The Case for Everything

We are drawn to voices that share our values and exalt what we hold dear. That is why I was intrigued by Jocko Willink’s Extreme Ownership tale of friendly-fire tragedy in Ramadi, Iraq.

The title — a pitch in itself — already spoke to the kind of thing I prize: owning failure, taking responsibility, and refusing the easy exit that excuses provide. Willink’s ideal, even if I don’t always reach it, is one I aspire to so his story resonated with me. And that’s the point. What resonates with one disposition may not land as well with another.

Disposition determines resonance

Now contrast the posture in I Kissed Dating Goodbye (1997) by Joshua Harris with the one in How to Not Die Alone (2021) by Logan Ury.

I was in a church young-adults group around the time Harris’s book was everywhere. Since I was new to church my instincts would have been closer to Ury’s: date with purpose, learn from real interactions, and look for a good fit.

I was in the minority. The girls in that group leaned toward Harris’s careful approach. Looking back, that split makes sense: values provide the scaffolding for our dispositions. The more values you share with an author, the wiser the author sounds.

Harris and Ury appealed to different priorities: one choice-restrictive, the other choice-rich. Harris valued intentionality, restraint, and commitment. His focus was marriage suitability. Ury valued agency, compatibility, and self-awareness. Her focus was helping people make better choices in the search for a good fit.

The girls there weren’t irrational for leaning toward Harris. They wanted a guarded road toward matrimony, and Harris offered what looked like a responsible path. I wasn’t irrational for leaning toward Ury. I wanted room to learn from real interactions about who actually fit, and I didn’t want to be thinking that far ahead. But since the girls were on Venus and I was on Mars you can imagine how I’d have been situated in that dating scene.

Then imagine the leaders kicking off a dating series with session one: “Date with marriage in view.” That’d have immediately set the tone against my approach and inclination. In that framing, Harris wins.

Which is to say: most debates are won upstream. Whoever sets the frame sets the value ordering — the relative rank of competing goods — which, in turn, predisposes resonance. In a framing favoring exploration and experience, Ury wins.

Well, I no longer think as I did. And while I’m not suggesting all approaches are equally wise and everything is just trade-offs, neither do I mean to crown Harris or Ury the winner. The subject in view is broader.

If the values which get elevated predispose the winner, who decides which values get elevated? And how?

The tail wags the dog

Pause for a moment and reflect on conversations you’ve had with ChatGPT. It can tend to mirror the frame you bring it. Its replies often lean toward the shape of your own assumptions. In that sense, the model is less a judge than a responsive instrument. With each turn, each nudge, you can hem the conversation in and add nuance. It can defend nearly any position because positions are defended by values, and those are often implicitly supplied by the one begging the question.

There is, indeed, a case for nearly everything. And if you’re the one steering, you’ll likely find an answer you can affirm.

Jonathan Haidt has a line for this: the tail wags the dog. People often start with an inkling of what they want, then build the reasons after the fact. A bias is already in the frame. What remains is bolting on a rationale that makes it sound right. They get the answer they wanted because they control the frame. These values matter more than those. My point is that, since no one thinks their own values are misordered, they’re already well inclined to substantiate their own perspective.

Values can be properly ordered

In the right frame, when the right values are elevated, a scaffolding can be built to justify nearly anyone’s convictions. Take two books that argue opposite positions with equal skill and clarity. What’s the difference between them? Different values. Or a different ordering.

Take any contested topic — marriage, abortion, immigration. Assume the best minds on both sides have written their books. Those books are simply the strongest arguments each side can make. Both, given their own frame — these values outrank those — will offer a rational and logically coherent take.

But even after the vote is counted, the election won, or the court has spoken, someone is still fuming. They won’t accept what has been declared right. While one side celebrates, the other seethes. Outrage. This is the heart of politics. And that is because most contests are decided less by the strength of the argument and more by the values which resonate with a group. Every argument stakes its claim on which value ordering is “better.” The battle in politics usually revolves around setting this frame.

