Terms of opprobrium are packaged for different recipients. People who defend the rights of people who are unemployed, refugees or Indigenous, for example, can be called chardonnay sipping socialists or bleeding hearts.
Why one particular variety of a substance whose whole raison d'être is to sozzle should be so disdained is a mystery. Nor is it clear why a bleeding heart should be regarded as a more fatal condition than a bloodless heart. The core business of hearts, after all, is blood.
These phrases are standard ordnance in knockabout polemic. Things get more serious when critics lower their voice, adopt a serious mien, and warn you against claiming the moral high ground, or even blame you for taking it. It's as if, like Odysseus chained to the mast, you must take drastic steps to avoid seduction by the siren voices wafting from the mist-shrouded moral high ground.
Yet just what the moral high ground is, how you would claim it or be claimed by it, and why its possession should put at risk your right to be heard, are rarely specified. We clearly need a handbook that will enable us to recognise the moral high ground and detour around it.
The moral high ground is a military metaphor. To take the high ground gives your forces an advantage because they can look and fire down on the opposition. In the same way, to take the moral high ground is believed to give you a decisive advantage in an argument.
You can achieve this highly desirable state of affairs in two ways. The first is to display the coherence between what you argue for and how you live your life. If this harmony contrasts with the dissonance between your opponent's actions and words, they cede to you the moral high ground.
Dissidents who argue for a democratic and peaceful society, for example, may come into conflict with an authoritarian government that pretends to benevolence. They may then commit themselves to demonstrations that embody the peaceful and consultative values of the society they call for. If the government employs violence against the protests, it undermines its claim to benevolence and ultimately its legitimacy. The dissidents occupy the moral high ground.
They will be accused of doing so, too. In this case the accusation is simply a frustrated tribute to the effectiveness of the dissidents' argument and an acknowledgment of the ethical poverty of the government's position.
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