Douglas Murray, Ethics, Lived Experience and the Difficult Boundary Between Compassion and Orthodoxy
There is something fundamentally decent at the heart of social justice.
People should not be disadvantaged because of their race. Women should not be regarded as intellectually or professionally inferior to men. Homosexuality should not exclude somebody from ordinary society. Transgender people should be able to enter a hospital, workplace, shop or public institution without being subjected to humiliation, hostility or abuse.
These principles represent genuine social progress.
Yet somewhere in that progression an important distinction appears to have become blurred.
The original demand of the civil-rights movement was essentially:
Treat me equally.
Increasingly, some contemporary arguments appear to demand something different:
Agree with me.
And occasionally:
If you disagree with me, your disagreement is itself harmful.
Those are profoundly different propositions.
Douglas Murray explores this transformation in The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity. His book examines what he regards as the extraordinary speed with which ideas surrounding race, sex, sexuality and gender have moved from legitimate areas of social reform into areas where questioning certain assumptions can itself be interpreted as evidence of prejudice.
Murray is deliberately provocative. His critics reasonably argue that he sometimes concentrates upon the most extreme manifestations of progressive activism and risks presenting them as representative of much broader movements.
That criticism deserves consideration.
But it does not remove the underlying question:
Can we protect people from discrimination without protecting ideas from disagreement?
A liberal society must be able to answer yes.
The Liberal Bargain
Traditional liberalism offered society a remarkably powerful compromise.
You do not have to approve of another person’s religion, politics, sexuality or lifestyle.
They do not require your approval.
What society can reasonably require is that you recognise their fundamental rights and treat them according to the law.
A Christian does not have to accept Islam as theologically correct to defend a Muslim’s right to worship.
An atheist does not have to believe in Christianity to oppose discrimination against Christians.
A heterosexual person does not need to understand homosexuality to accept that homosexual people deserve equal protection under the law.
There is therefore an essential distinction between:
respecting a person
and
accepting every proposition associated with that person’s identity or beliefs.
Much of the contemporary culture war appears to arise because those concepts have become entangled.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in debates surrounding sex and gender.
Gender: Courtesy, Identity and Objective Reality
There is nothing particularly difficult about treating a transgender person courteously.
If somebody introduces themselves as Sarah, calling them Sarah is hardly an intolerable burden. Ordinary human beings accommodate one another in thousands of similar ways every day.
The difficulty begins when interpersonal courtesy becomes confused with an institutional requirement to accept propositions extending considerably beyond courtesy.
Medicine demonstrates the problem particularly clearly.
A patient’s gender identity may be important to their dignity, psychological wellbeing and communication.
Biological sex and individual anatomy may simultaneously remain clinically relevant.
Reproductive potential, previous surgery, hormone treatment, disease prevalence and other physiological considerations can affect clinical assessment and treatment.
Acknowledging that is not inherently hostile to transgender people.
It is recognising that two pieces of information can simultaneously matter.
The objective should therefore be straightforward:
Treat the person with dignity and treat the patient according to their individual clinical needs.
Neither requires pretending that biological sex and gender identity are interchangeable concepts in every circumstance.
Ethics: Do Good and Do No Harm
There is an established ethical framework that provides a useful way of examining these questions.
The four principles commonly associated with biomedical ethics are:
Autonomy — respect an individual’s ability to make decisions concerning themselves.
Beneficence — act for the benefit of others; broadly, do good.
Non-maleficence — avoid causing unnecessary harm; do no harm.
Justice — act fairly and consider the legitimate interests of everybody affected.
These principles are useful precisely because none operates independently.
Autonomy does not mean an individual’s wishes automatically override everybody else’s rights.
Beneficence does not mean giving somebody everything they request.
Non-maleficence does not mean preventing every experience of discomfort.
And justice does not mean ensuring everybody receives the outcome they personally desire.
Sometimes an ethical decision will inevitably disappoint somebody.
The important question is whether that disappointment represents harm, injustice or simply an outcome with which the individual disagrees.
When Feeling Harmed Is Not the Same as Being Wronged
Consider the statement:
“I feel harmed.”
It tells us something important.
