The Case for Everything

We are drawn to voices that share our values and exalt what we hold dear. That is why I was intrigued by Jocko Willink’s Extreme Ownership. In the friendly-fire tragedy he lived through in Ramadi, Iraq that the book recalls, he practices the very standard he calls others to.

The title — a pitch in itself — already resonated with me. It appealed to my disposition. That is to say, I aspired to his ideal of taking responsibility and owning failure though, admittedly, not with the extreme calibur Willink modeled.

Your disposition determines what resonates with you.

Disposition determines resonance

Rewind to the mid-1990s. I was in a church young-adults group and, like most young men there, interested in dating. Around that time, I Kissed Dating Goodbye (1997) by Joshua Harris was everywhere. Its posture was intentionality, restraint, and commitment and its focus: marriage suitability.

Since I was new to church, my instincts ran in a different direction. Looking back, they were closer to what Logan Ury later argues in How to Not Die Alone (2021): agency, compatibility, and self-awareness — dating with purpose, learning from real interactions, and looking for a good fit.

Those books reflect different priorities: one choice-restrictive, the other choice-rich. I was in the minority. The girls in that group leaned toward Harris’s careful approach. Looking back, that split makes sense: values provide the scaffolding for our dispositions. The more values you share with an author, the wiser the author sounds.

The girls there weren’t irrational for leaning toward Harris. They wanted a guarded road toward matrimony, and Harris offered what looked like a responsible path. I wasn’t irrational for leaning toward Ury. I wanted room to learn from real interactions about who actually fit, and I didn’t want to be thinking that far ahead.

Then imagine the leaders kicking off a dating series with session one: “Date with marriage in view.” That’d have immediately set the tone against my approach and inclination. In that framing, Harris wins.

Which is to say: most debates are won upstream. Whoever sets the frame sets the value ordering — the relative rank of competing goods — which, in turn, predisposes resonance. In a frame favoring exploration and experience, Ury wins.

I no longer think as I did. And while I’m not suggesting the approaches are equally wise and it’s just a matter of trade-offs, neither will I crown either the winner. The subject in view is broader.

If the values which get elevated predispose the winner, how are we deciding which values get elevated?

The tail wags the dog

Reflect for a moment on conversations you’ve had with ChatGPT and how it tends to mirror the frame you bring it. Its replies often lean toward the shape of your own assumptions. In that sense, the model is less a judge than a responsive instrument. With each turn, each nudge, you can hem in the conversation and add nuance. It can defend nearly any position because positions are defended by values, and those are often implicitly supplied by the one begging the question.

There is, indeed, a case for nearly everything. And if you’re the one steering, you’ll likely find an answer you can affirm.

Jonathan Haidt aptly characterized this as “the tail wags the dog.” People often start with an inkling of what they want, then build the reasons after the fact. A bias is already in the frame. What remains is bolting on a rationale that makes it sound right.

Your convictions, for the purposes of this discussion, are your frame and your resolve for these values matter more than those. They’re your baseline value ordering. Charitably speaking, if they’re right, what follows is likely reasonable too. My point is that, since no one believes their convictions are misordered, you’re predisposed to arriving at a destination you like. And since chatbots are good at infering your baseline, they, like any good Uber driver, will get you wherever you want to go.

Values can be properly ordered

Take any contested topic — marriage, abortion, immigration. Assume the best minds on every side have written their books. Those books are the strongest arguments they can make. Each, comfortably seated in its own convictions, offers a rational and logically coherent take. Each resonates with its respective audience.

The difference between them? The values they explicitly or implicitly import. Or their relative weights.

At some point, those rival frameworks have to be cashed out in public decisions. But even after the vote is counted, the election won, or the court has spoken, someone is still fuming. They won’t accept what has been declared right. While one side celebrates, the other seethes. Outrage. This is the heart of politics.

That is because debates are decided less by the strength of the argument and more by the convictions that got smuggled in. Because every position is well seated within its own frame. To judge the better position, you need a broader frame.

