Thoughts on Moral Licensing

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ethics, ozy blog post

So I spend time thinking about the moral licensing effect. For people who are unfamiliar, the moral licensing effect is a subconscious effect where if we do one good thing, we are less likely to do other good things. As someone who wants to do all the good things, this is naturally terrifying. However, as far as I know, the research on moral licensing doesn’t suggest how it works, which is annoying, because how we should respond to it depends on how it works.

For instance, it might be that moral licensing is because we have a certain amount of resources we want to direct to each value. For instance, I might be willing to spend up to one hour (or equivalent in money or foregone utility) on my physical health each day and up to ten percent of my income (or equivalent in money or foregone utility) on altruism. So if I exercise for an hour, I’m probably going to eat chocolate afterward, because I already used up all the resources I want to use on improving my physical health exercising. In that case, I’m not sure there’s much to do beyond making sure my resources are allocated in the best way possible: if I’m using up all my altruism resources volunteering for my local homeless shelter, I’m not going to donate to GiveWell. In that case, the best way to respond to moral licensing is making sure that all of your discourse about ethics clearly states how important the ethical thing is and steering clear of ethical rules (such as language policing or modesty culture) which consume lots of resources for little altruistic benefit. (But you should also be careful to make sure that you don’t use up your whole altruism budget on telling people that they’re wasting their altruism budgets.)

Or it might be that we want to maintain a self-image as a virtuous person who cares about their health and people in the developing world and so on. So when I take a multivitamin, I think “ah yes! I am taking a multivitamin! The way a healthy person would!” and then I feel free to drive without my seatbelt fastened. In that case, in addition to paying attention to the costs and benefits, it might be a good idea to try to raise the amount of concern about your health that you have to do to maintain your self-image as a virtuous person who cares about their health, such that you both take the multivitamin and drive without a seatbelt.

Or it might be that morality is like a muscle. Immediately after you pick up heavy things and put them down, you’ll be really tired and probably not able to pick up any more heavy things. But if you keep picking up heavy things and putting them down, eventually you’ll be able to pick up much heavier things, and for longer periods of time. In that case, it makes sense to do as many compassionate things as you can: you’re developing your ability to be a compassionate person. Even if caring about a cat or an acquaintance might not be the best way to accomplish good in the world, it’s practice for your compassion muscle, which will hopefully extend to people and animals you don’t know.

Or maybe it’s going to turn out to fail to replicate and there’s no point worrying about it at all.

Everyone Is The Hero Of Their Own Story

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ethics, ozy blog post

Yes, everyone.

Which is to say: everyone tells a story to themselves about their lives, and in everyone’s story their actions are justifiable and make sense. It’s quite natural to think of some people as utterly incomprehensible, completely detached from reality, incapable of noticing obvious flaws in their beliefs, or valuing evil for its own sake. But mostly people aren’t.

Not everyone’s story is in the same genre. Some people are in a sitcom; some people are in a save-the-world science fiction novel; some people are in a mainstream, realistic novel about a father going to work every day and nobly sacrificing so that his children will have a better life. Me, I’m in a tremendously tedious biopic and we’ve been stuck in The Artist’s Early Life for an extraordinarily long time.

Of course, some people do tell stories in which they are the villains. But nobody tells a story in which they’re a lame, stupid villain; they tell stories in which they’re the villains that you wind up rooting for. They might be Punisher, wreaking vengeance on those who truly deserve it, willing to make the hard decisions for the greater good of all. They might be Frank Abagnale, living by their wits, cleverly outsmarting the forces of law and order. They might be Darth Vader, evil but oh-so-glamorous.

(In my experience, the last group tends to be pretty wimpy on the actual evil front.)

People are sympathetic to themselves mostly. When they aren’t, it’s called depression and it’s a pretty serious mental health condition– but even depressives, in my experience, often still have a story about how everyone has mistreated them and they’re holding up under adversity. That means that, for everyone you loathe and despise, there is a story in which they’re doing the right thing. If you try hard enough, you might be able to understand it yourself.

This applies even to the great villains of history. Nazis, Maoists, segregationists… they aren’t that different from us psychologically. I’m probably more different from the average neurotypical than I am from a Nazi with borderline personality disorder; in the right conditions, I too would be a Nazi. This is important. It means that you can’t say “I have a story I’m telling myself about why I’m sympathetic and good, so that means I must be sympathetic and good.” Everyone has those stories.

That doesn’t mean you have to stop thinking they’re doing harm, of course. People who think they’re doing right often hurt people in tremendously awful ways; the most dangerous people in the world are those who are well-intentioned but misinformed. But I think understanding people who are doing wrong is the first step to convincing them that they shouldn’t, and it’s an important tool to keep from demonizing people who hurt you.