The individual reports experiencing harm or distress.
That experience should not simply be dismissed.
But it does not automatically establish that somebody else committed a wrongful act.
A doctor giving a patient an unwelcome diagnosis may cause enormous distress without behaving unethically.
A manager telling an employee that their performance is inadequate may cause embarrassment without bullying them.
A disciplinary process can cause anxiety while remaining necessary and fair.
A person being refused something they want may sincerely believe themselves to have been treated unfairly even though precisely the same reasonable rule would have been applied to somebody else.
There is therefore an important distinction:
Discomfort is not necessarily harm.
And:
Feeling unfairly treated is not necessarily evidence of having been unfairly treated.
If non-maleficence — do no harm — is interpreted as never cause somebody to feel harmed, almost every legitimate exercise of authority becomes ethically questionable.
Performance management causes distress.
Criminal sentencing causes distress.
Medical diagnoses cause distress.
Refusing unreasonable requests causes distress.
Being contradicted can cause distress.
Yet society cannot function on the principle that distress itself establishes wrongdoing.
The ethical responsibility is to avoid unnecessary or unjustifiable harm, not to eliminate every negative human emotion.
“I Feel Threatened”
This distinction becomes particularly important in workplace disputes.
Consider:
“I feel threatened.”
The statement establishes that the individual reports feeling threatened.
It does not, by itself, establish that another person threatened them.
Suppose an employee behaves inappropriately and a manager challenges that behaviour.
The employee finds the confrontation uncomfortable and responds:
“I feel threatened.”
What should the organisation do?
Take the allegation seriously.
And then investigate it.
What happened?
What was said?
How was it said?
Were there witnesses?
Was the intervention proportionate?
Was there intimidation?
Or was somebody simply being held accountable?
Legitimate challenge can be uncomfortable.
Being told that your behaviour is unacceptable is uncomfortable.
Being disciplined is uncomfortable.
Being told no is uncomfortable.
None automatically constitutes bullying.
A fair system must protect employees from genuine intimidation while simultaneously protecting managers and colleagues from an allegation becoming a substitute for evidence.
Feelings are evidence of feelings.
They are not automatically evidence of events.
Lived Experience and the Right to Disagree
This leads to another powerful contemporary expression:
“My lived experience.”
Lived experience has genuine value.
Someone who has personally experienced racism, disability, discrimination, poverty, gender dysphoria or institutional failure may understand dimensions of that experience that an outsider cannot fully appreciate.
Listening matters.
But lived experience cannot become intellectually infallible.
An individual possesses particular authority concerning how an event felt to them.
They do not necessarily possess exclusive authority concerning what objectively happened, what another person intended, whether conduct was discriminatory or unlawful, or what everybody else must conclude from the event.
Those questions require evidence.
Otherwise a circular argument becomes possible:
I experienced something.
Therefore my interpretation of what occurred must be correct.
If you disagree with my interpretation, you are invalidating my lived experience.
That invalidation causes further harm.
Therefore your disagreement demonstrates the injustice I originally alleged.
The proposition becomes almost impossible to challenge because contradiction itself has been reclassified as injury.
This is one of the areas in which Murray’s The Madness of Crowds becomes particularly relevant.
The issue is no longer simply sensitivity.
It is whether particular propositions can become insulated from examination because questioning them is itself characterised as harmful.
Justice: Equality Does Not Mean Preferential Treatment
This is where the fourth ethical principle becomes indispensable.
Justice.
Equality means that irrelevant personal characteristics should not cause somebody to receive inferior treatment.
But equality does not mean that membership of a historically disadvantaged group automatically entitles somebody to the outcome they prefer in every subsequent disagreement.
We need to distinguish between:
equality,
reasonable accommodation,
and
preferential treatment.
Different treatment can sometimes be necessary to produce genuine fairness.
Providing wheelchair access is not unfairly privileging wheelchair users.
Providing an appropriate adjustment for somebody with dyslexia is not necessarily giving them an easier examination.
Providing an interpreter does not give a patient superior healthcare.
These measures address identifiable barriers.
But not every requested difference in treatment is necessarily a reasonable accommodation.