Consider the Holocaust. When Nazis came to a door asking whether any Jews were inside, many lied to protect them. Because the value of a human life, obviously outranks the value of telling the truth. To see the higher good, we move to a broader frame which, in turn, reveals the better value ordering.

Appealing to something higher

Virtues connect to values. The traits that register as attractive line up with our convictions. If virtue today seems subjective, it may be partly because the gulf between competing values has widened.

Values can be ranked. But, in a diverse and disagreeable world, how is the better ranking discerned? Who gets the final say?

Marriage was in the 1950s held as a covenant between a man and a woman, for life. It was sacred enough that divorce was considered scandalous. But the culture changed. It decided it should be widened to include other unions. That change moved through the states and then, in Obergefell v. Hodges, reached the Supreme Court and became the law of the land.

If government alone decides what’s right, then slavery was right when it was law, and segregation too.

But activists appeal to something higher. They acknowledge rightness comes from elsewhere. If government can be led by power (dictators) or popularity (democracies), either of which can be wrong, then it is not the authority but merely the arena in which we fight to legislate morality.

Complaint presumes objectivity

As hunger can be properly satisfied, so, too, one presumes, can the hunger for justice be. That’s why people complain — often loudly — when things are not rightly ordered. Everyone intuitively knows some positions are actually better than others. And, if so, not only does objectively right exist, but, theoretically and because of it, values can be properly ordered to meet any situation.

Were it not so, no decision could demand your reasons. In fact, a preference-only world could produce only likes and dislikes. There would be no basis by which to legitimately complain about anything at all.

In that world, when Martin Luther King, Jr. fought for the equal rights of black Americans, the government could have squashed his revolt with a “but we prefer it this way.” And with the popular backing it could’ve remained so.

“Civil rights?” Rights presume real order.

Consequently, without real order, what’s “just” is arbitrary, a unique expression in time and place. But not true. And if not, then politics is only ever bullying, one group instituting its preferred ideology by any fruitful means. The external, higher anchoring would be vacuously forever absent.

Blazing a trail blindly

Making moral choices poise a people to flourish. The inverse is also true. But if the broader objective frame for those choices cannot be discovered then, pragmatically speaking, we’re no better off. It cannot effectively guide.

Many, whether by power or popularity, will reach for nothing higher than their own predilections — leaving you nowhere to go once you have reached the highest human figure or institution. Where then, when even their judgment feels faulty? On what basis protest?

To hold the higher ground, convictions must be grounded in more than likes and dislikes — as our American forefathers presumed when they appealed to inalienable rights.

Look inward. Were you a wise teenager? A wise twenty-something?

Consider the certainty you once carried in your much smaller frame. All it took to claim moral high ground was to be the one ordering the values — and you did. Then you stacked your reasons on top like lumber on a frame. Because for every position one can find a chair comfortable enough to sit in.

The ultimate landing of a still broader frame is always worldview. Unless you’ve sorted your big picture reality, you can’t trust what follows from it. It is the river basin of conviction from which everything else flows.

People are a meandering river ever-changing direction. They can flow toward or away from good, because in themselves they are without an objective anchor — both finite and flawed.

It is not so with God.

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. Hebrews 13:8

This very God so hungered for righteousness He did not merely command it; He revealed it, so we would not have to guess.

What best explains that we similarly hunger and fight for it? An impersonal universe which, having banged itself into existence and then organized and animated matter, does by its own what demand it? For what obligation would it have on anything it produced? Or that a personal, moral Creator imprinted what can only be found perfectly in His own character upon us?

We are moral not by accident, but by reflection. If the universe mindlessly programmed that hunger, how can one claim we are, in any way, moral beings? If evolution advances by sheer probability, then humanity, like everything else, is part of a singular mindless machine. Why then would one believe our thoughts and desires somehow transcend it?

That real moral obligation you feel and fight for — it points more naturally to a real moral Lawgiver.