The Collusion Toward Moral Mediocrity

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.

[Dall-E rendition of "a cartoon of a man eating tofu with angry people yelling at him"]

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.