Political Correctness is Not a Moral Compass

A guest post by Maria Skoutaridou

In a recent New York Times essay, media commentator Ezra Klein argued that we must learn to “live together” as a society, praising Charlie Kirk’s approach to political engagement through campus debates. When pressed during a podcast conversation with Ben Shapiro, Klein doubled down: coexistence requires tolerating those we fundamentally disagree with. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, a Georgetown University professor, responded directly in Boston Review with an essay titled “How Can We Live Together?”—a sharp challenge to Klein’s vision of civility and dialogue. Táíwò argued that societies have always maintained moral standards through social shame and cultural pressure, and that during genuine moral crises such pressure is necessary, not something to apologise for. Both thinkers raise important points. Yet both miss something fundamental that sits beneath their disagreement. The real problem isn’t whether we should shame people who disagree with us. It’s that we no longer speak a common moral language clear enough to know what we’re actually condemning. Political correctness cannot serve as a moral compass because it conflates political identity with moral judgement, destroying our ability to distinguish genuine wrongdoing from legitimate political disagreement.

Consider two statements about the same crime: “A man raped a child” versus “A right-wing man raped a child.” The first describes a specific moral wrong. The second conflates political identity with a criminal act, muddying our understanding of what we are condemning. When we mix political labels into moral language, we do something corrosive. We weaken our response to genuine evils while corrupting our ability to identify actual wrongdoing.

Táíwò’s own essay reveals this problem starkly. He defends social shame as a necessary tool for maintaining moral boundaries. Yet his method for deploying this shame is to label Kirk as “right-wing”—marking a political identity as morally disqualifying. Here’s the tension: Táíwò argues we should use social disapproval to enforce moral standards, but his practice conflates political identity with moral failure. He doesn’t simply describe Kirk’s politics; he uses that political label as a tool of exclusion, to signal that this orientation is culturally unacceptable.

But this is precisely where the language problem becomes visible. By turning political identity into a mark of moral shame, left-progressive discourse demonstrates why social shaming has become so blunt and ineffective. It has been deployed so broadly—across political disagreements, not just moral transgressions—that we have lost the ability to distinguish genuine wrongdoing from legitimate political difference. Táíwò wants to weaponise shame as a mechanism of social control. But he has not reckoned with the fact that left-progressive politics has already exhausted the moral weight of shame by applying it indiscriminately against political opponents.

Recent research in psychology by Brandon Stewart and David Morris reveals that liberals and conservatives rely on fundamentally different moral frameworks. Liberals tend to emphasise values related to individuals, such as fairness and harm concerns, while conservatives draw on a broader range of moral intuitions, including loyalty, authority, and community cohesion. When conservatives express concerns based on ingroup loyalty or reverence for tradition, liberals often dismiss them. They are not speaking different languages by accident—they are operating from genuinely different moral foundations. This divergence has real consequences. When political opponents speak from different moral grounds, they are asking different moral questions. Agreement becomes nearly impossible not because one side is immoral, but because they are working from incompatible starting points. Worse, left-progressive discourse frequently attempts to reduce conservative moral language to political identity indicators rather than engaging with the underlying moral concerns. This rhetorical move short-circuits genuine dialogue before it can begin.

Yet there is something even more troubling happening in contemporary political discourse: the deliberate weaponisation of language itself. Framing Theory developed across psychology, linguistics, and communication studies, suggests that how we frame information fundamentally shapes how people interpret facts. Consider “tax relief” versus “tax redistribution.” The first frames taxes as burdens we seek to escape. The second frames them as money to be reallocated justly. By selecting specific words and metaphors, communicators strategically shape perception. A military intervention framed as “peacekeeping” activates very different associations from one framed as an “invasion”—the same action, but a completely different moral interpretation.

The problem emerges when we use this rhetorical power not to clarify disagreements but to obscure them. When political opponents are reflexively branded with inflammatory labels such as “fascist,” “right-wing,” or “racist”, we are no longer arguing. We are engaged in what might be called semantic misappropriation: concepts become so weaponised that they lose analytical precision. This tendency appears particularly pronounced in left-progressive political commentary, where political identity indicators are prepended to moral descriptions with striking consistency. Conservative rhetoric, by contrast, tends more often to critique ideas and policies rather than permanently branding opponents with identity tags. This is political correctness in action—the enforcement of moral boundaries through political identity labelling. This is where Klein’s concern about living together becomes serious, and where Táíwò’s defence of social shaming in order to enforce moral boundaries becomes almost beside the point. We cannot effectively enforce moral boundaries around concepts we have already destroyed through careless and deliberate overuse.

