The Right Answer to the Wrong Question

Both sides of heated debates are often correct—they're just answering different questions wearing the same clothing.

One grows weary of the interminable debates that plague our public discourse—not because the participants lack intelligence or conviction, but because they so reliably fail to notice they are playing different games on the same board.

"Colorblindness is a racist worldview."

"Colorblindness is the only non-racist worldview."

These propositions are hurled at one another across dinner tables and cable news desks as though they were mutually exclusive—as though one must be right and the other the province of knaves or fools. But I want to suggest something that may irritate partisans of both camps equally: both statements are correct. They are simply correct answers to different questions that happen to wear the same clothing.

The first proposition addresses the world as it actually exists—scarred by history, distorted by accumulated injustice, operating on momentum that no individual chose and few can escape. To be "blind" to color in this context is to be blind to the continuing consequences of very color-conscious decisions made by previous generations. One does not cure a patient by refusing to examine the wound.

The second proposition addresses the world as it ought to be—the regulative ideal toward which a just society might aspire. In this frame, a person's melanin content should carry no more moral weight than their shoe size. To see color as salient is the original sin we are trying to overcome.

Which question are you asking? The empirical question about navigating present reality? Or the normative question about the proper terminus of our efforts? These are not the same inquiry, and the failure to distinguish them has generated enough heat to warm a small planet while producing approximately no light whatsoever.

Consider a seemingly simpler case: Is Nicolás Maduro the president of Venezuela?

The ideal theorist, committed to democratic legitimacy, will say no. The elections were fraudulent. For a time, dozens of nations recognized Juan Guaidó as the rightful leader. Maduro is a usurper, and to call him "president" is to launder illegitimacy with nomenclature.

The realist, examining the situation with colder eyes, will say yes. Maduro commands the military. His signature moves money. When foreign heads of state wish to discuss Venezuelan affairs, they do not telephone Guaidó. Legitimacy, in this accounting, is a pleasant fiction we tell ourselves; power is what answers the phone.

Who is right? Both, obviously. One is answering the question "who should hold power according to the norms we claim to value?" The other answers "who does hold power according to the mechanisms by which power actually operates?" These are different questions. The word "president" is doing double duty, and we are too lazy or too partisan to notice.

This matters beyond the seminar room. When the United States captures Maduro, the evaluation of that act depends entirely on which question you take as primary. Violate the sovereignty of a nation and kidnap its head of state? That is one framing, and it has implications. Enter a country to apprehend a fugitive criminal with no legitimate claim to office? That is another framing entirely. The facts are identical. The questions are not.

We are too hard on the good-faith ideal theorists. They are making a consequential point: we need principles that apply regardless of whether we like the guy. Otherwise "sovereignty" just means "sovereignty for leaders we approve of." That's not a principle. That's power wearing a principle costume.

I can already hear the objection forming: "This is mere semantics. You've dissolved a genuine moral conflict into a word game."

But this objection misunderstands what semantics is—or rather, it misunderstands that for questions of meaning, semantics is the whole of the matter. There is no secret meaning hiding behind the words, waiting to be excavated by sufficiently clever philosophers. The inferential role of a term—what follows from it, what it follows from, how it connects to action and consequence—just is its meaning. To clarify the semantics is not to avoid the question. It is to finally locate where the actual disagreement lives.

And often, once located, the disagreement evaporates. The apparent conflict was a shadow cast by ambiguity. Two people vigorously agreeing while believing themselves to be at odds.

A boundary must be acknowledged. I am not proposing that all questions are infinitely malleable, that every answer is correct relative to some suitable framing, or that we have tumbled into a postmodern hall of mirrors where truth is merely what you can get away with saying.

If you tell me that two and two make five, I will not congratulate you on your creative relationship with arithmetic. "In my private number system, the symbols are transposed" is not an interpretation I am obliged to take seriously. Why? Because mathematical discourse operates with settled defaults. The inferential context is not genuinely contested. To claim otherwise is not to reveal hidden ambiguity but to violate the shared norms that make communication possible.

The interesting cases—the ones that generate real heat—are those where the defaults are not settled. Where reasonable people can and do operate with different background assumptions about which question is being asked. Colorblindness qualifies. The definition of "racism" qualifies. The meaning of "president" in the context of authoritarian regimes qualifies.

Where defaults are settled, wrong answers are simply wrong. Where defaults are contested, apparent disagreement often dissolves into mutual misunderstanding about which question is on the table.

The task, then, is not to win the argument but to surface it. To ask, before the swords are drawn: which question, exactly, are we trying to answer? You may find your opponent less foolish than you supposed. You may find they are not your opponent at all.