The questions must remain:
What disadvantage exists?
What adjustment addresses it?
Is it necessary?
Is it proportionate?
What effect does it have upon everybody else?
Without those questions, equality can undergo a peculiar transformation.
The demand begins:
“Do not treat me worse than everybody else.”
It progresses legitimately in some circumstances to:
“My circumstances require a reasonable adjustment so that I can participate equally.”
But in its most extreme form it can become:
“Treating me according to the same reasonable standards as everybody else is discriminatory because I believe my circumstances entitle me to a more favourable outcome.”
At some point an organisation must retain the ability to say no.
That is not necessarily discrimination.
Sometimes it is precisely what justice requires.
Corporate Fear, Litigation and the Incentive to Capitulate
Modern corporations operate within an additional complication: litigation and reputational risk.
An allegation involving discrimination, harassment or victimisation can have consequences extending far beyond the original workplace disagreement.
There may be grievances, investigations, employment tribunals, legal costs, regulatory scrutiny, reputational damage and social-media attention.
Organisations understandably attempt to minimise those risks.
But that can create an unfortunate institutional incentive.
Risk management can begin to replace truth-finding.
Instead of asking:
“What actually happened?”
an organisation can find itself asking:
“Which outcome creates the least corporate exposure?”
Those are not necessarily the same question.
A business may settle a disputed claim because defending litigation costs more than settlement. That does not establish that the underlying allegation was true; equally, a settlement does not establish that it was false.
An organisation may temporarily remove a manager from a situation while investigating an allegation because it considers that the safest interim measure.
Policies may become increasingly elaborate because demonstrating that the organisation has taken preventative action reduces perceived legal or reputational exposure.
There are entirely legitimate reasons for each of these decisions.
The danger arises when institutional self-protection becomes more important than establishing the facts.
Employment discrimination, harassment and bullying are real. Employees require meaningful mechanisms through which they can challenge genuinely unfair treatment.
Those protections are essential.
But the existence of a complaints process cannot mean that making a complaint establishes its truth.
A complaint deserves to be heard.
An allegation deserves to be investigated.
Neither automatically deserves to be validated.
That distinction protects everybody.
When Beneficence Creates Another Victim
There is an ethical paradox here.
An organisation attempting to practise beneficence can inadvertently cause harm precisely because it is determined to protect the person reporting harm.
Suppose an employee alleges that a reasonable managerial instruction made them feel unsafe.
The organisation instinctively responds:
Protect the employee.
That appears compassionate.
But suppose the allegation is accepted as fact before what occurred has been properly established.
The manager may suffer reputational damage.
Colleagues may become reluctant to challenge inappropriate behaviour.
Managers may avoid necessary performance conversations.
Other employees may perceive that different standards are being applied.
And an organisational culture may develop in which subjective distress carries more weight than objective examination.
An intervention intended to prevent harm has not necessarily eliminated harm.
It may simply have transferred the risk of harm to somebody else.
Non-maleficence therefore requires a more sophisticated question than:
“Could this person be harmed?”
It requires:
“What harms could arise from acting — and from failing to act?”
That is harder.
It is also considerably more ethical.
The NHS: Inclusivity, Proportionality and Evidence
The same reasoning can be applied to institutional inclusivity.
Consider an NHS organisation constructing an extensive taxonomy of pronouns and identities.
The intention may be entirely compassionate.
But good intentions are not themselves evidence of good policy.
Healthcare routinely asks difficult questions about interventions:
Does it work?
What benefit does it produce?
What resources does it consume?
Are there unintended consequences?
Is there a simpler method of achieving the same objective?
Why should organisational social policy be exempt from similar scrutiny?
If a relatively small number of commonly used choices combined with a free-text option can accommodate patients who use other terminology, an extensive predefined taxonomy should be capable of demonstrating some additional benefit.
Perhaps it can.
If so, demonstrate it.
The question should not merely be:
“Does this policy demonstrate inclusivity?”
It should also be:
“Does this policy meaningfully improve patient experience or care, and is it proportionate to the resources and complexity involved?”
Inclusivity is a worthwhile objective.
So is proportionality.
