In reading articles about current protests by Black Lives Matter and allied groups against police violence, triggered by the murder of George Floyd, I’ve noticed a particular rhetorical move that seems incredibly bizarre and counterproductive to me. My intent in writing this is not to discuss the relative merits of different political or moral positions regarding these protests (short version: I am sympathetic to the protestors). Instead, I feel I need to write down what’s rhetorically odd to me, here, but don’t want to do so in a forum where doing so would be likely to devolve into unproductive discussion in which a narrow disagreement with a particular rhetorical approach may be misinterpreted as a broader support for police violence or racism. In any case, here’s the article that prompts my interest at the moment, in the following text: “Would it not be better, Democratic strategist Greg Pinelo wondered, to talk about ‘police reform’ rather than abolition, given that the former polls at 80 percent approval and the latter at just 10? (‘It’s called branding,’ he smugly counseled, as though a call for justice were nothing more than a product launch.)”

Marketers care if something works and nothing else. It is entirely understandable that one wouldn’t want to be morally associated with them. However, suppose we have a social cause that is important to us and we want desperately for our efforts to be successful. Does this make it more, or less, important to use methods that work? It’s like saying that it is of vital importance that your car get you to Reno–therefore you’ll ignore the “check engine” light. Marketers take their cars to mechanics. I don’t think people are very good at switching between moral reasoning and pragmatism. Once we have a compelling moral cause and our minds are focused on the moral analysis of the situation, appeals to pragmatism become crass. You’re motivated by a feeling of righteousness, and there is nothing less righteous than logistics. Switching to pragmatic concerns requires, at least temporarily, letting go of that feeling. It feels like abandoning the moral high ground. Even if not immoral, as the association with marketers suggests, pragmatic concerns are always amoral. How well a car functions has nothing to do with the moral position of the driver. If it’s broken, you will not fix it by moral reasoning; you have to let go of any concern about morality and worry about mechanical and electronic matters. You have to abandon your morality, or at least put it out of your mind. Here’s the thing—that change in your mind, of itself, has absolutely no effect on anything outside of your conscious experience. The cause against police brutality is not lost because you aren’t thinking about morality for a while. You just don’t have that wonderfully addictive feeling of moral superiority in those moments. Do you value that emotional experience more than people’s lives?