Moral Progress Is Annoying
aeon.co
aeon.co
I am interested in moral progress as a person or community’s growing ability to behave responsibly. But what most people seem to focus on is the colonization of a social order by a different social order. That’s not true moral progress— that’s domination.
I roll my eyes not just because I am reacting to a challenge to a norm, but because my norms are as reasonable as anyone else’s. My norms are not second class norms.
Every kind of norm is a compromise among competing values. When you challenge any norm you are attempting to cut a Gordian knot— which is cheating. And Alexander got away with it because he held the sword and the Gordians did not.
> When we’re told that something we see as ordinary – like eating meat – is actually wrong, our first reaction is to get irritated and dismissive.
I am experiencing this firsthand in debates about urban transportation policy. One part of the challenging is getting people to recognize the negative impacts of cars (pollution, injuries, parking space) and car-dependent designs (unwalkable neighborhoods, little consideration for mass transit service, no autonomy with a car).
Another part of the challenge is to dispel myths about cycling: that bikes are just for kids, bikes are for exercise and not transportation, bike lanes are a waste of space, cyclists don't pay road tax, you can't bike in bad weather, etc.
> efforts to use the term ‘survivor’ instead of ‘victim’ when referring to people who have been sexually assaulted – were also seen as preachy and annoying
Continuing with my experiences in transportation debates, there are a few proposed changes to mainstream language that I agree with.
One is to never describe a traffic collision as an "accident", and instead call it a "crash" or "collision". This is because these "accidents" happen at a predictable rate and have mundane, preventable causes (e.g. drunk driving, dangerous road geometry, poor visibility, lack of police enforcement, heavy vehicles proliferating, protests against speed cameras, deliberately engineered prioritization of speed over safety in road design).
Another is to stop using the passive voice (almost universally used in news reports), which draws attention away from the culpable driver and makes it sound like a random act of God: "6-year-old killed in accident with SUV" versus "SUV driver kills 6-year-old in a crash".
> When new norms are enforced by the community, it can add fuel to the fire, leading to embarrassment and alienation, which can deepen social divisions and quickly tip into fear, anger and outright hostility.
Exhibit A: An unhinged person who cut down a speed camera and threw it in a pond. https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/toronto-speed-camera-vandal... . People are indignant about any decrease in the freedom to drive without restrictions or accountability.
I recognize the negative impacts, and yet will happily keep my vehicles because the benefits outweigh the risks and negative impacts. It's a trade-off many of us will continue making because there is no better alternative that checks all the boxes.
What I have a problem with is that instead of saying that a car works for them personally, they start attacking the people who challenge the car-dominated status quo. They propose ridiculous edge cases as gotchas, blithely ignore any evidence presented, and make it clear that you're an idiot for proposing any idea that differs from the norm. Furthermore, they fiercely attack any incremental change - whether it be congestion pricing or upzoning or adding bus-only lanes - even when every time it has been tried the populace is satisfied with the outcome after it gets implemented.
This is deflecting a critique of a systemic problem with a defense in terms of individual (and personal) effects. Taken broadly, this statement is utterly wrong, and the benefits come nowhere close to the dramatically negative impacts on human health and life, accessibility, neighborhood cohesion, child development, commute time/difficulty, the local and global economy, the local and global environment, etc.
If the whole system around you were changed, even marginally, toward more efficient and effective uses of land, infrastructure, and resources than a car culture, you would almost certainly significantly benefit (along with everyone else). For problems of this magnitude your personal choice is not really the issue (though there are certainly personal choices you can make which have a slight positive impact in your local neighborhood).
We have our share of problems with bikers and drivers (I am both) but none of them are even remotely close to the list.
I would say that the one that is annoying is that drivers do lt like bikers, and vice versa (and both have good and bad reasons for that)
Cultural differences is a thing.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/19485506114156...
(Sorry, don't have a nonpaywall link handy, but it's out there)
ps - I'm the web developer of this website: https://github.com/whyboris/utilitarianism.net
In the end, and perhaps in service of my original utilitarian impulses, I feel that entirely abandoning utilitarianism is the right path. This is sometimes referred to as `esoteric utilitarianism`, something that Sidgwick wrote about — suggesting that even teaching people about utilitarianism (himself being a utilitarian) might be immoral. Virtue ethics has been particularly appealing!
For example, some say it's more important to keep people's stock-invested retirement accounts solvent by increasing stock prices rather than take corporate profits and pay people who can't even afford groceries or rent, let alone invest in a retirement account.
Why is that obvious, why is that inevitable, and how is this inevitable communism utility-destroying?
Unless you are being facetious in your characterization.
That's not meant to discourage anybody from utilitarianism. There is no obviously better system. And we do need some basis on which to make decisions. I am just wary of utilitarianism for myself because I distrust its potentially confident-but-wrong conclusions.
I do think it's a very useful framework for elucidating the problems. Why is it we are willing to pull a lever to let the train kill one person, but unwilling to push a fat guy in front of it? I think that utilitarianism highlights the differences for exploring the moral intuition.
I have a poorly-elaborated notion that the moral intuition has some kind of universal, biological basis -- perhaps similar in origin to Chomsky's Universal Grammar. If that's true, we might be able to learn something from the neurobiology of moral decision-making. And that might in turn put utilitarianism on a firmer footing, or prove that no such footing is possible.
Just my $.02.