Conversing is not emoting

From "Moral clarity, these days, it means a lot less than I would like it to mean." by Ann Althouse.

"Moral clarity, these days, it means a lot less than I would like it to mean."

Said Jia Tolentino on "Fresh Air" yesterday. Here's the context:

We will have a mass shooting in America and people will get online and express their very true anguish, and people express their anger and their righteousness, and this formidable undeniable moral narratives [sic] about how children should not be dying in the U.S. like this — and then nothing happens.

And so the gun control debate is just a continual reminder to me: An opinion doesn't necessarily translate to action. Moral clarity, these days, it means a lot less than I would like it to mean. ...

But there's nothing formidable about the "moral narratives" that "children should not be dying in the U.S. like this." It's "undeniable," but that's because everyone already agrees with the obvious truth that mass murder is bad. It's obtuse to speak of "moral clarity" about something that's isn't the slightest bit susceptible to unclarity.

Indeed. It is hard to have a conversation when one half of the dialogue is conducted by idiots.

As Althouse points out, there are those who confuse the nature of the problem with the putative solution. Mass murders are one of the areas where virtually everyone agrees that the event is a problem but where few agree on what to do about the problem. Outrage about a problem without a shared constructive solution to the problem is merely moral self-pleasuring.

The second group of idiots are those who insist on a generic (and often unproven) solution that is irrelevant to the problem itself. If someone commits mass murder with a hand gun legally purchased, then proposing restricting access to long guns is irrelevant. If you are going to propose solutions, propose solutions pertinent to the tragedy that occurred, not to some cognitively abstract hypothetical tragedy.