Ideological Ascent and Asymmetry

There's a certain dialectical move I sometimes see, wherein you criticize someone's political conduct as unreasonable on grounds that abstract away from the (first-order) details that they're actually responding to.  We might call this ideological ascent, as the critic insists on looking only at abstract features of the dialectical situation, e.g. the mere fact that it involves an "ideological disagreement", without any heed to the actual details of the dispute.

Ideological ascent seems to presuppose a symmetrical view of political/ideological merit: that "both sides" of a dispute are (at least roughly) equally reasonable.  This convenient assumption saves one from the hard work of actually evaluating the first-order merits of the case under dispute.  (See also: in-betweenism.)  Alas, people have been known to advance unreasonable political views from time to time.



Some moral principles can work while abstracting away from the first-order details.  For example, you probably shouldn't literally crucify your political opponents, flay them, or bury them alive, even if they've deliberately implemented objectively harmful policies.  The cases in which such violence would be justified are so rare that you likely don't need to get into the details of the dispute before criticizing someone who wants to literally crucify their political opponents.  Ideological ascent works for such easy cases.

You might also find the odd individual who is indiscriminately wrathful towards anyone who disagrees with them, no matter how minor the issue or how low the stakes.  In such a case, ideological ascent is appropriate because it really does seem that what this person is responding to is the mere fact of disagreeing with them, rather than anything that depends on the specific details under discussion.

But most real-life instances of ideological ascent aren't so clearly justified.  Instead, it involves complaints like: "I find it reprehensible to celebrate a death of anyone just because you disagree with them politically." (actual quote recently seen on Facebook)  This sort of remark strikes me as misguided because it seems extremely unlikely that the celebrants in question are so indiscriminate that they would really celebrate the death of anyone just because they disagree politically.  We all have significant disagreements with the majority of other people, after all, but tend to only celebrate the deaths of people we consider egregiously villainous.  So unless you take the extreme view that death should never be celebrated (which doesn't strike me as a very defensible view), a productive response instead requires substantive moral evaluation: what kind of harms did the deceased cause?  To what extent were they justified? etc.

We're naturally biased towards exaggerating the demerits of our political opponents, so it may well be that many such celebrants are in fact misguided and behaving inappropriately as a result.  But it's a substantive moral question that depends upon the details of the case.  A general caution towards epistemic humility never hurts, I guess, especially in the political arena where dogmatism and overconfidence run rampant.  But it would be a mistake, I think, to forsake all attempts at substantive normative judgment and accept only "procedural" principles (of the symmetrical sort that apply at the level of ideological ascent).  Some people are really bad, some even commit genuine atrocities, and it makes a real difference to how we should react when that's so.  The risk of misjudging the matter is a reason to judge carefully (and consider the criticisms of those who disagree with us), not a reason to refrain from judgment altogether.