Because… some of those self-justifying stories people tell should throw up a red flag. They’re stories told far more often by those doing evil than by those doing good. And “those people are Always Chaotic Evil orcs” is one.

Loving Thy Actual Enemies

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ethics, ozy blog post

Your enemies aren’t always the people you think they are.

See, most people have this odd sort of assumption that one’s enemies are people one disagrees with a lot. For instance, if they’re a libertarian, they might assume their enemies are Marxists. But I’m a left-libertarian and I actually like Marx quite a lot (although I disagree with him); I have found several Communist thinkers deeply insightful and count several Marxists among my friends. I disagree with them a lot but they aren’t my enemies. Similarly, while I’m an atheist, I harbor no particular ill-will towards religious people.

My actual enemies make me ruminate for hours and hours about all the things that are wrong with their positions. I feel scared and sad and my stomach is tight when I read things they write. I want to curl in a ball and cry, or lash out and show them everything that’s wrong with everything they think. As it happens, most of my actual enemies agree with me more than the people I don’t really care about. I don’t care about redpillers; I find some of them interesting to argue with and some of them funny, but none of them threatening. But there are some anti-feminists where I have had to ban myself from interacting with them because every time I do I behave in a way I regret.

For me, when someone’s positions are far enough different from mine, I don’t think of them as being able to hurt me. Their friends aren’t my friends; no one will be cruel to me because of their arguments; they might try to get some ridiculous law passed, but while the Overton window isn’t exactly in a great place no laws that could realistically get passed are going to make my life anything less than cushy. And while I do try to care about other people, I am self-centered enough that I can only hate people who are going to hurt me, not people who are going to hurt others. So the people I viscerally hate are mostly people who agree with me about 99% of everything. And while a lot of people are different from me– obviously! Look at the amount of hate that Trump supporters get!– I think some people are the same.

And that’s scary. Naturally, people– not having access to other people’s internal state of feeling scared and sad and angry and ruminating about how terrible the other person is– use the heuristic “people who disagree with someone about a lot of things are that person’s enemies.” So people like me can get a reputation for being kind and charitable and forgiving to their enemies without actually ever being kind or charitable or forgiving to any actual enemies. When they are vicious and cruel to their actual enemies, misrepresenting their positions and insulting them personally, everyone is like “well, that guy had to deserve it. After all, so-and-so is nice to all their enemies! Therefore they definitely responded to this person in a reasonable and kind way!”

There’s no get-out-of-jail-free card here. If you’re a preacher at a church in Tennessee, you have to pray for the soul of Osama Bin Laden. If you’re a liberal in California, you have to have empathy for the Trump voter. If you’re me, you have to be kind to the person who slightly disagrees with you on an issue. When you love your enemies, you have to love the person it is hardest for you to love. Anything else is cheating.

Sergeant Bothari and Severus Snape

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ethics, god bothering, harry potter, lois mcmaster bujold, ozy blog post

[content warning: rape]
[spoiler warning: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Barrayar]

I have recently read or, rather, inhaled the Vorkosigan Saga. The character of Sergeant Bothari is similar to Severus Snape

Bothari is, in many ways, a terrible person. He has raped multiple people, tortured many more, and murdered still more. He delusionally believes that he is married to a female prisoner of war and repeatedly rapes her.

Snape, similarly, is not a good man. One need only consider his nigh-abusive treatment of Neville Longbottom– a child whose parents were literally tortured into insanity, but whose biggest fear is Snape. He seeks petty revenge on Remus Lupin for a prank decades earlier that wasn’t actually his fault, getting Lupin fired from his job; his actions lead to increased stigma against werewolves which causes discriminatory legislation to be passed that, among other things, prevents them from finding jobs.

Both Bothari and Snape are sympathetic as well. Snape has an abusive childhood and is bullied horribly in school. His passion for Lily, a woman who never returned his affections, is put in a different light when you realize it’s very possible Lily was the first person who was ever nice to him.

Bothari is schizophrenic and undermedicated. Although stable and functional when in the service of the Vorkosigans, his mental health falls apart when he works for the sadistic torturers and rapists Ges Vorrutyer and Prince Serg (the latter of whom is so awful his father the emperor engineers a war to get him killed). Bothari is as much a victim of sexual violence as a perpetrator: he did not exactly get a whole lot of choice in whether he would commit the rapes he was ordered to commit.

The thing that interests me about both Bothari and Snape is their moment of redemption. They are horrible people, violent and pointlessly cruel.

But both of them have a little bit of light. Not a whole lot of light, mind you. One tiny, gleaming virtue that has managed to survive the muck of their lives. For Bothari, it is his perverse loyalty to Aral Vorkosigan; when ordered to rape Cordelia by Vorrutyer, he recognizes that she belongs to Aral Vorkosigan, refuses, and kills Vorrutyer instead. For Snape, it is his love for Lily; he spies on the Dark Lord himself, one of the world’s greatest telepaths, risking torture or worse, in honor of her memory.

