Once you've disarmed the opponent, and you've conditionally conceded their premise, you have to agree on what a moral outcome is. And we, the framing is everything. You need to have a frame for what the conversation you're having. If you're arguing with someone, it should be about something important, right? And that something is usually that there's a problem that needs to be solved. And we have competing ideas on how best to solve it.

Right? So instead of arguing about which proposal is better, we're going to engage in a discussion about what ideally we want to accomplish and whether we have agreement on what ideally should be accomplished. And we can't even discuss which proposal is better until we have that agreement on what the ideal outcome is. And it's amazing how easy it is to get agreement on this even with people who disagree. I mean, people on both sides of the abortion debate can actually agree on what a moral outcome is. All right.

Um, so that's what framing the conversation is about. It's about agreeing on what constitutes a good or moral outcome before we proceed with our conversation and start considering whether any given proposal is going to meet those objectives or not. Now, in my experience, the first person to put forth a moral framework usually wins. So, what is the frame? frame is the moral imperative upon which we are going to decide whether any given particular solution is good or not. All right.

It's all about morality. It involves questioning why does this matter? Why are we arguing about this? What do we hope ideally will happen? Ideally, by framing the conversation we do two things. First, we're getting our first point of agreement we're getting our first Yes, we define what a good solution is one that accomplishes our agreed upon objectives.

Now the other person has to agree on on what this is what we're doing is we're reflecting back to them what they're telling us. They think is important. Why do they care about this? What ideally do they hope will they will accomplish by Whatever position they're holding. And if you can't agree it means you're not hearing what they're saying properly. If they don't agree with your restatement of what they're arguing, then you don't you haven't been listening to them properly don't get this right.

Just because you think you know what it is. They're arguing a lot of times we think we know what people are arguing, and we call it a straw man. You do this? Right. They have agreed with your rephrasing of the problem. All right.

So there's several things that happen when we do this. All right, we define what a good solution is one that accomplishes our agreed upon objectives, we take off the table normal topics of debate topics we can't agree on. And we focus on the things that we can, this is gonna again, disarm the opponent and force them into the conversation we want to have with them. If they agree on us what an ideal outcome is, they can no longer argue with us. All right, because we've now we're now engaged in a mutual discussion about how best to accomplish what we both agreed Read we think should be accomplished, right there way to accomplish it is one way but so is ours there's a bunch of different ways we feel helpless it, there's might not be the only way, right? But we can't even get them to consider that until we can agree get them to agree on what it is we're trying to accomplish.

To do this, you have to accept their premises or rather than morality underlying their premises. And you can't do that if you assume you know what is motivating them. All right, when you assume you are going to argue a straw man and a straw man is a bad argument you think the other person is making, but isn't really the argument that anyone holds? Alright. It's not a real opinion that's held by anyone. It's the fake argument you think the person is thinking?

It's not what they're actually thinking? To find out what's really motivating the other person what's underlying their argument. You have to ask them questions and accept their answers at face value. You don't argue with them. You listen to them. So let me give you a couple of examples of framing in debate.

We might not agree on whether abortion is murder or not. Right? That's the premise. But what's underlying that is, and what we can agree on, in most cases is, you know, abortion is bad or not great. If we want to reduce and limit the number of abortions that are occurring, we might not agree on why we want to limit or reduce the number of abortions that occur. But most people can agree that if we could reduce the number of abortions that occurred, society we benefit to it.

The question is how, how best to accomplish that? Alright, so we've seeded the point. And we're going to argue about what really matters, the policy solution or we're going to discuss it the death penalty. People might argue that the death penalty is going to prevent murderers All right. So what's really underlying that? Well, we we have crime problem.

How are we going to fix the prying problem? That's the real problem. All right. Why do we care about murderers and death penalty? Well, because we're concerned about the crime, right? prayer in schools, this is about religious freedom.

Right? Can we all agree on that? I would hope so that everybody has freedom of religion, racial profiling by police, the underlying issue there, on both sides is keeping our community safe. How we're defining keeping community safe might differ. But if we can agree on the premise, the moral premise that Yeah, we want to keep our community safe, we can get a lot farther in the conversation, then we can, then we can if we're saying cops have the problems or minorities have the problems, all right. So that's what the framing is about.

The point of agreeing on a moral framework is so that you can best agree on what a good outcome is, and you can judge what those outcomes are and whether There, they accomplished your stated shared objectives, whatever they are. So let's, let's talk about some very real debates that we have in public policy in America. So you can see how we frame conversations and debates, and how we ideally frame them, so that we can resolve these debates. And again, I'm choosing some really contentious things. But these principles hold true, even if you're having a conversation in the workplace about, you know, what cloud computing system to use, right? I mean, it doesn't really matter.

