Most vegetarians are familiar with "do-gooder derogation". People often react to ethical vegetarianism with hostility. But why? Why don't people admire vegetarians instead of reacting negatively? Vegetarianism is good for the planet and reduces incentives for corporations to raise animals in inhumane conditions. It's at least morally good, if not morally required. But admiration is far from the typical reaction vegetarians receive in our culture.
"Effective altruists" also sometimes complain of similar negative reactions when people hear of their donating toward mosquito nets in malaria-prone countries or their pledging to give away a certain percentage of their income annually. (Admittedly, there might also be more specific reasons people react negatively to that phrase or to the movement.)
Negative reactions might partly arise from suspicions of an ulterior motive -- a sense that the person might be doing good simply to impress others and gain social credit. But I doubt this is the main explanation.
First, we do lots of things to impress others and gain credit. Dressing sharp, publishing excellent pieces of writing, winning sports competitions, hosting parties.... But these attempts don't provoke the same derogation. Why would doing good for the world be a particularly bad way to impress others and gain credit? Performing actions with good consequences seems a more praiseworthy path to earning social credit than dressing sharp.
Second, it's not very plausible that people choose vegetarianism and mosquito-net purchasing primarily to impress others. The amount of effort required to sustain a vegetarian diet is far out of proportion to the amount of moral admiration one is likely to accrue for doing so.
What's going on instead, I suggest, resembles students' reactions to those who "break the curve" in class. If the whole class does poorly, well, the teacher still has to give some As and might just think the test was difficult. But if one or two people excel while the rest flail, the flailers look bad. People dislike the smartypants who raises the teacher's expectations for everyone.
Now I don't think people consciously say to themselves, "Hey, don't be a vegetarian, don't donate 15% of your income to famine relief, don't donate a kidney, you're breaking the moral curve!" It's not as conscious as that. But still, when someone you regard as a peer sacrifices for an ethical cause, it creates an ethical threat. If you're not making the same sacrifice, you'd better justify yourself or you'll look bad -- partly to others but also partly in your own moral self-conception. You could react to the threat by changing your behavior. of course -- making the sacrifice yourself. But derogation is far easier: Criticize the other's moral action, or their motives. Convince yourself and others that it's not as good as it seems. Then your moral self-image can survive intact without requiring further sacrifice.
As I've argued elsewhere, most people appear to aim for moral mediocrity. They aim not to be good or bad by absolute standards, but rather to be approximately as morally good as their peers. They aim to be neither among the best nor among the worst. They don't want to make the sacrifices required to stand out morally above others, but they would also prefer not to be the worst jerk in the room.
Now 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.
When it comes to morality, we participate, so to speak, in a collusion of mediocrity. We feel fine cranking up our A/C, driving our SUVs, eating our steaks, and flying across the country, even though we know it's contributing to possibly catastrophic climate change, because our friends and co-workers are all doing the same. We feel fine eating the meat of animals suffering in factory farms, we feel fine neglecting the welfare of the impoverished both among us and far away, we feel fine cheating or slacking in various ways at work -- as long as we look around and see "everyone else" doing the same. If some of our peers start imposing higher moral standards on themselves, that threatens the collusion. We might now start to look and feel bad for flying across country, eating factory farmed meat, or slacking in that particular way.
If my collusion theory of do-gooder derogation is correct, two specific empirical predictions follow.
First, we should tend only to derogate peers -- not people in other cultures, not people socially very different from us, and not people we already regard as moral heroes. It's the change in peer behavior that is particularly threatening.
Second, people should tend only to derogate actions where there's an obvious parallel action involving self-sacrifice that they might also be expected to do. If you're terrified of airplanes anyway and it would cost you nothing to sacrifice flying, you won't tend to derogate a friend who decides to abandon her jet-set lifestyle for ethical reasons. Nor, since the situation is unusual, would most of us tend to derogate people who sacrifice their career to care for a family member dying of cancer. Only if we ourselves are in a parallel situation but acting otherwise would another person making that sacrifice constitute a threat to our moral self-conception.
22 comments:
Let me take a stab at this.
