A couple of weeks before the astonishing Feb. 28 White House Oval Office meeting that saw United States President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance scold Ukraine’s leader, Vance told European leaders at the Munich Security Conference: “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.”
Vance was responding — with humour, he said — to pushback over Elon Musk’s vocal support for Germany’s far-right parties, expressed on X in a livestream event and in a December 2024 German newspaper op-ed.
Newsweek reported that the administration of Germany’s lower house of parliament “is investigating whether Musk’s support for the AfD on the platform where he has 210 million followers could constitute an illegal party donation.”
Are Musk’s actions, which some allege are interference, comparable to a young woman’s moralizing?
It might seem odd to equate the richest person in the world supporting far-right political parties with an eco-activist saying politicians should address climate change. However, there is a long history of people seeing scolding as one of the worst things we can do.
Our research has been concerned with how “purity politics” shape people’s attempts to live ethical lives, and what it means to reason about ecological catastrophe. We are writing a book about how rebellion against moralizing has become a surprising rallying point for the political right, and how to think about moralizing more broadly.
Rage against moralizing
Whereas conservatives used to be defenders of morals, they now rage against moralizing, seeing “wokism” as a threat to freedom. Religious conservatives used to position themselves as bastions of morality. But research shows secular societies do not behave less morally as a whole than religious ones.
Philosopher Judith Butler argues that while Trump displays a “shameless sadism” we are seeing his supporters revel in his rejection of moral repression.
The rejection of moralizing seems to be creating a terrain in which many on the right feel liberated by the current turn against “wokism.” But even on the left, some now worry about too much moralism in what is called “cancel culture.”
Read more: Cancel culture looks a lot like old-fashioned church discipline
How did moralizing come to this? Could understanding this help us navigate political deadlocks? The history of philosophy has some surprising suggestions here.
Traditionalism, scolding
First: there are some dangers in moralizing. One is a kind of traditionalism, which shows up in the creation of moral panics about transgender people, street gangs, abortion, immigrants and so on.
Another is if someone scolds: “you should take the bus rather than driving” — but the bus doesn’t run to your neighbourhood. Moralizing like this is just posturing. Maybe it makes the driver feel bad, but it doesn’t create more public transit.
Still, many of us have strong ethical convictions, and we try to live according to what we believe is right or wrong. Even if we judge someone else for the way they are living or behaving, we might hesitate to say something directly. Having personal ethics is socially acceptable; telling others what to do turns us into a scold. Why?
Our stance
The word “ethos” in ancient Greek means something like “posture” or “standing.” Aristotle saw ethos as marking our credibility, our character; we enact our ethics only in a shared world. Contemporary ethical approaches often focus on the personal side of this, setting an example without pushing values on others.
The related word “moral” comes from the Latin mores, usually understood as naming shared customs. Ancient Roman philosopher Cicero used the term moralis to translate ethos, (ἠθική) from Greek. “Morals” were regarded as “the common consent of all living together, constituted from shared traditions,” to quote the influential definition of Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro.
This “common consent” did not claim to apply to everyone. As late as the 16th century, philosophers such as Michel de Montaigne, Cardano or Agrippa of Nettesheim developed a comparative study of various customs and value systems known as “scienta moralis.”
Moral philosophers discussed different inclinations and life-ways of people without postulating one superior norm that would govern everyone. There was a Christian strand of moral theology that saw morality as a universal principle, but even after the era of 16th-century Reformation in the western church, it was not primarily about condemnation and judgement. Rather, this branch of “humanist” moral inquiry examined how people create and maintain shared norms in a pluralistic society.
This changed with ideas that we could have a universally applicable moral science, governed by reason. Philosophers like Immanuel Kant helped formulate this idea. If we think of morality as a law everyone can be subjected to, it makes sense that people rebel against it.
Channeling opponents of moralizing
When Vance characterised Thunberg as “scolding,” he unwittingly channelled opponents of moralizing, such as philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzsche once defined his philosophical project as a “declaration of war against morals and moralists.” For him and the thinkers he inspired, moralizing is conceived as a negative emotion motivated by resentment and envy.
Read more: Stephen Bannon's world: Dangerous minds in dangerous times
Nietzsche’s almost total rejection of morals can be understood as one of the many roots of the contemporary hesitation (though this idea is debated). No one wants to be denigrated by being seen as one of the sheep who unquestioningly embraces a herd mentality.
In this context, paradoxically, moralizing — scolding — has come to mean that anyone who says they think something is bad, or should be otherwise, is oppressing the people they criticize.
‘Scolding’ people in power
When we look at the extraordinary difference in power between Musk and Thunberg, this definition of moralizing begins to seem a little weird. Is scolding so dangerous to people in power?
For people interested in pushing back against authoritarianism, maybe we should hope that it is. We can look to the earlier ideal of morality as forging “common consent” for direction here.
In the philosophical sense, addressing our “mores” suggests moving towards a collective re-evaluation of how people want to live. Saying “no, I do not agree with this” can perhaps express our character in a way that shapes our shared world.
Moralizing could then be the process of building new customs. It would be about building morale and seeing hope and agency in these admittedly dire times. Moralizing with others, rather than at them, could help people move beyond feeling immobilized and cynical.
Studies about “bystander intervention” usually focus on the ways that people go along with things they think are wrong. Research does suggest our moral actions are shaped by the people around us, but this also means moral courage is contagious.
Standing up for something allows other people to also express their moral convictions. It can be a testament about hope or agency and could be more powerful than we think.
It is perhaps the fear of this powerful potential that is the core of truth in Vance’s otherwise absurd equation.
Perhaps this signals the true threat moralizing poses to the status quo — the possibility that there is a better way to live together in a shared world.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
