Beware the Moral Homophone

Or "Why you should prioritize attacking your allies before anyone else"

Homophones are words that look or sound exactly alike, but convey completely different meanings. It’s how bear can refer to the large forest animal or the act of carrying a burden, how light can be a weight designation or a source of illumination, or how spring can be a climate season or a compression device.

Homophonic confusion is not necessarily a problem, because context usually gives us enough clues to scry the word’s intended meaning. Within critical applications, forethought has provided us with safeguards: the NATO phonetic alphabet to avoid letter confusion, and roger was adopted as the standard affirmative phrase specifically to avoid the dangerous ambiguity of a pilot saying right. So generally when ambiguity finally blossoms, it’s either absolutely hilarious (“Knowledge is power, France is bacon”) or reveals someone’s literacy struggles (There/Their/They’re).

I’d like to introduce a related concept: moral homophones. This is where vastly different moral frameworks nevertheless get confused as the same thing because their practical applications are often identical. Just as linguistic homophones “sound the same but mean different things,” moral homophones appear identical in practice while harboring fundamentally incompatible underlying principles.

For example, vegetarian diets can be adopted for vastly different reasons. One person may do so out of a deep commitment to reducing animal suffering, while another cares none and is motivated purely by health benefits. Despite this fundamental disagreement on a core ethical principle, their behavior is nevertheless bound to be indistinguishable in practice. A divergence may not surface except in extremis, such as with the discovery of a mythical creature whose suffering directly correlates with human longevity. The animal welfare advocate will change nothing, while the health loon will clear out their pantry to make room for the new LifeSpan Fillets™️.

Moral homophones are unavoidable in the same way that humans having very different reasons for doing the exact same thing is unavoidable. Yet this phenomenon creates two distinct dangers. One is sleepwalking towards a coalitional divorce, where members who were previously laboring in harmony suddenly discover their frameworks unraveling at the seams when circumstances shift. The second is accidentally empowering a worldview that ends up backfiring when you need it most — essentially nurturing an ideological parasite that devours its host.

I want to highlight what I consider to be the ur-example, illustrate its serious ramifications, and then offer an easy solution.

The Sin of Racism isn’t Racism

No other example better illustrates this concept than the homophonic confusion between what I would call “individualistic antiracism” versus “reparationist antiracism”.

Much effort has been devoted towards revising dictionary definitions, but for old school advocates, the original sin of racism was the category error of mistaking irrelevant characteristics for relevant ones. The sin isn’t about simply having aesthetic preferences about race, but allowing those preferences to override pertinent considerations. This was seen as both irrational as well as morally corrosive because of the implicit reliance on collective attribution — the fallacious assumption that an individual’s worth, capabilities, or moral standing can be determined by their group membership.

The fundamental injustice therefore was tarring individuals with either collective guilt or collective merit they neither earned nor deserved. The exemplar of this thinking is enshrined in MLK’s most famous line from his most famous speech: judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.¹

In stark contrast, “reparationist antiracism” takes almost the antipodal approach. It eschews individual merit and doubles down on collective attributes. Under this rubric, so long as you are superficially a member of an oppressed class, you are presumed to have been aggrieved even if you — individually — are not. And on the flipside, you are presumed to be guilty because of your membership even if you — individually — have committed no crime. The exemplars here are Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, or Minor Threat’s classic banger Guilty of Being White:

I’m sorry for something that I didn’t do

Lynched somebody but I don’t know who

You blame me for slavery, a hundred years before I was born

It’s fascinating how such diametrically oppositional approaches can nevertheless exist in relative harmony, but that’s because practically speaking, they are identical in most applications. “We should raise funding for schools in black neighborhoods to make up for deficient funding” looks the same from both perspectives, up until the moment you reach budget parity. The individualists will pull the emergency brake and declare victory, while the reparationists will slam the accelerator, insisting the real work is just beginning.

In Defense of Signaling One’s Virtue

To the extent that we want individuals to conduct themselves virtuously, it’s good to have societal mechanisms that reward and encourage virtuous behavior. And once you start rewarding good behavior, you necessarily encourage people to advertise their beneficence, jumpstarting a constructive positive cycle. So long as it is truthful and earnest, there is nothing inherently wrong with signaling one’s virtue.

This otherwise beneficial cycle can be corrupted, and represents a particularly fatal danger with moral homophones. Instead of producing substantive virtue, wires can get crossed and we unintentionally end up encouraging either empty performative virtue, or “virtue” antithetical to our preferred framework. All because the social reward mechanism cannot distinguish between genuine virtue and its impostor — whether that resemblance stems from honest convergence or deliberate subterfuge designed to ride the tailwind of another’s legitimacy.

Many moral crusades had to go through a tendentious journey to finally garner lasting influence. With racism in 20th century America, racist attitudes had to lose cachet among influential intellectual types. Within those circles in the 1950s and 60s, the virtue signaling cycle reinforced the memetic replication of individualistic antiracism. If you wanted to be considered one of the “good decent people” who could hang at New York City apartment parties, you had to demonstrate your subscription to this framework.

