Are you abandoning the fight if you move from a red state to a blue one?

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:

I’m considering moving my family from a red state to a blue state. I’ve lived in a red state my whole life, and as a lesbian with a wonderful trans wife, it is hard. Moving to a blue state could give my wife and I better nondiscrimination protections, better worker protections, and better access to health care.

However, I feel like moving would be abandoning the good fight in my home state. I am well aware of how the red state exodus and the red state brain drain are already affecting our community. It’s hard to weigh what may be best for my wife against what’s best for our fellow red state residents.

Dear Should I Stay or Should I Go,

I feel your question deep in my bones. Not long ago, I made the decision to move with my partner from the US to Canada, where I’m originally from. We’re also a queer couple. And we grappled with many of the same questions you’re wrestling with now.

Is it selfish to leave? If you leave, would you be putting your own family’s well-being above the well-being of your wider community? Does that mean you’re reneging on your values? 

A few key philosophical ideas really helped me navigate these questions, so I’ll walk you through them. Whether you agree or disagree, they should clarify the terms in a way that makes it easier for you to decide one way or another.

Let’s start with your concern about how to weigh what’s best for your wife against what’s best for your wider community.

One strain of thought in modern philosophy — promoted by utilitarians like Peter Singer — says that we should aim to maximize the overall good, and that means doing good impartially rather than prioritizing certain people just because they happen to be our nearest and dearest. This perspective has become so influential in the past century that it’s probably shaping your thinking here, even if you’re not explicitly aware of it.

But I want you to know that other philosophers have pushed back. Bernard Williams, a staunch critic of utilitarianism, argued that it can actually be totally normal and morally appropriate to show partiality toward our loved ones.

In a famous passage, Williams said that if a man sees two people drowning, and one is his wife and the other is a stranger, and he pauses to consider whether rescuing his wife would maximize the overall good more than rescuing the stranger, he has had “one thought too many.”

Williams argued that moral agency does not sit in a contextless vacuum — it is always some specific person’s agency, and as specific people we have specific commitments. When you got together with your wife, you made a commitment to ensuring her well-being, over and above your general wish for all people everywhere to be well. Utilitarianism says you have to consider everyone’s well-being equally, with no special treatment for your own family members — but to Williams, that’s just an absurd demand. It alienates you from a core part of yourself, destroying your integrity as a moral agent.

According to this view, putting your wife’s safety first isn’t some moral lapse that should embarrass you. Honoring special obligations to our nearest and dearest is actually part of what makes a life ethical.

Besides, even though living an ethical life does sometimes involve being willing to sacrifice some of our own well-being, it’s important to recognize that everybody exists at a different vulnerability level. We shouldn’t expect someone who’s trans to take on risk to the same degree as someone who is not particularly marginalized or endangered. 

Given the assault on trans rights in recent years, I’d be really skeptical of anyone who tries to argue that you and your wife have a moral obligation to stay put and “fight the good fight” if she’d be happier and safer elsewhere. Mind you, I also want to caution you to consider all the factors that go into making a happy life before you come to any decision about moving. If your wife has a robust and loving community of friends in your current red state, but knows nobody in the blue state you’re thinking of moving to, she may end up unhappier there on balance. (Plus, as the recent midterms showed, red states don’t necessarily stay red, and even blue states can pass anti-trans rights ballot measures.)

I also think a bigger reframe is in order here. You say, “I feel like moving would be abandoning the good fight in my home state.” But would it really? I’d argue that the key consideration is: Where can you keep fighting the longest? The hardest? The most effectively?

The work of contemporary philosopher Lisa Tessman is instructive here. In her book Burdened Virtues, she argues that situations of oppression can demand certain traits of people — like sustained anger at injustice, fierce loyalty to one’s group, constant vigilance and sensitivity to others’ suffering — that can damage the people who embody them even though they are real virtues. These traits can undermine the well-being of the bearers over time, keeping them from flourishing. What’s more, they can potentially even warp their bearers’ moral character — for example, when anger grows into an all-consuming state. 

You said that you’ve lived in a red state your whole life and found it hard. So I think it’s worth asking yourself: Are the traits you’ve had to develop under those circumstances — however virtuous they may be — actually eroding your ability to keep showing up, both for yourself and for your wider community, in the way you’d like? If you feel that, say, constant vigilance is starting to take its toll, moving might give you a mental reset that allows you to be more — not less — active in enacting your values.

Plus, a quick look at the historical record can defuse the idea that leaving a place means “abandoning the good fight.” Consider what happened in the Great Migration, the exodus of Black Americans from the Jim Crow South. Did those migrants “abandon the good fight”? Absolutely not. Once in the North and West, they built up political power and institutions that ended up feeding into and supporting the civil rights movement. 

The point is not that the two situations are exact parallels — they aren’t. The point is that when people leave a place, they can choose to use the affordances of their new home in a way that helps their old home. So, although worries about a red state exodus and red state brain drain are totally understandable, I don’t think they decide the question of whether a move would be net-negative or net-positive for your wider community. 

What will decide that is what you choose to do with your newfound resources — including, plausibly, an increased sense of safety, security, and mental health — if you do relocate. 

Life gets busy really fast, especially after a big move. (I should know — months after moving, I still haven’t gotten around to putting up any art on my walls!) So, if you leave your home state, my strong recommendation to you is this: Make a plan, in advance, for how you will keep fighting the good fight once you reach your new destination. Will you organize remotely? Can you connect right now with the relevant leaders at red state groups you want to support? Which organizations will you donate to, how much will you give, and when?

To boost accountability and prevent mission drift, be as concrete and specific as possible, discuss your plans aloud with your wife, and write them down.

And once you’ve done all this? My dear, let go of your guilt and live.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• I loved this Aeon essay about “love with nowhere to go.” It notes that, although we have established social scripts for grief that arises in the wake of a death, we don’t have practices for recognizing and working through grief that’s not death-related. That’s a problem because “when we are unable to honor other profound losses, we become strangers to ourselves.”

• Noema published an absolutely wonderful piece by Atoosa Kasirzadeh on how AI is changing math — and how it should! In fact, the AI revolution can have the great effect of reorienting the field to things that really matter according to humans. In my opinion, this is a model for how many other fields should adapt, so it’s really worth reading even if you’re not “a math person.” 

• Most Westerners don’t have a good window into how people in China think about AI. So I was excited to see Persona publishing Jen Zhu on why the West’s habit of thinking about AI as an arms race misses the mark from a Chinese perspective. “When you watch a competitor sprint, you assume the finish line is the same as yours,” she writes. “But China is not running America’s race. It is continuing a 3,000-year-old project of ordering society as a single organism, harmonized rather than unleashed.”