying to argue with a second set.

In the books We Are Legion and For We Are Many, one character is named Medeiros. Medeiros is an intelligent space probe created by a dystopian version of Brazil, and his goal is to further the power and goals of the Brazilian Empire. At one point Medeiros starts dropping asteroids on Earth and kills millions, because there are enemies of the Brazilian Empire there- despite the fact that the Empire is gone, long destroyed in a previous world war. But there’s no arguing him out of this- his principle is loyalty to an empire that no longer exists. He’s being principled. Again, fictional evidence, again, kind of a satire, but I have seen arguments between people who want good things for America and other people who argue against by saying there will be bad consequences for the rest of the world. They failed to address the actual principle.

You’d have to argue the principle was inconsistent somehow, or that it was in conflict with something even more fundamental to them, or somehow emotionally pitch them on the wonder and joy of your principle — hoping they agree emotions of wonder and joy matter. This is harder than people seem to realize.

(Also, sometimes you’re just not that good at explaining things. It’s not always because the other side is dumb and bad!)

IV. Okay, but whither hypocrisy?

Sometimes I see people, usually already fed up with another person who is doing something they don’t like, fixate upon some seeming inconsistency. 

“See!” they cry. “Bella isn’t actually principled about honesty, she just lied about how long she’s been working for her company!” 

What I usually find when I dig into the details is that there are subtleties in how the principle is used. For instance, maybe Bella said “I’ve been working here for a billion years” and meant it as an obvious joke. Obvious jokes, in Bella’s mind, don’t count as lies.

Or maybe it was rounding that got taken as false precision. If I say “Yeah, I was a software engineer for a decade” and you find out it was from 2014 to 2023, a period of nine years, did I lie? I do have honesty as a minor principle of mine, and I think it at least depends on context. If I put 2013-2023 on my resume, that’d be a lie. If I said a decade and someone said “wait I thought it was only nine years” and then I doubled down saying it was really ten, then I’d have lied. I wouldn’t take rounding up by one in casual conversation as an affront to the principle of honesty — but then, it’s only a minor principle for me.

(In my specific case I’m also rounding up internships and freelance without a job title and personal projects and some number of months of w-2 work less than twelve.)

(Also if you take away from this that I’m less honest than most people, I think you’re just wrong.)

People with principles about not hurting others have subtlety around human lives vs animal lives, around saving lives in expectation vs certainty, around present harm and future harm, about what they do with their own hands vs what is done in their collective amorphous name. People with principles around art or beauty have all kinds of distinctions in taste. When calling out someone else for hypocrisy, I think sometimes what’s happening is the person on the outside without that tightly held principle isn’t tracking a distinction like this.

It’s even worse when most people try to adopt with ill-faith some principle they think is wrong. 

“Polyamorous people think it’s fine to sleep with someone who isn’t their spouse, but when I cheat on my spouse they still think I’m an asshole. Hypocrites, all of them.”

(“We’re doing it with our partner’s permission though. You just lied to your wife and hired a sex worker.”)

“You say you’re for free speech, but when I called your friend a *&#$ing @$#er who should be *%$#ed you banned me from your web forum. Hypocritical #&%$.”

(“We want everyone to feel safe expressing themselves. You were obviously making other people feel like they couldn’t express their side.”)

It’s just really easy to fail to live with a principle if you hate the people who hold it.

(Hypocrites totally exist though.)

V. Okay, but what do we do with all this?

I think the first step is asking what principles people are holding to. Maybe you’re each making assumptions here because your principle is so obvious to you. State even the obvious aloud and notice where you’re confused at their behavior.

I think the second step is recognizing that there’s going to be interpretation and subtlety in principles even in their ideal world, and they probably already are compromising some. Firearm aficionados know if they carry a Pfeifer-Zeliska around they will get stopped by the police, so they don’t, even if they might want to. (And boy do some of them want to.)

Step three is accepting that compromise can hurt. It means not getting everything you wanted. Sometimes it means not getting most of what you want. I’m not saying you have to compromise your principles but I am saying that you might have very sharply constrained other options like “do it or leave.”

Step four is tolerate tolerance. Try not to snap at your allies or at neutral parties for allowing someone else to “get away with” unprincipled behavior. They might not share the foundation with either of you.

I have all this in my mind because often I talk to people who are both very principled and very sure their principles are the right ones, and I need to work with all of them. 

(Remember, my daily occupation these days is ACX Meetup Czar. That means interfacing with ideally every single ACX meetup organizer, plus a healthy amount of the leadership of adjacent groups. It may not surprise you to know that the broad community around here has a lot of very principled people with some very different principles!)

I’ve found I’m better than average at interacting with a broad range of people, and I achieve this by being unusually flexible and willing to “go native” a bit. The downside of this is that I have a much less rigid core than many others. What finally put this essay on my list of things to really write was when I ran upon a principle of mine that I really would not compromise on; I need to be able to make promises as distinct speech acts different from my common speech, and I need those to be recognized. 

It’s not that most of what I say is worthless, but there’s a real difference between “Sure, see you tomorrow around noon” and “I promise I will be at your office at 12pm Eastern Time.” That provides a flexible structure that can be rigid when I need — I can commit to following other rules when I’m in the space those rules hold sway, and then stop following those rules when I leave — without making me inflexible in a way where I can’t reshape to meet the next person. If someone’s claiming I made promises I didn’t make or claiming I broke my word casually, it feels to my gut like there’s no point communicating with them, and when I try and reason through it feels like there’s no way to negotiate the places where their principles end and mine begin.

It snuck up on me. I didn’t realize how strong that was in my psyche until someone ignored it.