People just don't think about morality- it's not that they strive to be morally mediocre.
If I had to guess, people are into their own lives and the situations they're in and if some parent told them to eat their veggies, they'd see it as an imposition.
So instead of mediocre, maybe we can say they don't want to be evil, but don't want to feel they're on planet earth for some divine mission unlike Ned Flanders or some super Rabbi doing Tikkun Olam.
It's just nobody even their own family and friends are really into them so it's what's in it for me, because they're on earth to be themselves
You're being imprecise about ethically mediocre. First in that they might average out to the mean but in some ways being outliers on both ends of the spectrum and in that they don't really care about morality in the way that I do a little and you do a lot.
Other things come into play- maybe things like authority, and I'd say if people have a view of morality it is that of a child
You write: "What's going on instead, I suggest, resembles students' reactions to those who 'break the curve' in class. If the whole class does poorly, well, the teacher still has to give some As and might just think the test was difficult." I don't think that's right. If it were, then shouldn't we have the same hostile reaction toward MLK, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and war heroes? They certainly "break the curve." To stick with your analogy, war heroes don't give others the impression that they're just doing what's passing and that the rest of us are not even doing passing work. By contrast, many vegetarians and effective altruists give others the impression that they're just doing the bare minimum (passing work) and that the rest us are failing. And those of us who think that we are doing passing work resent (and are hostile to) the suggestion that we're failing. So, I don't think that we want all of us to do poorly, morally speaking. We're glad that some are doing extraordinary moral work. What we resent, though, is the idea that we're not even doing the moral minimum. So, we don't resent the typical person who gives one of their kidneys to a complete stranger. We admire them. But we do resent the utilitarian who does so because they claim that this is what we're all morally required to do. We're hostile and resentful of them, because they're suggesting we're failing to do even the moral minimum.
Which is where my wife and I got to before reading Eric and Howie posts...
...that is...philosophy of psychology vs philosophy of divine mission...
I mean...'the blues brothers were on a mission for god to save the orphanage where they were raised.'...
...We watched the movie and knew what was wanted and what was to be given...
Stirring stuff, for we the illusionary audience...
...but sometimes that's all the best I can do...
Morality seems to have a force and all-encompassing aspect that is lacking in other areas.
If I am content being a journeyman athlete, not putting in the practice and conditioning hours that the best in the sport do, I will not be as good as those who do, but there isn’t an overarching athletic code or set of commandments that says I should. Being ranked in the top in tennis is quite enjoyable.
On the other hand, it feels like intentional moral mediocrity is wrong, requiring justification as to how one’s mediocre moral acts are actually acceptable.
Thanks for the thoughtful comments, folks!
Howie: I think people tend not to consciously think "how moral am I being?" but I do think people care about being moral. They don't want to be, or to be perceived as, or to perceive themselves as, insufferable jerks, or unusually selfish, or on the side of evil. They do want to be, or to be perceived as, or to perceive themselves as, decent people, relatively generous, and on the side of good.
Doug: I did intend to address the Mother Teresa / Gandhi point in passing: I don't think we are threatened by heroes because we don't see heroes as peers that we would be expected to live up to. At the same time, I think there's a lot to what you say. Part of the feeling of threat comes from the sense that maybe the do-gooder thinks that anyone who isn't doing what they're doing is not coming up to some minimum standard. Maybe we can get at the difference between these -- not incompatible but rather complementary -- explanations with a couple of thought experiments.
First, what if the do-gooder doesn't see your behavior but other people do so it? For example, several do-gooders in front of you in line donate to the "children's hospital" charity when the cashier asks, or tip generously in a tipping-optional situation, and then they walk off. Now it's your turn. Have the do-gooders wrecked the curve in a threatening way? Second, what if the do-gooder explicitly and sincerely says, "I think being vegetarian is much morally better than not being vegetarian, but it's supererogatory. If you want to keep eating meat, I think you still get an ethical low pass." Is the threat gone? Maybe somewhat -- but not entirely. That's my thought here at least.
Arnold: Thanks for your attention and kind comment.