I'm just using really contentious wants to give you an idea that even on these contentious things, you can find a frame that people will agree on. So let's talk about abortion. That's like, the most contentious thing I can think of one side argues that abortion is bad. It's killing a child. It's morally horrid. That's their moral framework.

The other side argues that abortion is a necessary valid choice that it benefits that there are societal benefits to allowing women to choose when and if to have a family and those benefits are so great. We need to give one That autonomy that choice and autonomy. Now, if you're on the choice side, there are several moral frames you can use to promote your ideas. One is individual autonomy. Another is access to healthcare as a human rights, economic benefits to society and more. The problem is, for us using all those, none of those moral frames surrounding choice are compelling.

They're just not in the face of abortion is killing a child and killing your child is bad. Autonomous choice is not a compelling moral framework to combat the killing of a child, which is how anti choice is framed is killing a child you're never going to no one's going to value individual autonomy over the killing of a child ever. All right. Um, and even if you did take individual autonomy and say that's my moral frame, the person who thinks killing a abortion is the killing of a child is going to use into the to autonomy to reinforce their point that the killing of an individual autonomous child is bad. So, like, what if the pro choice side accepted the frame the moral framework of the anti choice side? What if they said, okay, you're right.

Abortions are bad. I accept that premise. Everyone should be able to accept that premise that killing children is bad, like who would? No one. And yes, the killing of a child is a bit of a straw man. But let's let's go with this for a while.

Um, abortions are bad. Right? They're the killing of a child or a potential child. Let's not debate that anymore. Let's agree that we should limit abortions based on that. All right.

The big question is how, how do we do that in a way that actually reduces the number of abortions and does not cause harm to women at the same time, how Do we do that? That's a productive conversation you can have, as long as you're debating whether or not the abortion is the killing of a child or not, you're not. You're not getting anywhere. Right. And that's kind of the point. When we heal, we now can have a productive conversation.

As long as we don't yell. We're gonna butt heads. And this is the same even if the conversation topic is mundane. We had been debating our abortions bad, but if we accept the premise, and the conclusion that comes with it, that we should limit the number of abortions, we take it off the debate table, it's no longer up for discussion. We've agreed on that. We've changed the frame of the conversation from whether or not abortions are bad and how best we can prevent abortions.

And it turns out the pro choice side has some really good ideas on that. And that's something that pretty much everybody can agree on, or at least I hope so anyways, and it's through the discussion of how best to limit or reduce the number of abortions that occur. That we can now discuss the punitive approach make it illegal versus the preventative side, which is, you know, the the pro pro birth control side, reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies also reduces the number of abortions that occurred. But what happens is when we're having that discussion, the punitive approach falls apart, the punitive approach doesn't work to reduce or eliminate unwanted abortions. So it doesn't even produce the outcome that the anti choice people want, but they're never getting to that conversation or realization, because they're so invested in whether or not abortion is killing a child. So we never make any progress on either side.

But once we accept their premise, we can say well, what are our options, all our options, not just their option, but the all the options and which ones are going to be the most effective and the most humane and give us the best day outcomes that we can all agree on. All right, we have to yield in order to have the larger conversation that we should be having. Another example is the death penalty. One side argues it's necessary to prevent further crime. The other side argue is it's a human rights violation that does nothing to prevent further future violent crime. And we're stuck arguing with no way to resolve the dispute.

And statistics don't help. All right, because we actually have a moral conversation that we have to agree on first, before we can we can even learn about the statistics. So what instead of arguing whether or not the death penalty is effective, we start by agreeing with the moral frame of wanting to prevent future violent crime. All right. Now we're in a position to discuss the variety of ways we might be able to do that. And now we can consider the death penalty as one of many possible solutions to that problem.

It's not the only solution. It's a potential solution. But as long as We're having a conversation about whether or not the death penalty works. We're not having the real conversation we should be having, which is how best to reduce violent crime in our communities. All right. So the debates that we end up having and the conversations that we end up having, because we refuse to yield, the premises are actually what I would call a proxy problem.

They're not the real problem we're trying to solve. They're the proxy problem, the problem we think we need to solve in order to solve the real problem we want. It's actually much better to find out what the real problem is, in this case, with the death penalty. It's about preventing future violent crime in our communities that we can have a constructive conversation about. All right, we've changed the frame about what we're debating about. We're not debating the death penalty.

We have yielded to the underlying world premise. Murder is bad. So let's figure out how to reduce it from happening. All right. That's what yielding does. It allows you to reframe, so that you can now have the conversation about potential solutions in a way That will allow you to discuss those in a way that might actually allow the person to consider alternatives that they weren't considering as long as they were stuck arguing their premises.