Why is Immoderation Bad? (and What to Do About It)

It might make sense to back up a minute or two and talk about why immoderation is bad in the first place. It's obviously not always bad, of course. Some immoderate beliefs are great precisely because they're immoderate. The belief in an omniscient and omnipotent God, for example, is a pretty immoderate belief. But believing it and being convicted of it helps billions of religious believers maintain moderation in other areas of their lives (and of course also leads to immoderation, which we'll discuss more later). You probably have some immoderate beliefs that do that too. (We'll get into more of the nuances and complexities of immoderate beliefs and their link to moderation later.)

But immoderation is bad in most cases for a few important reasons.

The first reason is that the immoderate position is much less likely to be true. It's important that our convictions match reality not just from an epistemological perspective but because the more all our convictions match reality the better able we are to cooperate with one another and live together in communities, which is a pretty basic human need. And really that's most of what this blog is about: how to live together and flourish together as the social beings we are. Our beliefs need to be by and large true in order to do that. And immoderate beliefs are, for a variety of reasons, less likely to be true. (We'll delve into why this is the case in other posts).

The second reason is that immoderate positions have the tendency to treat other people as means instead of ends. Without getting all Kantian here, other human beings matter precisely because they have their own ends and goals and purposes in life. Treating other humans as though they exist to fulfill your particular goals is an immoderate thing to do. It's immoderate because it refuses to recognize the diversity of human needs and ends and the fact that humans find flourishing in different ways. Moderation is, in this sense, a moral requirement. Notice, moderation does not require that we agree with other people's ways of life, think they are good, or think they are worthy of copying. Moderation does, however, require that we recognize that people have different values, needs and goals and that we respect other human beings enough to avoid forcing our values, needs, and goals on them.

The third reason is that immoderation frequently leads to imbalance in our own lives. The immoderate dieter forgoes the joys of eating good cheese or drinking excellent beer. The immoderate worker forgoes the joy of relaxing with family. The immoderate religious believer cuts off family and friends who do not share her values, forgoing the wisdom they could impart or the joy of their company. Human life requires tradeoffs because we have limited time, energy, money, and knowledge. Pouring too much of ourselves into one area means we lose out on others. While the quest for a perfect balance in human life is itself problematic -- after all, most of us have circumstances outside of our control that impact how we spend our time and resources -- avoiding obvious immoderation can help us align the way we spend our time with our values. It allows us to flourish.

Overall then, immoderation is bad because it has negative effects on humans and the communities in which they live. It leads to separation of people into tribes (more on this later), polarization in politics, and segregation within communities.

We'll be talking about a lot of this in followup posts, but for now we're taking both a normative and descriptive position on immoderation. Immoderation is undesirable because it is often untrue or fails to align with reality (descriptive) and because it leads us to do harmful things to other humans or treat other humans in ways that are incompatible with their humanity (normative).

(Aside: While we're taking a broadly consequentialist approach here, that doesn't mean we don't think there are very real non-consequentialist arguments for moderation too. We might get to some of those issues later. And don't worry if this last part got a bit complicated. You can ignore or engage with the philosophical piece as you wish. What we really want to get at here in this context is the Why and the How of moderation, which can be pretty basic.)

Phew! That was a lot. We'll develop and simplify a lot of this in later posts, but this is a decent starting point.

What about you? Do you think immoderation is bad? If so, why? If not, why? Why is moderation worth defending, if at all? We'd love to hear from you!