A clearer approach requires distinguishing three categories that contemporary discourse persistently conflates: genuine moral wrongs, legitimate political disagreements, and rhetorical abuse. Genuine moral wrongs, such as child abuse and torture, are acts that violate fundamental human dignity and command universal condemnation. Such acts do not require political agreement to identify. Torture is wrong whether perpetrated by someone on the left or right, and whether the victim holds right- or left-wing political views. We need clear, common moral language here, untainted by political embellishment. The nature of the crime matters more than the perpetrator’s or victim’s ideology. This is where Táíwò’s essay falters. By repeatedly describing Kirk as “right-wing”, he imports political identity into the moral sphere where it has no place.

Legitimate political disagreements encompass questions about how societies should be organised, how resources should be distributed, and what role government should play. Left-progressives and conservatives can hold genuinely incompatible visions of the good society while remaining equally committed to democratic processes and human flourishing. These are not failures of moral clarity—they are what democratic politics actually is. Rhetorical abuse occurs when we deliberately mislabel political disagreements as moral atrocities. Calling someone a fascist because they oppose immigration reform, or a communist because they support higher taxation, belongs in this category. It is a conversation-stopper dressed up as moral truth. This weaponisation of language reveals how political correctness has been used to enforce supposed moral values. But political correctness cannot serve as a moral compass precisely because it is, by definition, political. Morality and politics operate on different levels. The moment we allow political identity to determine moral judgement—the moment we undermine a genuine moral wrong by labelling the victim “right-wing”—we have abandoned moral reasoning altogether. We have substituted political conformity for ethical principle.

What societies actually need is not intensified social shaming through political correctness, but something far more demanding: the cultivation of genuine moral community based on shared civic purposes and mutual responsibility. This means developing shared practices—conversations that seek understanding before condemnation, moral education that teaches children how to distinguish substantive wrongs from mere disagreements, institutions that reinforce common accountability rather than enforce political conformity. We restrain certain behaviours and cultivate others not because we fear being labelled negatively, but because we are accountable to a community we value and to principles we genuinely believe in. This is fundamentally different from Táíwò’s approach, which seeks to extend the reach of political correctness. What we need is common moral language that exists independently of political identity.

The path forward requires two fundamental shifts. First, we must agree on a common moral language that refuses biased convenience—language that names wrongs without appending political labels. Second, we must stop weaponising language deliberately for purposes of political correctness. Moral seriousness demands consistency: if we claim torture is evil, we must condemn it equally regardless of who perpetrated it or who suffered it. When we abandon this consistency, we reveal that our moral language serves tactical interests rather than genuine principles—and this explains why social shame has lost its effectiveness.

The Klein–Táíwò exchange exposed a real tension in how we can live together. But it resolved nothing because neither identified the actual problem. We do not disagree about whether societies need moral boundaries. We disagree about how to draw them in an age when the language we use to identify boundaries has become corrupted. We cannot live together using political correctness as our moral guide because it is inherently political, not moral. Until we can name a moral wrong without needing to add to it political affiliation, we have not restored our common moral language—and we will not be able to live together on any terms worth having.

---

References

• Chong, Dennis, & Druckman, James N. (2007). “Framing Theory.” Annual Review of Political Science, 10, 103–126. Available at: https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev.polisci.10.072805.103054

• Klein, Ezra. “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.” The New York Times, 11 September 2025. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-ben-shapiro.html

• Klein, Ezra. “We Are Going to Have to Live Here With Each Other.” The Ezra Klein Show (podcast), 16 September 2025. Episode page: Apple Podcasts+1

• Stewart, Brandon D., & Morris, David S. M. (2021). “Moving Morality Beyond the In-Group: Liberals and Conservatives Show Differences on Group-Framed Moral Foundations and These Differences Mediate the Relationships to Perceived Bias and Threat.” Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 579908. Open-access version: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.579908/full?utm_source

• Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi O. (2025). “How Can We Live Together? Ezra Klein is wrong: shame is essential.” Boston Review, 23 September 2025. Available at: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/how-can-we-live-together/?

Maria Skoutaridou is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK