The Morality of Being Stubborn

Being stubborn and how stubborn to be is an extremely important ethical question. It relates to being able to credibly pre-commit to following certain policies and plays a part in determining the behavior of a wide range of counter parties. However it also involves reckoning with sunk costs throwing good effort after bad, how much the scenario is applicable to others and how much it is your responsibility to uphold credibility to your reference class whether that be counterfactual selves, parties to a lawsuit, criminal defendants or nation states.

It seems odd; it is not usually quite so morally charged, normally it is in the realm of personality quirks, albeit with a twinge of moral valance. Furthermore it is generally considered a negative attribute something that the "cooler heads" in one's life may discourage, effectively that it is a-priori wrong to be stubborn and only leads to suffering. "I am a stubborn person" they may object and in a way that actually get's to the crux of it. Being stubborn doesn't do much of anything for you if say it is a one off or a lark, being a stubborn person on the other hand or predictably being stubborn, credibly being stubborn when you say you will be does a whole lot.

Your propensity to be stubborn effects your interactions and those of others. The credibility of your deterrence in many circumstances is dependent on your credible ability to stubbornly hold a grudge, not forget a slight (or contrastingly to remember kindnesses and loyalty) and to pay it all back in kind. What are you accomplishing when you are stubborn? Establishing or reinforcing a reputation of being stubborn or of doing what you say for yourself your clan maybe even for humanity in general.

Does it really matter though if you: - Don't end up acting on it - Wouldn't act on it - Couldn't act on it It really depends on the information that your adversaries have it is precisely if any of the above is evident/knowable that the stubbornness is rendered impotent. If it becomes common knowledge to the extent you can exercise agency over your stubbornness the right thing to do straightforwardly becomes to quickly get over it to change the conditions that make it impotent or evident.

It may feel like you can't undo the past and that is true in one sense but not in another. See what you can do is credibly act in a way that prevents "the past" from having happened in the first place. That's pretty convoluted so let's go ahead and unpack that. You acting in a given way will as a rule tend to be predictable to a degree. You follow some policy if that policy includes a degree of stubbornness then it will have to be accounted for by adversarial agents. When they are say deciding whether to wrong you this will be taken into account. Unless you consider them incompetent at prediction there will be some correspondence between what your actual actions are in the future and the predictions they make their decisions on the basis of. So your actual actions in the present will have effected the past in this way.

More broadly all deterrence is ultimately a function of stubbornness, punishment after the fact neither directly prevents more of what was done nor does it (directly) undo what was done. We follow through with deterrence out of stubbornness and deterrence can only actually exist when we do credibly follow through with it i.e. when we are stubborn. All bark and no bite means we have stereotypes of Pomeranians and that consequently almost no-one is afraid of them. Pacifists are bad body guards because they didn't beat you up in the future after you got too close to their charge.

If you are too stubborn you can be cruel, over-committed, stuck in the past but you need to be at least kindof stubborn to be effective to make and have commitment. You need stubbornness to be fearsome, to be loyal, to be principaled and to be commited. All depends on having the right measure and on reasoning well about when being stubborn does and does not change the past.