Would you choose between your daughter and your community?

I believe morality exists. It’s intangible, it’s controversial, but it’s as real as gravity and it’s undergirded by certain objective truths.

But I also believe there exist moral questions that do not have definitive answers, or at least cannot be generalized from a finite set of rules. A Kantian may try to follow the law “thou shalt not lie”, then be faced with edge cases like whether lies of omission count, or whether they can lie to protect a sworn secret. A non-Kantian deontologist may try to follow laws like “thou shalt not lie unless other obligations or a life depends on it”, but there will always remain thorny edge cases (Should you lie to a human to protect the life of a butterfly? Do promises made while inebriated count? Etc.). Every additional algorithmic condition increases the surface area of edge cases (so proof by induction: You can never be rid of all the edge cases).

A New York Times article by Nikole Hannah-Jones titled “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” started trending last week, almost as soon as it was published. It’s a deeply personal and vulnerable article about Hannah-Jones and her husband’s decision to send their daughter Najya to bad schools—specifically low-income black schools within New York’s deeply segregated public school system—out of a moral obligation they felt to their community.

I knew that P.T.A.s at poor schools often can raise only a few thousand dollars, but Faraji and I could write checks that exceeded the annual P.T.A. budget. I witnessed how dismissive school officials could be to lower-income parents who lodged complaints or made demands for resources and how deferential they were to wealthy ones. I believed Faraji and I could bring some of that power with us. We had connections and time and status that should not matter, but that we all know do. And more than that, we believed strongly that if families like ours went into schools like this one, it would challenge other families with similar values to do the same.

Hannah-Jones is a hero, says the Effective Altruist or utilitarian who believes in the greater good: Morality is a numbers game. It’s moral and meritorious to sacrifice even your own child if it means saving others’ children, and to do otherwise is selfish.

But now I felt overcome with regret. Najya deserved better. They all did. But she was mine. This girl, my only child, looked to me to protect her, to give her what she needed to thrive. And I had not chosen her.

Hannah-Jones has been terribly misguided, according to the moral partialist that believes in “God, family, country” or some other numbered prioritization of ethical duties. I think the average person who doesn’t strictly adhere to any strict moral code, or who seeks moral guidance from their religious or political communities, will find Hannah-Jones’s actions alien and anathema to their intuitions.

I almost cannot type the words. Because when I do, an image of her in her blue school uniform, her hair in beaded cornrows that clicked when she swung them, with her sweet, baby-toothed smile springs to mind, and the tears come.

There’s many conversations to be had around this story, whether regarding desegregation or the need for education reform, or whether regarding the particulars of Hannah-Jones’s decision. Hannah-Jones sparked a national conversation and may have helped desegregate schools around the country, thus propagating much good, but we only know this in hindsight; I can’t measure what impact she likely could’ve expected at the time, nor the expected impact on their daughter Najya’s well-being.

I realized what she’d been yearning for most was my acknowledgment that she had borne the cost not only of our unjust society but also of my ideals.

“Did she make the right choice?” is a binary I can’t answer without having been in her shoes. What I know is that I cannot fault her decision, nor can I have faulted her if she’d made the opposite decision. That’s because predicaments like these belong to the aforementioned category of “moral problems not generalizable from finite rules”. Predicaments like these are inevitable, but also a healthy sign, in any society with freedom of choice.

The fact that there are people like Hannah-Jones, and people unlike Hannah-Jones, is a good thing.

If no one was like Hannah-Jones, it’s easy to see our world would be far worse off. We need people willing to sacrifice themselves or even their families in order to better the world and revolutionize broken systems. When all agents in a system are insular and self-absorbed, the system calcifies: Desegregation never happens, nor civil rights, nor abolition.

But if everyone was like Hannah-Jones, we’d have another problem. The typical monogamous relationship doesn’t work without commitment. To feel safe and secure, people need to feel loved, and to feel loved, people need to feel prioritized. Children need someone to depend on, parents need an incredible degree of patience and focus, and it’s easier to take care of the people you know best. That’s why, in general practice, it’s for the best that families protect themselves first, then help their neighbors and strangers second.

Secondary virtues

This idea of prioritization—e.g. favoring one’s family over friends, and friends over all others—is called “moral partiality”. I think of partiality as sort of a valuable heuristic rather than, say, any sort of fundamental law of the natural universe. Rather, it emerged from human societies and evolved into what I call a secondary virtue, which refers to any rule or guideline that doesn’t perfectly capture the “greater good” but leaves people generally better off.

Some examples:

• Honesty. From a utilitarian perspective, the sharing of information either true or false should be judged by the consequences of that sharing. But time and time again, we’ve seen the pernicious effects of lying or misinformation; society would be better off if the average human was more honest than they are today.
• Privacy. This one can seem at odds with honesty, but in the real world, hiding information can prevent unjust persecution, smooth over awkward social situations, isolate eyesores and contain infohazards.
• Law-abiding. This applies to even smaller laws and regulations: There’s no natural law that demands a particular road in a particular city must not be driven over any faster than 35 mph. But generally speaking, following speed limits is a good thing.

I actually suspect that most of the most important, beautiful, and profound parts of human existence stem from secondary virtues. Love might just be a secondary virtue. Maybe not.

All that’s to say: Doing everything you can for your daughter, like sending her to the best school possible, is a secondary virtue. “Secondary” here doesn’t mean lesser or wrong. (For most people, secondary virtues are actually more important than the underlying fundamentals of utilitarianism, by definition: If trying to follow them didn’t result in humans making better decisions more often than not, then they would cease to be virtues.) The controversy around Hannah-Jones stems from the fact of this secondary virtue conflicting with the virtue of altruism, and there’s no algorithm nor holy book to explain what Hannah-Jones should have done in this particular situation.

I wrote that predicaments like this one are inevitable but also healthy.

The inevitable side is this: Hannah-Jones’s choice was unique, informed by the exact particulars of her family’s situation and her school system. The balance of moral factors necessarily varies from person to person and situation to situation, meaning that any given virtue or heuristic will sometimes be followed and sometimes not.

The healthy side? If you follow rules blindly long enough, you may end up misaligned with the Good (because finite rules cannot be perfectly specified) or you may end up a blankface. Doing what is always expected by the mindless application of certain virtues detrimentally absolves you of considering consequences and the responsibility of making better choices.

So I’m glad that people like Hannah-Jones exist, even if Najya might rightfully rue me for that opinion. It’s good for Hannah-Jones to feel her daughter’s pain, but at the same time, I hope she’ll be able to let go of this guilt for having tried to do the right thing.

Kant considers honesty a “perfect” duty while the saving of lives is an “imperfect” duty, meaning that it is one’s moral obligation to find the means to save a life without violating the duty of honesty. I will never understand this bass ackwards ordering: Honesty should be the duty we try our best to follow while trying even harder to save lives.

Though judging from its lack of dedicated Wikipedia page, it must not be the most popular of positions among philosophers.