The Moral Gadfly's Double-Bind

Warranted moral criticism is rarely welcomed

Imagine living in a society where most people (at least in the privileged classes) regularly participate in perpetuating a moral atrocity—slavery, say, or factory farming; any practice you’re deeply appalled by will do. When asked to either abstain or offset their harms—and ideally, take positive steps to help reform the system—most people refuse, get defensive, and even attack the moral reformer for being “holier than thou”.

It’s a tricky situation. If you really put yourself in the mindset of recognizing an atrocity going on all around you, it’s not the kind of thing you can happily just ignore. People need to do better! On the other hand, few people are receptive to being asked to kindly be less atrocious. So you may need a gentler communication strategy. The problem is, if people are already sensitized to an issue as one that’s strongly moralized, even the gentlest of invitations to consider “doing more good” is apt to feel unwelcome or even aggressive and intrusive to the listener. (They’re satisfied with however much or little good they’re doing right now; if they wanted to do differently they’d have done it already, thankyouverymuch!)

Conspirators in Vice

Consider Eric Schwitzgebel’s account of collusion toward moral mediocrity:

If you’re aiming for mediocrity rather than goodness by absolute standards, you don’t want your peers to get morally better, if that moral improvement involves any sacrifice. For then you’ll have to engage in that same sacrifice to attain the same level of peer-relative mediocrity as before. You’ll have to pay the cost or fall behind. It’s like a mediocre student who doesn’t care about the learning objectives and only wants that peer-relative B-minus on the class curve. If her peers suddenly start working harder, that mediocre student will now also need to work harder just to keep that B-minus. Hence the derogation of the bookworms.

I hate this feature of human nature so much. Absolutely loathe it.

On Schwitzgebel’s account: moral reformers are raising the bar for ethical behavior, and those who stand to lose social or moral standing as a result don’t like it and so lash out (with “do-gooder derogation”) to preserve their selfish interests. I would have thought this was so transparently shameful that it shouldn’t survive public awareness of what’s going on. But perhaps the colluding mediocrities are sufficiently numerous and motivated to avoid acknowledgment that making it truly common knowledge isn’t socially possible?

To help fight against this threat, I wonder whether well-meaning people could make progress by emphasizing how incredibly vicious do-gooder derogation is.^[1] Genuinely OK people needn’t positively do good in the world, when it’s effortful or costly. But those who outright undermine efforts to make the world better (without adequate reason or excuse) are falling short of such basic neutrality. They’re outright vicious: D-, not B-, on the moral curve. So even those merely aiming for minimal decency shouldn’t be going out to bat for Team Evil in such an active fashion. If you’re not gonna fight for good, at least stay on the sidelines and do no harm!

Mixed Motivations

Perhaps we can best model people as containing a (variably weighted) mix of sub-agents: one part well-meaning akratic, committed to advancing the good and thus welcoming new efforts (like the 🔸10% Pledge) to better normalize this; another part largely selfish and only morally concerned to avoid being unusually bad, thus hostile to normalizing greater altruism.

People with such mixed motivations could be expected to feel torn (to varying degrees, depending on the comparative weights of the competing motivations). The invitations of the moral reformers may then play a dual role:

• A genuine invitation to our “better angels” to help set up a social order in which we’re (happily) nudged in better directions; and
• Adversarial social pressure against our baser selves to get them to (grudgingly) do better in future.

I strongly dislike adversarial relations, but I dislike death and suffering even more, so I’m willing to endorse the pressure here—whenever the encouraged position is genuinely supported by the best reasons, that is,^[2] and one remains genuinely open to considering any (unexpected) good-faith objections and challenges to one’s position.

The Case for Persuasion

Sarah McBride had a great interview on Ezra Klein’s podcast about the strategic importance of “maintaining proximity to public opinion, of walking people to a place”:

We should be ahead of public opinion, but we have to be within arm’s reach. If we get too far out ahead, we lose our grip on public opinion, and we can no longer bring it with us. And I think a lot of the conversations around sports and also some of the cultural changes that we saw in expected workplace behavior, etc. was the byproduct of maybe just getting too far out ahead and not actually engaging in the art of social change-making.

Here I think there’s an important division of labor between political and intellectual roles. Intellectuals should try to work out what’s true, no matter how far away from public opinion it may be. Of course, we should do our best to communicate important insights in ways that will be accessible to others, given their different starting points. And we should especially take care, in public communications, to improve the importance-weighted accuracy of our audience’s beliefs. But I don’t think we should indulge in lying or crass manipulation. (It’s not our comparative advantage, and isn’t worth the loss of trust and epistemic value.)

Political actors, by contrast, should probably communicate more strategically to achieve good ends. This plausibly involves the sort of “message discipline” Matthew Yglesias always recommends: draw as much attention as you can to the issues for which your party’s policies are more popular, and as little as you can to issues with the opposite feature. (Though—especially between election cycles—it’s also important for activists to try to change minds on important issues where bad views currently predominate!)

In short: good activists and politicians should probably engage in a lot more pandering and sugar-coating than intellectuals, at least some of whom we really need to just call a spade a spade (while still, of course, remaining open to contrary arguments). Different norms are appropriate to different roles.

Some other themes from McBride’s interview plausibly hold more universally: prioritizing pragmatism over purity, real individuals over symbolism, and welcoming incremental improvements rather than demanding maximal compliance instantly.

A broadly pragmatic, welcoming, “glass half full” sort of mindset for reformers seems likely to maximize audience receptivity (even if many people will never be receptive to the message until a critical mass of their peers drag them along), while also being a genuinely apt response to the value of incremental improvements. I take it that this is a large part of why many Effective Altruists prefer to frame the EA project as an “opportunity” rather than an “obligation”. As mentioned above, that doesn’t entirely prevent people from feeling prickly or threatened by it. But I’m not sure what else a reformer can do, short of joining the vicious conspiracy to never mention our collective complacency. Annoying those who benefit under the status quo seems an inevitable cost of trying to improve our moral culture—and a relatively small price to pay, all things considered.

1. ^{^}

   Or, more generally, by prioritizing intellectual integrity and good epistemic practices as core social virtues.

2. ^{^}

   Many activists strike me as deeply misguided, e.g. recommending cures worse than the disease. But I think it’s important to argue those points on their independent merits rather than merely dismissing them for their moral ambition. (Though it sure is especially annoying when a group or ideology claims moral superiority while actually being, in your view, decidedly inferior!)