While riding my bicycle past a housing project in the city of St. Louis yesterday, six teenaged boys ran up to me. I suspected trouble. One of the teenagers ran alongside me. I was concerned that he was going to push me off my bicycle, so I hopped off. He looked nervous, and we all froze for a couple seconds, with the other five teenagers standing about 20 feet away. The teenager closest to me suddenly reached back and took a swing at me, punching me on my right shoulder. I wasn’t hurt much, even though this kid was trying to hurt me.
Though I had previously been in only one other fight in my entire life (a minor scuffle when I was about 10), I assumed that I could handle two or three of these teenagers (assuming that they didn’t have weapons), but not six of them. Instead of lunging for the attacker, I yelled, “Cut it out!” He immediately backed off, then all six young men scampered about 150 feet away, taunting me as they went. I crossed the road toward a restaurant and they stayed away. This all happened along a well-traveled road.
My response to the punch was largely guided by pragmatic reasons. I didn’t want to escalate the fight, given that there were six boys, and I didn’t know if they had weapons. But what was the “proper” response? What do the moral rules tell us to do in this situation?
One option would be to chase down the aggressor and pound the crap out of him. I can assure you that this was my deep instinct, whether or not it would have been possible for me to do this. But there are certainly other moral rules that could pertain to this situation.
For instance, Jesus purportedly said, “Love your enemy.” Luke 6:27-36. To me, this New Testament rule means that we should never strike back, certainly not when the attacker has retreated. That is my personal interpretation of that rule. American Christian politicians claim that the “turn your cheek” rule of Jesus” allows them to drop large bombs on the people of those other countries we consider to be our “enemy,” even when it means that millions of civilians are killed, wounded and permanently displaced. Many others, including Dr. Martin Luther King, have implored that we act with non-violence whenever we are attacked.
What were my other options? A friend of mine (I’ll call him James) once told me that when he was in grade school a kid walked up to him and punched him, but didn’t really hurt him. James was puzzled at the unprovoked attack. That night he told his father that a kid punched him, but that James didn’t punch him back. His father became angry. He said, “James, our family never starts a fight but we always finish them.” James was instructed by his father that he should never stand there and take a punch, even if he isn’t hurt.
Nietzsche had another approach for this situation. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (“On the Adder’s Bite”), Nietzsche criticizes the Christian ethic of “turn the other cheek.” He urged that if you have been wronged, you should release your anger through a little revenge, rather than letting the frustration build up inside. People shouldn’t burn off great amounts of energy getting revenge, but neither should they do nothing.
I used the Nietzschean approach yesterday. I went into the restaurant and called the police. When the police arrived, I explained that I didn’t need to file a formal report, but 
[1]that I would like the police to go into the projects to find the teenager who punched me (I gave them a fairly detailed description). I requested that they give him a lecture and a warning. I assume they did this. To the right is a photo of the police car driving into the area where the teenagers approached me.
What I find interesting is that none of these approaches (turn the other cheek, finish the fight or get a little bit of revenge) actually told me what to do. Each of these simple-looking rules is vague because none of them is accompanied meta-rules describing exactly when and how to apply the rule. Aristotle levied this devastating criticism toward alleged rule-based morality more than 2,000 years ago. [2]
It’s worse than a problem of vagueness. Almost every bit of moral guidance is balanced by an opposite rule. You can almost always find a rule to justify whatever you’d like to do. You can almost always find some rule to criticize someone else’s behavior. I’m not the first to notice this problem with pairs of opposing rules:
All maxims have their antagonist maxims; proverbs should be sold in pairs, a single one being but a half truth.
William Mathews
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
– George Santayana
Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true. H.L. Mencken
An aphorism is never exactly true. It is either a half-truth or a truth and a half.
Karl Kraus, Sprüche und Widersprüche, 1909
Somewhere in the world there is an epigram for every dilemma.
Hendrik Willem van Loon
A good teacher must know the rules; a good pupil, the exceptions.
Martin H. Fischer
Would you like some examples of antipodal guidance? Consider the following:
[table id=1 /]
Are we in charge of our actions? We are doing the steering, but most people like to believe that the rules are steering us. Or that God is in charge, and we are simply following His Will. Or that fairness 
[3]compels us. When we are deciding what to do, we are all like lawyers who twist and spin the rules, always acting as if we had no choice in the matter. Each of us is often a chattering fool riding on the elephant described by Jonathan Haidt. [4]It’s not as if the rules mean nothing at all–they are guides and posts that capture and direct our attention [5]–but we decide to privilege some of them and quite often we do so consciously; they don’t actually control us, certainly not as often as we claim.
The bottom line? There’s a rule for every occasion. We chose the rules, they don’t really compel us. It’s just a matter of deciding what to do, then choosing a rule to justify your decision. If no rule is reasonably available, then create on, stretch one, distinguish one, or ignore one. Why would we do that? Because it’s much easier to justify our decisions by claiming that we are following “objective” criteria than by arguing that we chose to do something because we personally decided to do it (without any objective criteria). In Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind, Preface, p. xiv, (1987), George Lakoff commented on this need to find “objective” criteria for our decision-making:
There is a major folk theory in our society according to which being objective is being fair, and human judgment is subject to error or likely to be biased. Consequently decisions concerning people should be made on ‘objective’ grounds as often as possible. It is the major way that people who make decisions avoid blame. If there are ‘objective’ criteria on which to base a decision, then one cannot be blamed for being biased, and consequently one cannot be criticized, demoted, fired, or sued.
Hence, we work hard to justify our behavior according to “moral rules.” We claim that we did X because we were morally compelled to do X. Or course, if we had conducted ourselves some other way, we would have found a rule to justify that too. Welcome to the hyper-technical world of moral ratiocination, a world that parallels the equally bizarre world of legal reasoning.
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