Dan: Yes, that's a common view, but I don't think it's a universal view. Note for example Howie's comment above!
By now, many people are tired of this multogue. So long as one's choice of diet is not illegal, it is his/her own business.Immorality is irrelevant. Fattening is personal choice. Say what you wish of personal responsibility: as a practical matter, it is none of our business.
Re vegetarianism: biologically we benefit from the dense proteins, minerals, omegas, vitamins that are in fish and meat. That is countered by any antibiotics, artificial hormones, and other toxins that they might contain. Also, we are wired, like other life forms, to nurture our offspring to be as healthy and happy as possible. This doesn't mean no structure or discipline.
Those denying offspring all flesh, such as my daughter-in-law did during the first 5 or so years of life, might have omitted some omegas and nutrients from their diets. (fraternal twins). She (a pediatrician and Internist) decided after reading various material I sent, to serve them fish. A younger son (3) developed a liking for 'fish sticks', and enjoys them 4 years later. The older two don't like it. (now nearing 10.
It is arbitrary and subjective in my view to pick certain behaviors as either good or bad. Yet, I'm a physicalist (energy-matter-information), and a hard determinist! So I don't blame Jennie for her actions as they were determined by her history. That includes heredity (genes, microbiome, prions, viruses...) and experiences since conception. (incl. epigenetics)
In social mammals, the clan/pack/herd is the responsible organism in the view of many. It can discipline, outcast, or kill deviants. Sorry to drag you afield of mediocrity, but psychological analyses can miss the underlying assumption of free will. Existential angst is real, but it is as physical as are memories, thoughts, feelings...Caloric, electro-chemical...Provide evidence for anything not physical (or inextricable from it), and A Nobel Prize is likely!
I wonder whether the first prediction is sufficiently specific to the hypothesis under consideration (i.e., aren't there good independent reasons to think it is correct?). Tomasello's theory on the evolution of morality, for example, seems to portrait it as a mechanism that allowed for the success of collaborative units (dyadic hunt and later cultural collaboration). If that is true, shouldn't we think that our moral emotions are somewhat tuned to assess the behavior of peers?
(P.S. I usually read this blog, but it is the first time I comment, so thanks for posting, Eric!)
Thanks for the continuing comments, folks!
Paul, the choice of vegetarianism as an example is inessential to the point. It's just a familiar case and one on which the psychological literature on "do-gooder derogation" has often focused.
Steven, I'm not claiming evidence for anything non-physical. But I don't think good vs bad is arbitrary. For example, as a starting point, pleasure is good and pain is bad, other things being equal.
Marcelo: I'm glad this post drew you in enough to want to comment! Right, I don't really disagree with Tomasello here. I think that general picture is consistent with at least two possibilities: one in which we value people for being morally excellent and don't mind being morally below-average free riders on their generosity to the group, or one in which we'd rather have shared, mediocre standards for ourselves and our peers (but higher standards for exceptional heroes).
Just a brief reply re: "pleasure is good and pain is bad, other things being equal." What is good in Sharia Law is considered bad in Judeo-Christian based western law. Wearing a hair shirt and self-flagellation were painful, and considered good in some Christian sects. Sadism, masochism, and domination are practices desired as good things despite giving pain. There are surely other examples. "Other things" are rarely equal!
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Hope"...
First published Wed Mar 8, 2017; substantive revision Mon Mar 21, 2022...
Isn't it morality and ethics are for Hope...
...not hope is for ethics and morality...
Timeliness aside...
A collusion towards moral mediocrity seems reasonable to me. Still I wonder if charitable people truly do get all that much negative feedback? It seems to me that they tend to get far more praise than derision. And when we do denigrate them, don’t we mostly do this privately? It could be that people who do charitable things tend not to have much tolerance for such criticism and so play up this angle to help substantiate their general kudos.
What I like most about the proposal here is that a testing method is provided. The theory is that we should tend to denigrate people most when they are charitable in ways that we could also be, but fail to be. And I must admit, I don’t think that I’d even privately denigrate a person who’s donating a kidney to a family member (that is unless they seemed to showboat their apparent selflessness too extravagantly). So it could be that I’m more concerned than I thought about how my own moral status suffers when others do charitable things that I could do but don’t.
