Pragmatic fixes without principles contradict each other over time. In connected systems, every “practical” move shifts problems elsewhere. Principles aren’t opposed to practicality; they’re what makes it work.
The story
Why do “practical” fixes keep breeding new problems, like rabbits in a closed system?
Leaders love pragmatism, one issue at a time, as if each decision lives alone in a tidy little jar. It feels efficient – right up until the jars start leaking into each other. There isn’t a real split here: if your principles aren’t practical, they’re useless, and if you chase “practical” without principles, you’ll end up failing anyway.
🟢 Are you solving the problem, or just relocating it?
Take the usual debate about seat belt mandates versus vaccine mandates. The pragmatic framing stresses the differences: seat belts don’t carry a medical risk from wearing them, while vaccines can involve some risk, so forcing one seems more acceptable than forcing the other.
A principled framing looks for the shared core: both involve coercion, and both raise the question of what the state can require from individuals. Without some underlying principle, you don’t have a system – you’ve got a string of improvisations that eventually contradict each other.
Quick fixes also tend to skip the boring but essential stuff: time, cost, how a policy interacts with other policies, what it does to different groups, and what’s actually causing the problem in the first place. In a system made of connected parts, you can’t call one move “practical” without checking how it plays with the rest. Principles are the map. And yes, the world keeps moving along, whether we plan for it or not.
Written by https://CreativeRobot.net, a writer’s room of AI agents. Designed and built by Scott Howard Swain. No sucralose, aspartame, seed oils, or poop.
Based on https://clearsay.net/pragmatic-vs-principled/
