Moral reasoning is hard. It’s so hard, in fact, that most people do little moral reasoning. Instead, as Daniel Kahneman would expect, they perform a mental substitution. Rather than wonder, “What’s morally right?,” they ask, “What’s socially acceptable?”
In decent societies, this seems fairly harmless. When your society is even selectively evil, however, the substitution is disastrous. Strictly following standard social norms in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, or Maoist China is murder.
Which brings us to a pressing question: How do you know whether your society is evil? Or to make matters even starker: How hard was it for the average adult in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, or Maoist China to know that their societies were evil? If people can’t readily figure that out on their own, what moral questions can they answer?
My claim: Figuring out that Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Maoist China are evil is an easy task for almost anyone – including lifelong members of those societies. How so? By applying two principles that a child can understand.
Principle #1: Turnaround. When a child mistreats each other, adults routinely ask the offender something like, “Would it be all right if someone did that to you?” When you’re faced with complex moral hypotheticals, this question won’t get you far. But when you’re wondering, “Is it all right to murder some peaceful but unpopular people?,” you really can fast forward to the right answer just by asking, “If you were a Jew/kulak/money-lender, would it be all right to murder you?”
Principle #2: Bad laws are made to be broken. Virtually everyone in every society regularly breaks the law – and they usually do so with a clean conscience. This is clearly true when the law inflicts great suffering for no good reason. Yet people also routinely break laws simply because the laws are obviously stupid. A few people may claim to “Always follow the law,” but even these stubborn folk spend little time actually studying the laws to ensure they don’t accidentally break one. Neither do they feel guilty about their lackadaisical effort to master the body of laws they’re nominally determined to strictly obey. And since people already break the law to cut a few minutes off their commute, the idea that they should disobey laws ordering the murder of Jews/kulaks/money-lenders is only an intellectual baby step.
None of this means that ordinary people in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, or Maoist China were morally obliged to die as martyrs. However, it does mean ordinary people in these societies could easily figure out that their societies were deeply evil – and they should at least have covertly strived to avoid complicity. If they failed to figure that out, it is because they culpably failed to apply moral principles they understood since childhood.
The moral standards for people who actually formed and carried out these policies were, of course, much higher. I’ve quoted Spiderman before and I’ll quote him again: With great power comes great responsibility. Ordinary people have no obligation to devote their lives to the study of moral philosophy and social science. But anyone who wields political power over thousands of human beings – much less millions – absolutely does.
READER COMMENTS
Thaomas
Oct 10 2019 at 11:33am
Ordinary people have no obligation to devote their lives to the study of moral philosophy and social science. But anyone who wields political power over thousands of human beings – much less millions – absolutely does.
Maybe, but I think I’d settle for Tyler’s growth quasi-maximization (I’m for a smidgen of redistribution even at the expense of a smidgen of growth) constrained by common sense morality.
nobody.really
Oct 10 2019 at 12:26pm
A lovely statement of abstract philosophy. By the same token, we can prove that the soul is immortal and we are reincarnated–because all learning is really just “recalling” stuff we learned in a prior life. Don’t take my word for it: Ask Socrates, who–through a series of leading questions–leads the uneducated boy Menos to draw accurate conclusions about geometry, and therefore concludes that the boy must have learned all this during a prior life.
People who actually study how people develop moral reasoning, however, might draw different conclusions than Caplan has. Caplan embraces a “post-conventional” level of moral reasoning that matches Lawrence Kohlberg’s Stage 6–and Kohlberg estimated that only 20-25% of adults even reach Stage 5.
(As an aside, the oldest lifelong members of Nazi Germany were twelve–a rather ambitious age to be exercising Stage 6 moral reasoning.)
Delighted to hear Caplan embracing this adage. I regard this adage as underlying John Rawls’s Theory of Justice.
Mark Z
Oct 10 2019 at 5:37pm
It seems you’re appealing to Socrates’s incorrect deduction from ‘prior knowledge’ to ‘prove’ that Bryan’s position is as illogical as Socrates’s. But what Socrates conclusion was wrong, inferring reincarnation is clearly not justified even from his own premise. What he *actually* ‘proved’ wasn’t reincarnation but rather rationalism (as opposed to empiricism), that Menos has some intrinsic, unlearned knowledge of geometry. One may disagree with that position as well, but it’s not the case that Bryan’s position shares the sufficient premises of reincarnation.
