In Just Hear Me Out: How to Change Minds Without Lies, Bullshit, or Moral Compromise, philosopher Colin Marshall offers a guide to persuasion for people who want to change minds without manipulation or coercion. In this excerpt from the introduction to that book, Marshall explores the importance of reclaiming persuasion from bad actors.

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Think of some issue you care deeply about. Maybe it’s a large-scale political issue, like immigration, free speech, religious liberty, abortion, economic justice, violence in the Middle East, racism, firearm regulations, or climate change. Or maybe it’s something smaller scale, like the health of your family, the incompetence of your employer, what’s happening in your local schools, or a relative whose driving poses a threat to everyone around them. Whether they’re large or small, these issues are all high-stakes: they profoundly impact our lives, and they matter to us ethically. Unfortunately, regardless of which high- stakes issue came to mind for you, you probably know at least one person who doesn’t care about it. Or perhaps you know someone who does care, but comes down on what you believe is the wrong side. And that’s a problem.

Take climate change. Some people, like me, believe it’s an unprecedented crisis that demands drastic action at all levels of society. Other people think it’s a problem, but one we can’t do anything about. Still others believe it’s a hoax, orchestrated by shadowy political agents and attention-hungry scientists. One way or another, millions of people are in the wrong, and that’s extremely bad. As a society, we’re either falling short of what we need to do to save countless lives, or else we’re wasting time and attention on a pseudo-crisis. The stakes are too high for us to simply agree to disagree, or to just politely listen to each other’s perspectives. If I’m wrong about the crisis, I want someone to set me straight.

So what we need is persuasion: people, especially knowledgeable people, deliberately changing others’ minds. That need is moral. High-stakes issues are morally important, which makes high-stakes persuasion morally urgent. This urgency is obvious for large-scale problems. The sooner we all get on the right side of climate change, the better it will be for our world. But small-scale problems can also be urgent. The sooner your uncle with declining driving abilities gives up his car keys, the safer he and everyone around him will be.

This raises a question, though: how should people try to persuade each other? Whenever you want to change someone else’s mind, you face an ethical choice. Your ultimate goal may be noble: saving the planet, combating conspiracy theories, or saving your uncle’s life. But when you set out to achieve that goal, do you make moral compromises in choosing your persuasive methods? Do you let the ends justify the means, even when the means are morally questionable?

This question is hard, because when it comes to persuasion, many of the time-tested means are psychological tricks: exaggeration, buttering people up, cherry- picking stories, playing to biases, old- fashioned bullshit, and stone-faced lies. If you have a moral conscience, those tricky persuasive techniques should feel repulsive, like selling pieces of your soul. Yet when the stakes are really high, any well-intentioned persuader should be open to some moral compromise. What if pandering and bullshit are the only ways to combat climate conspiracies? What if lies are the only way to make your uncle give up his keys? More generally, what if moral compromise is always necessary for persuasion?

I’m an ethicist who has (I admit) tried using persuasive tricks when the stakes felt high. But about a decade ago, I started wondering whether persuasion could work without tricks. So I started digging into the ethics and psychology of persuasion. I read the best work I could find, then talked to social psychologists, philosophers, political scientists, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, union organizers, grassroots activists, nurse practitioners, doctors, and anyone else with insights to offer. I started teaching classes on the ethics of persuasion, where hundreds of students gave me their blunt reactions—telling me which ideas they found helpful, and which not.

As a result, I’ve become convinced that persuaders can succeed without underhanded tricks. Hence, this book is a defense of morally uncompromising persuasion. I’m not a moral purist: I believe that there are cases where persuaders should compromise, using manipulative tricks to achieve their noble goals. But I also believe that many people compromise too quickly, and that too many persuaders let their ends justify any means.

Before I say more, I need a label. More specifically: I need a label for what gets compromised when a persuader resorts to psychological tricks. “Respect” captures a lot of it, but as we’ll see, it leaves out some important pieces. The same is true with “compassion” and related terms like “benevolence,” “kindness,” and “empathy.” The best label I’ve found is “civility.” Civility, in the sense I care about, isn’t just about being polite, though politeness can be an expression of civility. The type of civility I have in mind is taking the other person seriously, as someone you share a world with, someone who deserves respect and compassion. That’s what civil persuaders refuse to compromise. They refuse to let their larger goals get in the way of taking the person in front of them seriously. This is the kind of persuasion I’m going to defend.

Defending civil persuasion these days is an uphill battle. To see how popular uncivil persuasion is, go to any bookstore and find the best- selling books on persuasion. Almost everything you see will be a curated selection of manipulative tricks. Some of those books’ authors nod to ethics along the way, but those nods generally feel like afterthoughts or paper-thin rationalizations for being an asshole. To be fair, I’m sure some of those authors have noble aims, and I know that they have helped some of their readers. But those authors make it tempting to believe that moral compromise is simply part of life, and that relating to other people is always a manipulative psychological game.

