When Moral Clarity Becomes Moral Performance
On outrage, social media, and the difference between identifying injustice and cultivating understanding
I’ve been thinking about the difference between recognizing injustice and cultivating understanding between people.
I sometimes follow conversations online about race, identity, discrimination, parenting, and other complicated human experiences. Often, people share stories that reveal troubling assumptions, harmful behavior, or a lack of awareness about the experiences of others.
The responses can be illuminating. People bring knowledge, lived experience, and perspectives that need to be heard.
But I also notice something else: a kind of competition to identify what’s wrong with the person telling the story, demonstrate how thoroughly we recognize their failures, and condemn them. Extra likes seem to be awarded for the cleverest put-downs and sharpest barbs.
And I wonder what we’re learning.
I believe deeply in naming injustice and holding people accountable. But identifying someone’s failures isn’t the same as educating them or gaining insight. And moral certainty, even when justified, isn’t the same as compassion and understanding.
When we encounter someone whose words or actions reveal harmful assumptions, I wonder what might happen if, alongside naming the harm, we asked questions intended to understand their thinking rather than simply demonstrate its failures.
I’ve recently watched The Social Reckoning and begun reading the Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files. They reinforce something many of us have observed: social media platforms are not neutral environments for human conversation. Their engagement systems typically reward the very behaviors that make thoughtful dialogue difficult. Outrage attracts attention. Simplicity travels faster than complexity. Certainty and harshness can be rewarded while curiosity, humility, and reflection struggle to find room.
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Outrage can be a legitimate response to injustice. An outrage-driven environment, however, can make it difficult to distinguish between moral urgency and moral performance.
And here’s what troubles me: we may enter these conversations hoping to advance justice and leave having practiced contempt.
An invitation to react is not an invitation to learn.
I recognize that creating spaces where people can genuinely learn from difficult conversations requires enormous intention and effort, particularly on platforms whose incentives often work against those goals. But if our purpose is education, shouldn’t we be asking what kind of learning we’re cultivating?
Are we helping people examine their assumptions, recognize perspectives they haven’t considered, and develop the capacity to respond to injustice? Or are we becoming more practiced at identifying who is wrong?
I don’t believe compassion requires us to excuse harmful behavior, or that curiosity requires us to abandon our convictions. We can recognize harm and still acknowledge the humanity of the person causing it. We can hold people accountable while leaving room for reflection, growth, and change.
And we can ask ourselves what happens to our own humanity when we repeatedly participate in public condemnation, however justified we believe ourselves to be.
I want more conversations in which we can say both, “I see something deeply troubling here,” and “What might I be missing?”
More spaces where moral courage and intellectual humility coexist. What might become possible if we approached difficult conversations with questions, kindness, and compassion — not to diminish the harm we recognize, but to understand more fully and find a way into genuine dialogue?
When we turn one another into adversaries, we deepen the divisions that make collective action so difficult. We may leave feeling righteous, even victorious, while becoming less capable of working together to change the systems and conditions that harm so many of us.
Because surely the purpose of recognizing injustice is not simply to become better at identifying it, but to become more capable of changing the conditions that allow it to persist.
And perhaps that begins with examining whether the ways we advocate for our values are themselves consistent with those values.