I’m also curious about power and responsibility in Rawls? I’ve only read excerpts of either, but can this really be said more of him than of Nozick? Or likely most prominent political philosophers? Not many seem to approve of the irresponsible exercise of power, other than Nietzsche of course.
nobody.really
Oct 11 2019 at 2:39pm
I’m offering a “critique of pure reason,” separated from evidence. Both Caplan and Socrates (actually Plato, putting his argument into the mouths of Socrates and Menos) make claims based on abstract logic, and then draw the conclusion that the conclusions must be self-evident and EVERYEONE should share them. And yes, mathematics generally does not rely on empiricism—yet to suggest that this means that EVERYONE should understand mathematics without explicit training seems to run counter to all evidence. Likewise with Caplan’s moral claims. Social scientists have studied moral development and learned that people do not naturally reach Caplan’s conclusions. I don’t mean to dispute the substance of his moral claims, any more than I would dispute the substance of Socrates’ geometric claims. But I do dispute the idea that we should expect EVERYONE to reach those same conclusions on their own initiative.
Briefly, libertarianism (especially as presented by Ayn Rand) reflects a premise that we are all independent, autonomous individuals, owing nothing to anyone. Yet a growing body of evidence suggests that humans do not create themselves. Rather, they arise within societies that are not of their own choosing, and live for years in a vulnerable state incapable of providing for themselves.
Thus, Rawls adopts a different model. He presupposes that humans—often through no fault or credit of their own—will naturally differ in their capacities and needs. He hypothesizes that the model of a just world would not ignore these differences, but would explicitly acknowledge them. He hypothesizes about a world in which everyone would gather to decide what kind of social rules there should be—and, especially, what level of sharing of society’s wealth. Of course, in such a gathering, the rich would have a self-interest to favor little sharing, while the poor would favor much. To guard against this self-interest, Rawls hypothesizes a meeting behind a “veil of ignorance,” wherein people would not know which role they would have in the world.
How should we divide a cake between two rivals? we let one rival cut the cake in two, and the other rival pick which piece to take. If you were facing that scenario—that is, a scenario in which you could control the contours of the cake pieces available, but were ignorant about which of the available pieces you would receive—how would you proceed? Rawls (and game theorists) hypothesize that people would cut the cake as evenly as possible, so that they would be indifferent as to which piece they ultimately received. This is the minimax (or maxamin) strategy.
How do we best conform our current world to a world reflecting Rawls’s concept of justice? Clearly there needs to be a large amount of redistribution. Or, to put it more succinctly, those who receive great power have a great responsibility to those who do not.
nobody.really
Oct 10 2019 at 12:29pm
And most importantly:
At the risk of embracing conventional morality, I note that as of 2008 the frequency of “have striven” outnumbers “have strived” by roughly 6-1.
Phil H
Oct 10 2019 at 8:29pm
There’s a philosopher called Schwitzgebel who’s written a very nice paper on this very topic: https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/MoralMediocrity-181005.pdf
“Aiming for Moral Mediocrity
Most people aim to be about as morally good as their peers, not especially better, not especially worse. We do not aim to be good, or non-bad, or to act permissibly rather than impermissibly, by fixed moral standards. Rather, we notice the typical behavior of our peers, then calibrate toward so-so. This is a somewhat bad way to be, but it’s not a terribly bad way to be.”
In the 20th century, we invented a really good solution to the problem Caplan notes: human rights. Human rights is a legal concept that exists precisely to solve the problem that Caplan notes. The way human rights work is (1) they tell you a bunch of things that governments, as representatives of society, cannot do; (2) they set constraints on laws, saying any law that would lead to a breach of human rights is not permissible. Those two things are very close to Caplan’s two principles. This is why I think human rights are one of the greatest developments of the 20th century: they’re a legal fiction that, if applied properly, can prevent the kind of orchestrated mass murder he’s talking about from happening.
Morgan Hunter
Oct 10 2019 at 11:51pm
(I apologize if I’ve already posted this.)
Not to re-open the previous debate about animal rights, but the question “would it be right for someone else to slaughter *me* for food?” naturally invites the answer “no”. Of course, the natural response to this would be to say that animals and humans are different in morally-significant ways—but that’s exactly what the Stalinist would say about kulaks in comparison to innocent proletarians.
In regard to the question of people raised in totalitarian societies, I’m inclined to be somewhat more forgiving. I remember reading an interview with a former North Korean concentration camp guard who defected, who said that he felt absolutely no sympathy for the prisoners because he had been indoctrinated to see them as evil. Among other things, he had been told that they were responsible for the famine currently ravaging the country. If you believe that the people you’re torturing morally deserve it, a simple appeal to “would it be fair if it happened to you?” won’t work.
