On annoying tendencies

Megan McArdle and Ezra are fighting about health care. This is obviously a war Ezra needs no help waging, so I'll sit it out. But I found this bit from Megan really peculiar:

[I]n health care, as with so many arguments, there is an annoying tendency on all sides to shift back and forth between arguments. One starts by arguing about morality (when is society entitled to take money from one group of people to give to another, and how much), and your earnest young policy reformers says "But what really matters is that it's more efficient!" Then you start to argue about efficiency, and suddenly your opponent says "But what about the suffering old people?"

This is not a good way to pick a health care system, or much of anything else.

See, I don't find this tendency annoying at all. In fact, one of the things I like best about being in an argument is when I can win that argument on a handful of different grounds. For instance, I can make both efficiency and morality claims about torture, the death penalty, profiling, health care, and the Brian-deserves-more-free-money initiative now making its way through Congress, and my arguments are all the firmer for it. And I should add that keeping in mind both efficiency and morality is an obviously excellent way of picking a health care system, or for that matter any other system that depends on both efficiency and morality to be effective.

What actually is annoying is the tendency of one's opponents in a multi-flanked argument to complain that the war is being fought on too many fronts instead of either hitting back strongly, or, more preferably, ceding the point altogether.