Our current historical moment fuels that temptation. Political polarization is at a record high. Self-righteous name-calling is almost the norm. Nearly everyone now has family members they can’t talk with openly. Rampant fake news, toxic social media, and a teetering democracy all make civil persuasion seem like a thing of the distant past. Donald Trump, who shattered nearly every convention of civility in politics, won two national elections—not in spite of his incivility, but because of it. When people have to sway each other, it can feel like uncivil moral compromise is the only option. Even one of civility’s most committed modern defenders, the legal scholar and ethicist Stephen Carter, admits that “if you want to win, you must not be civil, especially if the other side will not be civil in return.” These days, it’s easy to feel that civility is for losers.

We shouldn’t give up on civility, though. Admittedly, civil persuasion doesn’t always work. And it isn’t always called for. But sometimes it is called for, and sometimes it gets the job done. In what follows, I’ll introduce a range of civil persuaders who have changed others’ minds without moral compromise. A black musician persuaded dozens of KKK members to abandon their racist worldviews. A patrol officer convinced a man to step back from death on the Golden Gate Bridge. A social reformer persuaded staunch traditionalists to embrace women’s rights. A few earnest Twitter users flipped a lifelong member of a hate group. On a more modest level: once I started understanding civil persuasion, I got better at it (even talking politics with strangers), and I started helping my students persuade people around them on high-stakes topics. In all those cases, it’s hard to see how incivility could have achieved the same results. Civil persuasion can help us achieve our most noble moral goals.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy, though. As the philosopher Amy Olberding writes, “Civil persuasion is a nasty sort of business, one that offers few heroics. It takes patience, care and work. It entails getting my hands dirty by trying to reason long and hard with others I often cannot like. It draws little admiration in an age like ours, little I can celebrate as triumph over all that’s bad and wrong. It could even lose me the esteem of those who share my values—they might well find in my politeness a tolerance for wrong.” In other words, being civil comes with costs. Some costs are internal: it’s stressful engaging with people who see the world differently, especially when you try to take them seriously. Other costs are social: talking to the other side can look like selling out, like wavering in your moral commitments. Any defense of civil persuasion has to take those costs into account.

There’s another reason why some people are suspicious about appeals to civility. Abusers and oppressors of many stripes have used the term “civility” as a weapon. It’s a powerful trick, if you’ve got the social standing to pull it off: silence criticism by declaring that all dissent is uncivil. Think of societies where people of one sex, class, religion, race, or caste aren’t allowed to object to how they’re treated, or even to speak to the people in charge. Or think of hostile, hierarchical workplaces, with self-righteous bosses who make no space for criticism. Or, finally, think of classrooms where a dogmatic teacher refuses to allow certain legitimate viewpoints. We might not all agree about which societies, workplaces, and classrooms are genuinely oppressive, but we can all agree that this sort of oppression happens. Oppressive, weaponized uses of “civility” take many forms: “Where are your manners?” “You’re out of line,” “Know your place,” or “That’s offensive.”

I don’t want my defense of civil persuasion to be turned into a weapon for shutting down legitimate dissent. The best way to avoid that, I think, is to say more about what genuine civility involves.

Civility, as I understand it, is about taking other people seriously. Abusers and oppressors fail to do that, so they fail to be genuinely civil. But what does it mean to take another person seriously when you’re trying to persuade them? My main claim is that civility has two main components: respect and compassion. These are both ways of taking another person seriously, though they focus on different aspects of a person’s psychology. Respect involves taking someone seriously as a fellow rational being who can reason, plan, compromise, and contribute to the conversation. By contrast, compassion involves taking someone seriously as a fellow emotional being, someone who wrestles with fears, personal insecurities, social anxieties, physical pain, and fragile hopes. When you seriously engage with both sides of the person you’re talking to—the emotional and the rational—you treat them as a whole person. Instead of regarding them as just another liberal, another conservative, another religious nutjob, another godless atheist (etc.), you engage with them as a full human, who is every bit as real as you. That kind of engagement amounts to genuine civility.

It follows that failures of civility can be more about rationality or emotionality. Being condescending is a failure of respect for rationality. More specifically, it’s a failure to treat another person as a fellow rational being. On the other hand, being insensitive is essentially a failure of compassion. It’s a failure to seriously consider another person’s emotional state. Bigots, hostile bosses, and dogmatic teachers fail in exactly these ways, which is why their demands for “civility” ring hollow.

Real, genuine civility is morally powerful. It lets us truly connect with each other, hear each other out, and feel recognized in our whole being. That’s why it can make persuasion work. Cheap persuasive tricks often wither in the sunlight: once people realize they’ve been tricked into changing their mind, there’s a good chance they’ll revert to their earlier beliefs and resent the people who tricked them. But no one resents being taken seriously, so long as that includes both their rationality and their emotions. So civility can survive in the sunlight and thrive there. Civil persuasion can get lasting, powerful results, strengthen our relationships, and maybe even save the world. The question is how to achieve it.

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Colin Marshall is professor of philosophy at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of Compassionate Moral Realism.

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