Yeah. When an outcome is bad, you should critically reconsider the principles that were involved in causing it. It’s an opportunity to improve your principles, not IMO a reason to value principles less. When a bad outcome is caused in any significant part by bad principles, that actually demonstrates the importance of principles and the harm errors regarding principles can do. It doesn’t demonstrate that principles are less important.
In general, principles and outcomes aren’t in conflict, and I don’t think one should pick one or the other to prioritize: it’s important to think about both and try to get both right and try to keep them in harmony.
For example, if you value free speech, but you see a social media platform censor free speech, you might say “well, private businesses have a right to do that on principle”. But I think ending the analysis there is a mistake. When there’s a bad outcome, you should consider if any of your other principles conflict with that outcome. If you can’t come up with any principle you have which is in conflict with the bad outcome, then you may have an issue with your principles. If you can come up with one, you should talk about that too, not exclusively talk about the principle of freedom for private businesses. Valuing free speech is a principle so you could say that you think the business is making a mistake and analyze how it’s a bad business decision and immoral. I’ve seen libertarians not even say that. And I think you ought to be able to come up with some other principles that are being violated too and talk about those too. Hopefully your principles are pretty overwhelmingly against censorship overall, so you ought to be making that case and pointing out many different principled reasons it’s bad instead of excusing it just because a private business did it and you like freedom.
A reason people downplay principles sometimes, in favor of outcomes, is they use principles wrong. So basically they have some wrong meta-principles (or thinking methods).
For example, people focus on local optima. They don’t want to go “in the wrong direction”. They resist any change they see as going in the wrong direction according to a principle they have, e.g. (for libertarian types) any raise of taxes, any restriction on free speech, any infringement on freedom, any regulation on businesses, any increase in government size or spending, etc. Sometimes people use this sort of reasoning sometimes but not other times (they object to many increases in government size on principle but then in some specific case they like it and don’t bring up that objection).
The concept of directions is wrong and is related to viewing things in terms of quantitative spectrums instead of decisive factors that make qualitative differences. This connects with CF. When something is not close to what you want, and a change makes it also not close to what you want, in general it doesn’t really matter and you shouldn’t care much. Resisting any changes away from local optima peaks is actually harmful to the goal of one day getting to a better society that fits your principles. Resisting any change that isn’t on a straight line path towards your final goals, or which goes in the wrong direction even briefly, is just as dumb as applying that reasoning to driving home. Sometimes the best route to drive home involves driving away from your home (judged by straight line distance or as the crow flies) for part of the route. Or if you’re on a winding hiking trail, walking to your destination may involve going the wrong direction (wrong in the naive, simplistic sense) sometimes.
