It Is What It Is

That's Tiger Woods' catchphrase, or one of them at least, usually spoken in response to something bad, like a round of golf. I've taken to quoting it occasionally, usually in an at-least-somewhat-joking tone of voice. But I think that there are some important principles that I would refer to as the "It Is What It Is" principle, and I just happened across one of them in my Philosophy of Law textbook. Specifically, one thing about moral thinking is that you don't need to sort people into two boxes--"Good" vs. "Bad," or "Guilty" vs. "Innocent"--because there are no consequences. If we think someone is in the moral wrong, solely within the confines of moral philosophy we stop there, thinking they are in the moral wrong. In legal thinking, however, or in theological thinking in judgmental theologies, or any other context at all where we need to visit discrete consequences on people, we do need to decide. Good or bad, guilty or innocent, wrong or right, constitutional or invalid. Choices need be made, and so on the tough, borderline cases, we need to expend a lot of effort deciding which side of the infinitely thin line we're on.

But if we're just being philosophers, just thinking about things and forming opinions without in any sense trying to invoke consequences based on our conclusion, we have a different option available to us: we can say that it's a difficult, borderline case! What's stopping us? It's a point I made in this post, and I liked seeing it in my philosophy textbook.