In any case this all fits with my position that morality exists as an evolved social tool of persuasion. To break this down psychologically, our moral inclinations should be constituted by sympathy for others (or to somewhat feel what we perceive them to feel), as well as desire to feel respected. Otherwise we shouldn’t have become such a successful social creature.
Fun post! As a vegan for almost 18 years now, I've received my fair share of "do-gooder derogation" and have a bunch of thoughts.
First, an interesting observation: I would say over the years I have received an equal amount of derogation and what I would call "pedestalization". People tend to either begin arguing against my views in order to deride me (usually with no instigation on my part) or they begin this interesting attempt to portray me as some sort of moral guru with abilities and will power far beyond that of a "normal" person (including themselves). The former is an attempt to show that I am mistaken and thus nothing to be taken seriously, the later is an attempt to convince themselves that I am some sort of super-human and my standards do not appropriately apply to them. Both get them off the hook in their own minds. It is interesting.
Second, and I don't know if this goes along with your moral mediocrity theory or not, perhaps it does, but it has always seemed to me that people's problem with my veganism has always been less about morality and more that my mere existence is a threat to their identity. Food is such an integral part of who we are. Often when we speak or think of a culture we first bring up the types of food they enjoy. It is, I would say, deeply personal and very much intertwined with our identities, both in how we conceive of ourselves and how we project that conception to others. The mere existence of vegans and vegetarians is often enough to challenge a person's deeply help assumptions and behaviors surrounding their eating habits, and to challenge something so very central to your culture, upbringing, and oftentimes very identity, is tremendously uncomfortable.
Once I understood that my very existence as a vegan, even without overtly bringing it up or talking about, is itself an attack on a lot of people's identity, I stopped being as bothered by it. I get it. It is the exact same with my atheism. That also hits a lot of people right in the identify bulls-eye. People don't like wondering if something so central to who they are is wrong and their derision (or pedestalization) is usually just an attempt to ameliorate their own cognitive dissonance.
The premise seems to work from the idea that the example of the vegetarian is of a person who is definitely on the moral highground - and then goes from that to 'Why are people so offended?'
A different way of looking at it is they are not on the moral highground and pushing certain practices as 'how to live' is shaming others. Perhaps people find the practice of shaming to be offensive?
If you felt your favorite color is the morally correct one and other people are morally mediocre for having other favorite colours, is it disliking you being a person who likes that color or is it disliking the shaming you're practicing?
Perhaps the real reason is that saving the animals is just not that important. I don’t deny one should save the animals, but if you donate your money PETA or whatever, rather than say, Black Lives Matter, you seem to be failing morally.
Steve: The differences are salient, but that's partly because we take implicitly for granted how much there is in common. Theft is frowned on, nor should you let pets die in the heat of the car, nor should you drive your car at full speed through playground full of children....
Phil E: Right, the view is meant to make certain empirical predictions which separate it from other hypotheses. I find the predictions plausible, but they remain to be systematically tested. It's fun, in a way, to be so near the beginning of rigorously thinking through empirical moral psychology.
Chris: Interesting about the bifurcated reaction, which fits the moral mediocrity theory exactly! I like the idea of identity threat too. I think that can be orthogonal to, or complementary to, the threat I've identified. Atheism is an interesting comparison case, where there's no threat (at least not an obvious one) that the atheist is *morally* better; but it does challenge what many people feel more comfortable taking for granted. It could also be related to an alternative hypothesis about vegetarianism: That people feel negatively because they assume they are being judged negatively. This might be true of the atheism case too: Theists might dislike the thought that the atheist might be looking down on them. But I doubt this is the whole story.
Callan: This is the most common alternative hypothesis I hear (compare Doug's reply above). I do think there might be something to it, but I don't think it can be the whole story, since I think the derogation exists even when the person isn't around to judge you or if the person explicitly and sincerely says they don't think that vegetarianism is morally required and instead only supererogatory.