Consider the Holocaust. If Nazis came to a door asking whether Jews were being hidden inside, many would lie to protect them. Because the value of a human life, obviously outranks the value of telling the truth. The lie serves a higher good. It seems self evident that values must be ranked. Ordered.

Appealing to something higher

Virtues connect to values. The traits that register as attractive line up with how we order values. If virtue today seems subjective, maybe it’s because the gulf between competing values has widened.

If values can be ranked, then the next question is unavoidable: by what authority is that ranking judged?

Marriage was in the 1950s held as a covenant between a man and a woman, for life. It was sacred enough that divorce was considered scandalous. But the culture changed. It decided there was no reason it should not be widened to include other unions. That change moved through the states and then, in Obergefell v. Hodges, reached the Supreme Court and became the law of the land.

If government alone decides what’s right, then slavery was right when it was law, and segregation too. Because you cannot depend on it, whatever good thing you enjoy today may be gone tomorrow.

So activists appeal to something higher.

Which raises the real question: where does rightness come from in the first place? If government can be led by power (dictators) or popularity (democracies), either of which can be wrong, then on what grounds is justice fought? Who, or what, is the highest authority one can appeal to?

Rightful protest presumes objectivity

If people are inclined to argue for a right ordering, that points to something higher: in reality, some moral positions are better than others. If that is ever true — as with lying to Nazis to protect Jews — it must be universally true, not true at one time and false at another.

But arguing for a right ordering is what societies do. And as hunger can be properly satisfied, so, too, one presumes, can the hunger for justice be.

If right is merely subjective, when Martin Luther King, Jr. fought for civil rights, he would be reduced to someone merely trying to have it his way. The government could have rightly squashed his revolt as “but we prefer it this way.” And with the popular backing it could’ve remained so. There would be no basis by which to argue for a better value ordering — only a desire by one group to have its preferences now met. In that reality, expressions of outrage are employed as psychological props. The so-called appeal to the higher good: a ruse.

Consequently, without a real order, what’s “just” is arbitrary, a unique expression in time and place. But not true. And if not, then politics is only bullying, one group instituting its preferred ideology by any fruitful means. The external, higher anchoring would vacuously be forever missing from the picture.

Objectivity if not knowable is useless

Even if objective moral order exists, it must be knowable enough to guide judgment.

Indeed, discerning how to properly order values is a worthwhile endeavor. It is meaningful to argue for a better society. There is nothing more human than seeking the greater good, and nothing more humane.

But if objectivity exists “out there” it is largely unknowable. Then pragmatically speaking, we’re no better off. Many, whether by power or popularity, will reach for nothing higher than their own predilections — leaving you nowhere to go once you have reached the highest human figure or institution. Where then, when even their judgment feels faulty? On what basis do you protest?

To hold the higher ground, your why must be grounded in more than just you — as our American forefathers presumed when they appealed to inalienable rights.

No one is debating the difficulty of divining it. However, it is logically in reach that, from top to bottom, an objectively correct moral order exists. The values in any situation can, theoretically, be properly ordered.

What best explains the sense of that hunger for which people so vigorously fight? That an impersonal universe, having banged itself into existence and then organized and animated matter, does by its own what demand it? For what obligation would it have on anything it produced? Or that a personal, moral Creator imprinted what can only be found perfectly in His own character upon us?

A real moral obligation points more naturally to a moral Lawgiver.

If the universe mindlessly programmed that hunger, how can we claim we are, in any way, moral? If evolution advances by sheer probability, then humanity, like everything else, is part of a singular mindless machine. It would be hard to suggest our thoughts somehow transcend that.

Look at yourself. Were you a wise teenager? A wise twenty-something?

Consider the certainty you once carried in your much smaller frame. All it took to claim moral high ground was to be the one ordering the values — and you did. Then you stacked your reasons on top like lumber on a frame. Because for every position one can find a chair comfortable enough to sit in.

People are a meandering river ever-changing direction. They can flow toward or away from the greater good, because they are an insufficient anchor — finite and undependable.

It is not so with God.

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. — Hebrews 13:8