The memetic spread wasn’t confined to intellectual salons, it also gained momentum through celebrity endorsement. Charlton Heston exemplified this dynamic, proudly marching with MLK in 1963 and leading the arts contingent at the March on Washington, serving as a durable counter to John Wayne’s explicit and public adoration for “white supremacy”.²

Individualistic antiracism had unique characteristics which made it so fervently compelling, and accelerated its memetic virality:

• Explicitly patriotic: Calling back to America’s fundamental promises etched on its founding charter, that all men are created equal.

• Rationally capitalistic: As the black conservative Thomas Sowell said “Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.”

• Pleasantly passive: There was no affirmative obligation imposed upon you, all you had to do was not discriminate.

Passivity is a double-edged sword because whatever barriers to entry it lowers, it sacrifices in bombast and urgency.

If you flipped a switch during Jim Crow America and eliminated every single discriminatory policy, virtually nothing would change the next day. Some obvious effects would disappear, such as separate water fountains and segregated schools, but much of the accumulated impacts of decades of discriminatory policy would take years or decades to undo. The black families that lost out on cheap loans to purchase homes during decades of redlining would not wake up with back interest in their bank account from all the generational wealth they missed out on. The debate around the Civil Rights era mirrored the one during Reconstruction. The promised 40 acres and a mule reparation package for lifelong bondage never materialized. Instead, shackles were unlatched and Freedmen were set off to fend for themselves, often stumbling back into subjugation somewhat less glaring than the slavery of yore.

From the standpoint of virtue signaling, it’s really hard to compellingly brag about all the things you are not doing. It’s not sexy. This vulnerability was a maladaptive trait within social reward systems, one which the reparationist approach just happened to be uniquely suited to capitalize on. If you were someone who genuinely believed in individualism and the power of people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, you accepted letting fields lie fallow today for a promised bumper crop in the future. But the reparationist approach is much more dramatic — it promised redress right here and right now.

Stuck Between an Antiracist Rock and an Antiracist Hard Place

Individualists faced pressure from the other side as well. The soup at the time actually included a third homophonic ingredient: the status-quotidians. Those who wanted to appear supportive of civil rights while maintaining the status quo, best exemplified by the “separate but equal” canard. In the same way that reparationists could “pass” as the less extreme individualists (all while hovering their foot above the gas pedal), status-quotidians also had an incentive to “pass” as the more respectable individualists.³

If you’re a genuine individualist stuck in the middle, no matter how earnest, you might be encouraged to either distinguish yourself from the status-quotidians, or the virtue encouragement cycle might encourage you to dabble in the reparationist camp because of the easier ramp towards accolades. The social reinforcement machine humming along lacks the resolution to distinguish competing frameworks anyway, and the push from one side worked synergistically with the pull from the other.

Still, the demarcation lines between the dueling camps remained fuzzy for many decades, in part because there were genuine overlaps of disagreement which further blurred the boundaries.

At first, the reparationist ramp-up appeared as too incremental and reasonable to reveal its true nature as an opposing force. But gradually the acceleration intensified, like an engine revving out of control from its chassis. It became passé to merely pass laws banning racial discrimination — so timid, so quaint! Instead you demand reparations for redlining from decades ago, and trawl deep through genealogy trees to assert reparations for any and all enslavement and related atrocities, going back centuries. You don’t just ask for universities to stop discriminating; you demand they make up for lost time by taking affirmative action to discriminate against some groups as a remedy for past discrimination against another group. An eye for an eye with no statute of limitations.

Ironically, what let the reparationist mask truly slip was that eventually the individualists had essentially achieved total victory. A black man was elected president after all! And just as the individualists could finally consider retirement, relaxing on their rocking chairs, the reparationists finally discovered their momentum.

The watershed moment came during the 2015-and-beyond era, when the individualist antiracists had been comprehensively defenestrated from any position of influence. Where once you had to demonstrate that someone was not judged on their merits, any disparate impact was now prima facie and irrefutable evidence of discrimination, such that even autonomous traffic cameras were denounced as an example of “racist technology in action”. Color-blindness was openly disavowed as naive or, worse, an insidious tool of white supremacy itself. Racism was no longer defined as bigotry based on race but redefined so that culpability was only possible by one particular race (guess who). You could openly proclaim hatred of one particular race (guess who) and still be hailed within the “antiracist” penumbra.

The tails had fully and completely come apart. Lifelong comrades no longer recognized each other.

Picking Up the Pieces

I highlighted the story of antiracism in America because it stands as the most salient and evocative illustration of moral homophones. Would the reparationist approach have been able to achieve such prominence if it hadn’t ridden alongside the individualistic approach, buoyed by its tidal fervor? It’s hard to imagine. It probably would’ve been the death knell of the civil rights movement had MLK’s iconic speech been replaced a Robin DiAngelo struggle session castigating the audience on indelible white guilt. None of what made the individualistic approach uniquely compelling — patriotic, capitalistic, passive — applied to the reparationist approach.