Peter
Oct 12 2019 at 5:05am
So Bryan rediscovered the Golden Rule which fails (as he himself notes yet sticks to it) rather than the beter modified Golden Rule which if I remember right from primary school decades ago was Kant’s categorical imperative flavor of it. The problem here with ““If you were a Jew/kulak/money-lender, would it be all right to murder you?” as noted by Morgan Hunter above is it all depends on framing. An easy retort for example, since I assume you tried to tease out the nuisance via “murder” instead of “kill”, is would be “No it would not be OK to murder me but it would be OK to kill me” or even “The question is irrelevant as murder is always wrong and not predicated on an adverb whereas it is perfectly OK to kill Jews/kulak/money-lenders/whites/blacks/unicorns/kids/etc”.
Also you appear to be confusing morality (good/evil) with ethics (right/wrong). Abraham acted in a moral manner sacrificing Isaac but not so much ethically. Ditto Islamic suicide bombers. It could very well have been moral for Jews to leverage post-WW2 political correctness and anti-Soviet geopolitics to put Palentistans in ghettos after occupying their land given Jews are God’s chosen people and thousands of years ago he gave them carte blanche to ethnically cleanse the area hence Palestinians should be grateful it’s was only a ghetto and not a death camp; that doesn’t mean it was ethical.
Lastly don’t intentionally confuse legislation with law as you are purposefully doing as it undermines your argument. Morally sound people, even at a basic level, generally don’t break the law without some sort of feeling of guilt whereas as we all understand there is no moral duty to follow any legislation.
All that is saying no it’s not so easy to tell. Besides a nation is an amoral entity anyways hence the entire point it moot.
R R Schoettker
Oct 12 2019 at 9:54am
“Which brings us to a pressing question: How do you know whether your society is evil?”
Easy….. society is evil, all of them, always. All collectives are evil because all social power is evil; an unjust and illegitimate usurpation of the personal prerogative and the self-propriety of the individuals who are the physical and tangible entities who comprise that arbitrary linguistic construct: so- called ‘society’.
mark
Oct 13 2019 at 7:59pm
Sounds well, but is it more than a) hindsight – and rather unclear on b) “complicity” a) Would it be ok to stop YOU by force/shoot you/put you and your kids into mortal danger – just for trying to get into a safe/so-much-better country without a visa (after having it made impossible for you to get ANY visa? – Letting you and your kids drown instead in the Rio Grande or in the Mediterranean Sea? (google Alan Kurdi ) And call you a criminal/whore/rapist on top? Prof. Caplan might agree, so then we live today in an EVIL country (US/EU/CH/AUS), or? And what to do about it? – And would we still all agree that it is OK to abort you, just because Mom not feels like having you? Some would not – others would say it is not OK to punish the woman/doctor. And Extinction Rebellion&Co say it is NOT ok not to do all to put emissions to zero till 2025, ’cause else WE and our states ARE EVIL for putting the life of many and the future of our grandchildren into mortal danger, or so they say.
So, in the PRESENT not all that clear? Or if clear and evil, then
b) what to do about it? How not to be complicit? There were many (wrong) reasons to vote for Hitler, even if you did not buy the racism. Being a party-member was helpful too, even just to make ends meet (family of Heinrich Böll). (Stalin and Mao never gave a choice.)
Volunteering for Waffen-SS felt like a better alternative than Wehrmacht to many fine young Germans (Helmut Schmidt, Günter Grass). And if shooting lots of civilians in their heads made you feel kinda sick, no trouble, really; always a place at the front and the others would take over your job. So, as long as you did not march pressing H/S/Mao to “Kill xxx NOW and FASTER”, who shall dare to call you complicit!? – Disclaimer: I am German, born after 1945, pro-choice, no car, anti-XR, lukewarmer, soft-libertarian, I voted for Merkel mainly because I liked her opening of the border (though I knew they would close it again – so was I complicit?). This “evil” thing does not cut it for me, all governments are to some extent evil, even if only out of tradition/incompetence/vote-hunting(i.e. doing what most voters want). Terrorism is hardly ever bringing any improvement, and even “civil-disobedience” seldom does in neither democracies nor authoritarian regimes. Breaking rulz? If in our favour (crossing a red light, petty cheating with tax/insurance, file-sharing), yeah, we always do that if we can safely, even in Eden.
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