Buy Local, Act Evil
slate.com
slate.com
This was most pronounced in pedestrians: they ignore traffic lights and j-walk at will. If you ever spoke to them about it, they would give you something along the lines of "I am an earth-saving pedestrian, you are an environment-killing driver of a gas guzzler- ergo I always have the right of way.
Not everyone was like that, but a good percentage of people were.
Suppose moral fiber works this way? At first, as you work on your behavior, you can only do so much and simple sacrifices seem like a huge burden. As you continue, you conscience becomes stronger and doing 'the right thing' becomes more the norm and former behavior seems more extreme.
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Also possible, that 'virtuous consumption' is pursued for social status and not virtue, and so people who engage in it for this reason are entitled jerks as a matter of course.
As an aside, I wouldn't assume that people are "entitled jerks" as such--even if it's all just social status signalling, they're almost certainly not consciously aware of it.
Note that I'm not implying that every who buys organic produce is an 'entitled jerk.' People and their motives have to be judged on an individual basis.
I'm not talking about doing wrong and believing it to be right, or even doing something without realizing it was wrong. I'm talking about just doing something without consciously knowing why you did it at all. The primary role of the conscious mind is not to make choices, but to rationalize after the fact the actions undertaken at the (largely amoral) subconscious's command. Expecting someone to always know why they made a decision is an impossibly high standard.
The general inability to correctly interpret one's own motivations is discussed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection_illusion Note that this is not a cognitive defect, but the standard state of affairs. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia for when it goes more wrong than normal. A few examples:
Implicit Association Tests may be more accurate than conscious introspection in identifying prejudice. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_Association_Test
Grandmothers are hard-wired to be biased against some grandchildren vs. others. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=941739
More directly relevant to this article, skim some of the posts on social signalling at http://www.overcomingbias.com/tag/signaling and realize that, while the author uses intentional language of decisions and preferences, most of what he's talking about are the sort of choices heavily subject to conscious delusion.
To summarize, accurate knowledge of one's own decision-making process is the exception, not the rule, and if questioned people are more likely to provide an ad-hoc rationalization based on inaccurate self-perception than anything resembling the actual reasons, and believe whole-heartedly that the rationalization is correct. To summarize the summary, nobody's generally aware of why they're doing whatever it is they're doing. To summarize the summary of the summary, being a person is a problem. [0]
[0] With apologies to D. Adams.
Perhaps you don't intend the term "jerk" to carry overtones of moral responsibility or social judgement, but that's a fairly common connotation.
Put another way, yelling at a cripple is not likely to give them their health back, but guilting an insensitive 'jerk' will (likely) cause them to change their behavior to something more socially acceptable.
No, I'm just saying that the default state is to have neither control nor awareness of decision-making. Actual conscious decision-making is possible with effort and, to the extent that morality is a well-defined concept, it applies only to conscious minds.
guilting an insensitive 'jerk' will (likely) cause them to change their behavior to something more socially acceptable.
Not necessarily, if their reasons for behaving that way are unknown to them. More likely their mind will confabulate something sensible-sounding that fits their pre-existing world-view and (unless they already hold a positive disposition toward you) they'll just write you off as being a jerk, after all, you're attacking them for something they had a perfectly valid reason to do... they think.
In which case they are culpable for not forming good habits (and we are back at Aristotle.) You're not going to get very far telling me that people are not responsible for acting like jerks because either you deny human moral choice altogether, or at some level they are.
But new research by Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong at the
University of Toronto levels an even graver charge: that
virtuous shopping can actually lead to immoral behavior.
In their study (described in a paper now in press at
Psychological Science), subjects who made simulated
eco-friendly purchases ended up less likely to exhibit
altruism in a laboratory game and more likely to cheat
and steal.
> In an experiment, participants were randomly assigned to select items they wanted to buy in one of two online stores. One store sold predominantly green products, the other mostly conventional items.
That said, interesting point by you. I'd guess the causation can run both ways - doing superficial good gives you the moral license they were talking about, but also maybe bad people want to compensate and wash their sins away with some public good behavior.