The two are not enemies.
Competing Rights: The Problem Social Justice Cannot Avoid
The most difficult ethical problems occur when legitimate interests collide.
Prisons provide an uncomfortable but useful example.
Consider decisions concerning a transgender prisoner and placement within the male or female estate.
That prisoner has legitimate interests concerning dignity, privacy, safety and protection from abuse.
Other prisoners have those interests too.
Some female prisoners may themselves have histories of sexual or domestic violence.
There is therefore no ethically serious solution that identifies one population as vulnerable and stops thinking.
Risk assessment may need to consider sex, anatomy where relevant, offending history, behaviour, vulnerability, safeguarding and the circumstances of everyone affected.
A mature society should be capable of holding two thoughts simultaneously:
Transgender prisoners deserve protection.
and
Female prisoners deserve protection.
Sometimes those interests may conflict.
No slogan can resolve that conflict.
Ethics requires judgement.
Murray and the Hierarchy of Oppression
Murray is particularly critical of the way intersectionality can develop from an analytical concept into something resembling a hierarchy of moral authority.
Intersectionality itself identifies something important: disadvantage can arise from several characteristics simultaneously.
That observation is hardly unreasonable.
The difficulty begins when individuals become categorised primarily as:
oppressed or oppressor;
privileged or marginalised;
victim or perpetrator.
From there another assumption can emerge:
the identity of the speaker begins to influence the perceived legitimacy of their argument.
But facts do not possess identities.
Evidence does not become more or less accurate according to who presents it.
An accusation does not automatically become true because the person making it belongs to a historically disadvantaged group.
Nor does an argument become false because the person making it belongs to a supposedly privileged one.
Evidence must retain the ability to contradict all of us.
Otherwise we have stopped reasoning and started determining truth according to identity.
Social Media and the Outrage Economy
Technology has dramatically accelerated these tensions.
Human beings once conducted most disagreements with people standing in front of them.
Now a badly worded sentence can be presented to millions of strangers within hours.
Context disappears.
Nuance disappears.
Intent becomes secondary.
Outrage becomes instantaneous.
And outrage attracts attention.
In ordinary conversation, when somebody expresses an idea badly, we might ask:
“What exactly do you mean?”
Online, the incentive can instead be to select the worst possible interpretation and condemn it immediately.
Once the crowd joins in, the individual at the centre of the controversy stops being treated as an individual.
They become a symbol.
A disagreement concerning gender becomes transphobia.
A disagreement concerning immigration becomes xenophobia.
A criticism of religion becomes hatred of its followers.
A workplace disagreement becomes evidence of systemic oppression.
Sometimes those descriptions are entirely justified.
Sometimes they are not.
The problem is allowing the verdict to arrive before the evidence.
Murray Must Be Challenged Too
It would be easy to read The Madness of Crowds and conclude that contemporary social justice is simply ridiculous.
That would itself demonstrate precisely the kind of intellectual laziness we should be opposing.
Racism exists.
Misogyny exists.
Homophobia exists.
Transgender people can experience genuine hostility.
Workplace bullying exists.
Sexual harassment exists.
Institutional prejudice exists.
Many movements Murray criticises developed because conventional institutions had historically failed to address genuine injustice.
There is also a danger in selecting the most absurd activist found on social media and presenting them as representative of millions of people.
And criticism of “wokeness” can itself become an intellectual shortcut allowing genuine prejudice to disguise itself as common sense.
Most importantly, ideological certainty is not confined to the political left.
Conservatives can become dogmatic.
Religious movements can become dogmatic.
Nationalists can become dogmatic.
Political movements of every persuasion can become dogmatic.
Any ideology becomes dangerous when contradictory evidence is interpreted as confirmation that the ideology was correct all along.
The problem is not fundamentally left versus right.
It is certainty without scrutiny.
Equality Does Not Require Agreement
Perhaps the confusion ultimately comes from failing to distinguish three concepts:
Tolerance.
Respect.
Agreement.
Tolerance means recognising another person’s right to live differently from you.
Respect means recognising their humanity and treating them with dignity.
Agreement means accepting their argument.
The first two are reasonable expectations within a civilised society.
