system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: if an action is immoral, one should not try to also argue that such action is ineffective.

I often see examples of this phenomenon in the media and also in the real world.  Recently, I listened to a podcast discussing the MAGA hat wearing catholic high school teens, and the podcaster was saying that people shouldn’t dox and send death threats to the teenage boy.  But the first reason the podcaster gave was that such actions are ineffective and undermine the political aims of those who are sending such death threats.

I think what the podcaster said was factually correct, but it occurs to me that such arguments may actually undermine the moral argument.  The primary reason sending death threats is wrong is because sending death threats to someone like that is just immoral.  But if you tell someone that it’s also ineffective, I think it also implies that if it were effective, then such actions may be ok.

I’m torn on this issue because the effectiveness argument seems to be persuasive in the particular situations.  If my child bullied someone because he thought it would make him popular, I would be very tempted to show him that bullying makes him look worse in the eyes of his peers, in addition to it being immoral in itself.  But if I gave the first argument, wouldn’t that suggest to the child that if he found himself in a situation were bullying were indeed effective at achieving his ends, then he should?

EDIT:  thanks for all the great responses.  I can't reply to each one b/c there's a lot and there's also a lot of similar arguments, but I think ultimately my view has changed primarily based on the argument that there are many contexts in which it is worth stopping the immoral action from occurring rather than worry about potential downstream consequences.  Thanks all.
gpt
What about torture?  It's immoral, but it's easy to construct a "greater good" sort of moral argument that many people find convincing.  For those people, arguments that torture is ineffective undercut the "greater good" argument and thus help support the notion that it's immoral.