I don’t mean to say that either of those are particularly good motivations. I don’t think that women belong to men who have asked to marry them, and I think it is probably wise to get over people when they reject you instead of devoting the rest of your life to honoring them. But I think it’s a lot to ask someone who’s generally sort of evil to have a completely decent moral system. And the core of their morality is good: honor, love.

Neither Bothari nor Snape becomes a good person afterward, which is remarkably realistic. People who make a habit of being kind of evil will no doubt continue to be kind of evil. Both Bothari’s rapes that he wasn’t coerced into and Snape’s bullying of children and attacking of Remus Lupin happen after their moment of redemption. Bothari, once medicated and in a more stable environment, becomes something approaching a good person; Snape, perhaps because Albus Dumbledore is a lot less awesome than Cordelia Vorkosigan, never does.

It is something I can only call grace. A person can wind up trapped in the muck, hurting others and hurt themselves; it seems as though everything good inside them has been crushed, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a redeeming feature. And then something happens to tug on that one little bit of good left in their soul, a bit they maybe don’t even remember they have themselves, and… they are heroes. And it doesn’t fix anything, they’re still the same people they were before, they still hurt people, but they do this one astonishing piece of good that perhaps even they didn’t realize they were capable of. I like stories about that. It gives me hope. No matter how trapped you are in hell, you can still have the moment of heaven.

The Enemy Control Ray

Tags

ethics, ozy blog post, utilitarianism it works bitches

Imagine your worst ideological enemy– the people whose blog posts you read and go “why are you WRONG about EVERYTHING.” For many transhumanists, it might be bioethicists; for a disability rights advocate, Peter Singer; for an effective altruist, a philanthrolocalist; for a feminist, a social conservative.

Now, imagine that a mad scientist has invented a device called the Enemy Control Ray. The Enemy Control Ray is a mind-control device: whatever rule you say into it, your enemy must follow.

(Let’s pretend for a moment that the moral problems of mind control don’t exist. This is a thought experiment.)

However, because of limitations of the technology, any rule you put in is translated into your enemy’s belief system.

So, let’s say you’re a trans rights activist, and you’re targeting transphobes. If you think trans women are women, you can’t say “call trans women by their correct pronouns”, because you believe that trans women are women and transphobes don’t, so it will be translated into “misgender trans women.” If you are a disability rights advocate targeting Peter Singer, you can’t say “don’t advocate for the infanticide of disabled babies”, because it will translate as “don’t advocate for the death of beings that have a right to life”, because you think babies have a right to life and Singer doesn’t. And, for that matter, you can’t say “no eugenics” to Mr. Singer, because it will translate as “bring into existence people whom I think deserve to exist.”

You might be tempted to say “what a useless device!” But the thing is that you have to be clever.

For instance, here are a bunch of things you can say to your friendly neighborhood transphobe:

• Do not do violence to anyone unless they did violence to someone else first or they’re consenting.
• Do not fire people from jobs for reasons unrelated to their ability to perform the job.
• If your children are minors, you must support them, even if they make choices you disapprove of.
• Do not bother people who are really weird but not hurting anyone, and I mean direct hurt not indirect harm to the social fabric; you can argue with them politely or ignore them but don’t insult them or harass them.
• Try to listen to people about their own experiences and don’t assume that everyone works the same way you do.

That’s, like, half of transphobia right there.

—

One of my favorite sketches is the Are We The Baddies? sketch from the Mitchell and Webb show.

Second Nazi: Have you noticed that our caps actually have little pictures of skulls on them?
Hans: I don’t… er-
Second Nazi: Hans… are we the baddies?

I think one of the most important rules of ethics is that you might be the baddies.

Everyone thinks they’re on the side of good. Outside of comic books, no one wakes up in the morning and says “ah, yes, I am evil, today I am going to evilly take over the world while evilly stroking an evil cat.” Some people have managed to shock children for not obeying [cw: psychiatric abuse] and not realize that they’re the bad guys here.

So one of the things I want out of my ethical system is that it fails gracefully. If it turns out I’m wrong about everything– if future generations will look at my morality in horror, if people like me are going to be used as the caricatured villains in TV shows– I want to cause as little harm as I can.

For this reason, I think to myself: what rules would I want the people whom I think are evil to follow? What rules would I say into the Enemyphone? And I use these rules to bind myself as best I can. I don’t support firing people for what they believe in. I don’t deceive people or lie with statistics or misrepresent my opponent’s views to try to get people on my side. I read things by people who disagree with me (I have an entire comment section of people who disagree with me) and try to be open-minded. I support leaving people to make their own decisions as much as possible, even when those decisions are ones I disagree with.