Anon 05:58: I worry about perfectionism here. An effective altruist might say that mosquito nets are better than BLM. Or someone might criticize you for, say, donating time to cleaning up the river bed rather than helping the homeless, because the former is not quite as effective by some calculus. It seems to me that we ought to have some flexibility in our choice of moral issues to focus on.
Hello Eric,
Well the subject was 'ethical vegetarianism' - I'd say what would be 'hanging around' is the term ('ethical') brought into discussion at that point. Might benefit from more stringent semantic hygiene or otherwise the values examined get entangled in the value examination process (kind of like treading mud from one site into another site).
I'll grant that I think just the word 'vegetarianism' can trigger some 'You think you're better than me?' responses in some populations (it'd be good to run a survey/test on this, though not with student populations as I think you wont find that effect there terribly much). I just think it's important that if you want to examine that you need to be careful not to bring something to the table (like 'ethical') that could contaminate the responce.
I can't remember if I've said this before, but I think there's an alternative and perhaps kinder way to view the urge for moral mediocrity: rational suspicion of an individual's ability to make good moral judgments, combined with historical knowledge of failures of strong moral programs.
That is, if you know that you're no smarter than anyone else, and so not very likely to have achieved moral insights greater than other people; and you know that great moral programs in the past have included religious wars, disempowerment of women, and communism, which we can now see were very harmful; then you might conclude that any radical moral decision which a person comes to may well be harmful. Here I'm understanding radical as "not what most people do."
So, not necessarily the urge to mediocrity, but an unwillingness to believe in radicalism.
Callan: Right, I intended vegetarianism as an example, not as the main topic really. It could definitely be the case that there's something unusual about vegetarianism in particular that makes it a misleading example.
Chinaphil: Yes, that's a fair point! It could be interesting here to distinguish between *morally risky* moral radicalism -- where what you think is morally excellent is condemned as morally bad by others (or where there's good reason to worry that it might be morally bad) -- versus *morally safe* moral radicalism -- where even if it isn't morally excellent at least there's not much risk that it's actually morally bad. Holy wars might plausibly be in the first category and vegetarianism in the second.
Eric: Plausible, but I don't think I'd grant it. I stopped being a veggie last year, and one of the reasons is that I think the argument which convinced me originally - Singer's utilitarian argument - is wrong. (He never includes wild animals in his accounting of utility.) I held out for a while after coming to this conclusion, as there may be other arguments for being a veggie, but I felt like my uncertainty left me with only two possibilities: (1) My judgment was correct, in which case the argument for vegetarianism has not been properly made (not for lack of trying!), and it would be odd to make a major life choice based on an argument that doesn't (yet) exist; or (2) my judgment is unreliable, in which case my best strategy would be to look to the current consensus/wisdom of crowds.
Because Singer made a powerful and compelling argument about pain and suffering. If he's wrong, then that argument may still apply, but in the opposite direction to what he suggested: not eating meat may create very significant disutility. In general, if an argument has the moral force to make someone do something radical; and you think that the argument may be wrong; then there is at least the possibility that a similar level of moral force should be pushing you away from doing the radical thing.
To return to the article, Eric writes....
"If technology continues on its current trajectory, we will soon be facing a moral catastrophe."
Another possibility is that if technology continues on it's current trajectory it will present us with more challenges and threats than we can overcome, and we'll find ourselves more interested in survival than morality. Morality is a luxury we may no longer be able to afford. A "moral catastrophe" concept assumes a continuation of the present status quo where we are safe in our offices and able to kick back in our chairs and reflect upon such conundrums.
We, the culture at large, seem to be assuming that we can introduce revolutionary new technologies such as human-like robots at an ever accelerating pace, but our thinking and relationship with knowledge can remain about as it's been since, say, the Enlightenment. We imagine a world where technology changes radically, and we don't have to respond by changing radically ourselves.
It seems to me that nature is offering us the same choice it always offers every species, adapt or die. And we're say, "Nah, don't feel like adapting." And nature replies, "Well, ok then, as you wish."
Apologies! My comment above posted in wrong article. Duh....
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