The antiracism case study reveals a pattern that extends across the political spectrum. A parallel cautionary tale are liberal Jews who found themselves bewildered and isolated after October 7th, watching progressive groups openly celebrate organizations explicitly dedicated to Jewish genocide. What previously appeared to be shared commitment to social justice masked a core schism rooted in incompatible moral frameworks.

Jewish Americans had been prominent allies in civil rights movements for decades, from funding Freedom Riders to marching alongside MLK, who was himself a strong supporter of Israel. This historical alliance made the contemporary fracture all the more jarring. Liberal Jews who supported progressive movements (including the adjacent “decolonial” movement) believing they were strengthening universal human rights inadvertently bolstered social justice ideologies that explicitly excluded Jewish lives from moral consideration. There were burgeoning clues for those paying attention, such as with the Women’s March implosion over Jewish inclusion.

Noah Smith

unwittingly made the perfect case study for moral homophones from a foreign policy lens, before I even published this essay!⁴ The post-World War II liberal order was buoyed by overlapping motivations that masked basic disagreements about civilization itself:

Yes, some Americans cared about saving Western Europe for economic reasons, others cared about democracy and freedom, and many worried about the balance of power. But to conservative Americans in the 20th century — the type of people who joined the John Birch Society — the Cold War was about preserving Christendom from the threat of godless communism.

The pattern repeats as cultural pendulums swing back and forth. From the right, the University of Austin is monomaniacally bristling at anything that may have a passing resemblance to DEI. Within MAGA, immigration restrictionists motivated by economic concerns are surprised to learn that many of their compatriots want to institute a Pantone color swatch citizenship test.

And there’s Scott Alexander’s classic observation: “If you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches.” Under most practical applications, the belief that “witch-hunts should not happen” is indistinguishable from simply “being a witch”. This dynamic explains why civil liberties organizations face an existential challenge: the very people they might appeal to also risk derailing their core mission.

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A Framework for Action

The solution is not complicated: attack your allies! What I mean by this is that it's great to have allies willing to assist in a shared endeavor, but you must be ruthless in scrutinizing your disagreements.

People already instinctively engage in this kind of ally scrutiny through qualifying statements. We naturally say things like “I don’t support their methods, but I support their goals” or “I don’t agree with their message, but I defend their right to speak.” These qualifications reflect an intuitive recognition that surface-level agreement often masks deeper philosophical differences.

The gay rights movement manifested many of these instincts. Supporters would preface their advocacy with “I’m not gay but…” to underscore a universalist relevance. The Mattachine Society, with their crisp sartorial presentation, put a lot of effort to distinguish themselves both from the iconoclastic queer liberationists and from the assimilationists who wanted to remain in the closet.

The key is making this instinctive skepticism and distinction more systematic and rigorous. Here’s how to implement this productively:

• Start with acknowledgment: Begin by explicitly recognizing your willingness to work on shared endeavors, even if you are motivated differently. This prevents the process from devolving into destructive purity spirals.

• Identify core disagreements early: Don’t wait for circumstances to force hidden tensions into the open, and actively seek out where your essential assumptions diverge from your allies. This is accomplished by repeatedly emphasizing first-principles reasoning instead of reflexively accepting surface-level consensus.

• Create clear demarcation lines: Establish explicit boundaries about where cooperation ends and fundamental disagreements begin.⁵ This serves both to educate observers who might confuse the movements and to prepare for future divergence points.

• Maintain collaborative relationships: The distinction between this approach and endless purity test spirals is that you preserve the ability to work together on shared goals while maintaining intellectual honesty about your differences.

That’s it, it’s that simple! The goal isn’t to eliminate all disagreement, but to ensure that when the inevitable fractures occur, they happen along predictable lines rather than catching everyone by surprise when the stakes are highest.

All this is yet another reason why we should avoid sanewashing at all costs. It can be really tempting to see a mass of undulating zealots sorta-kinda agitating for a cause sorta-kinda similar to yours, but history shows a real risk of creating a monster that will devour you the first chance it gets.

Just as linguistic homophones can create confusion in communication, moral homophones create confusion in coalition-building. The solution in both cases is the same: context and clarity. We must learn to distinguish between words that sound alike but mean different things — and between allies who act alike but believe different things.

1. I do not intend to portray MLK as a staunch individualist antiracist. He supported many reparationist/redistributive economic policies, including within this very speech.

2. Tellingly, Heston remained a lifelong Republican and became the NRA’s iconic face until his death in 2008, illustrating a compatibility between conservative politics and antiracism activism which would only become puzzling under subsequent antiracism frameworks.

3. You can also see how unambiguous racists would try and “pass” as a status-quotidian, and so forth, all the way down the line. Layers, man!

4. Telepathy?

5. I myself have done exactly this on the topic of Israel in an essay called Sorta Contra Zionists.