The third cannot be demanded.
Because the moment agreement becomes compulsory, an idea has ceased competing intellectually and has begun acquiring the characteristics of doctrine.
People possess rights.
Ideas do not.
Ideas can be questioned.
Ideas can be tested.
Ideas can be criticised.
And ideas can be wrong.
Do Good. Do No Harm. But To Whom?
Perhaps the traditional principles of medical ethics ultimately provide a better framework for these cultural disputes than either side of the political argument.
Beneficence asks us to do good.
Non-maleficence asks us to avoid unnecessary harm.
Autonomy asks us to respect the individual.
Justice reminds us that the individual is not the only person in the room.
The employee making an allegation matters.
So does the employee being accused.
The transgender patient matters.
So does the clinician responsible for providing safe treatment.
The employee belonging to a minority group matters.
So does the manager legitimately attempting to manage them.
The vulnerable prisoner matters.
So do the other vulnerable prisoners sharing the institution.
Ethics cannot simply identify the person expressing the greatest sense of harm and declare them morally victorious.
It requires evidence.
Proportionality.
Competing interests.
Consequences.
And fairness.
Conclusion: When Equality Is No Longer Enough
Perhaps Douglas Murray’s most important question is not whether society has literally gone mad.
The deeper question is whether parts of contemporary social justice have crossed an important philosophical boundary.
The civil-rights argument said:
“You cannot treat me as inferior because I am different.”
That was an argument for equality.
A more troubling contemporary argument can sometimes become:
“You cannot question my interpretation of what my difference means.”
That is an argument for intellectual authority.
And occasionally it progresses further:
“Your disagreement with my interpretation constitutes harm.”
At that point disagreement itself becomes morally suspect.
That should concern everyone.
We can protect transgender people while discussing biological sex.
We can recognise racism while examining whether a particular incident was racist.
We can protect employees from bullying while investigating whether alleged bullying actually occurred.
We can accommodate disability without assuming every requested accommodation is necessarily reasonable or proportionate.
We can make healthcare inclusive while asking whether inclusivity initiatives actually improve healthcare.
We can recognise lived experience without making an individual’s interpretation immune from evidence.
And we can listen compassionately when somebody says they have been harmed without automatically concluding that somebody else has wronged them.
That is not a retreat from social justice.
It is what justice actually requires.
To do good does not mean giving everybody the outcome they demand.
To do no harm does not mean ensuring nobody ever experiences discomfort, contradiction or disappointment.
And to treat people justly does not mean treating one person’s subjective interpretation as more important than everybody else’s rights.
Compassion requires us to listen.
Beneficence requires us to consider what good we can do.
Non-maleficence requires us to consider the harms our decisions may create.
Autonomy requires respect for the individual.
But justice requires something more difficult:
We must establish what happened, consider everybody affected and be prepared to reach a conclusion with which somebody may profoundly disagree.
A free society does not guarantee that nobody will contradict us.
It guarantees that we are free to disagree.
Perhaps the point at which social justice loses its way is therefore not when it demands equality.
It is when equality is no longer enough.
The moment justice requires agreement, it has ceased to be justice and started to become orthodoxy.
Sources and Further Reading
Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (Bloomsbury, 2019).
Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics — the influential formulation of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice in biomedical ethics.
Equality Act 2010 — the principal UK statutory framework concerning discrimination, harassment and victimisation in areas including employment and services.
ACAS, guidance on discrimination, bullying, grievances and disciplinary procedures — useful for distinguishing allegations, investigation and fair workplace procedure.
NHS England, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion guidance and associated patient-centred care resources.
Ministry of Justice and HM Prison & Probation Service, policy framework concerning transgender prisoners — illustrating the practical requirement to balance individual circumstances, risk, safety and the interests of other prisoners.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex (1989) — an important primary source for understanding intersectionality rather than relying solely upon later interpretations or criticisms of the concept.
Douglas Murray’s argument should also be read alongside critical responses to The Madness of Crowds. Doing so is important because the subject of this article ultimately demands the very principle it advocates:
No argument — including Murray’s, and including this one — should be immune from challenge.
