This comment by Arthur Schopenhauer raises some interesting questions:
If a person is stupid, we excuse him by saying that he cannot help it; but if we attempted to excuse in precisely the same way the person who is bad, we should be laughed at. And yet the one quality, like the other, is inborn. This proves that the will is the man proper, the intellect the mere tool.
While one can question any of these three claims, there is a real issue here that cannot be easily dismissed. Thus I do not think being bad is entirely inborn, but then neither is being stupid. Academic education is possible, and moral education is also possible. With some effort, we can get smarter and we can get better. I doubt that any modest difference in the extent to which stupidity and badness are inborn can fully explain society’s vastly different attitude toward these two traits. And Schopenhauer’s conclusion about “the will” being the man proper leads one to ask: Why are people viewed this way?
One possibility is that the harm from stupidity is usually internalized to a much greater extent than the harm from being bad. We blame people for being bad because bad behavior has much greater external costs than stupid behavior. A person can stupidly throw away a fortune at a casino with very little in the way of legal or moral sanction. But if someone uses fraud to steal a fortune from another person, we call them evil and throw them in prison. Stupid behavior causes harm, but much of the harm (not all) falls on the person that engages in the foolish actions. If we consider both blame and prison to be forms of deterrence, then these sanctions are less necessary where a person is already being punished for their foolish behavior.
Think about two societies. One is a community of average American families in Ohio, and the other is a few hundred hunters and trappers who live alone and isolated from each other in Alaska. The community in Ohio might condemn drug use, fearing that it could cause people to become irresponsible, unable to support their families. In the wilds of Alaska, it’s unlikely that “society” would much care if an isolated hunter was using drugs. If it interfered with his ability to hunt and trap, he would pay the price without any government sanction.
From this perspective, society’s system of morality, our code for choosing when to blame people and when not to blame people, might be viewed as a sort of tool, like a shovel or a scalpel. Blame is a tool we use to discourage people from imposing external costs on society.
If I’m right, then stupidity that does not involve external costs would only be condemned when we actually care about the person hurting themselves. And I think this is mostly true. I might yell at a neighbor’s kid for scratching my car, but I won’t yell at that kid for not studying harder at school. The child’s parents love their child much more than I do, and might yell at them for not doing their homework, for being “stupid”. (That’s not to say parents cannot also punish children for selfish reasons, but surely the world contains at least some “tough love”.)
I am not saying that people consciously act as utilitarian moralizers, rather that we’ve evolved in such a way that we instinctively try to use our moral system in an effective way, a way that makes society work better. We instinctively overestimate the difference between being stupid and being bad.
I’m also not saying that our moral sanctions are always appropriate—that would be absurd. It’s highly unlikely that the prohibition of alcohol was optimal during 1920-33, but not optimal in either 1910 or 1940. More likely, we sometimes make mistakes when deciding whom to blame and what sanctions to apply.
It’s also possible that our moral indignation is more convincing if we do not understand where it comes from and what’s its purpose is. This sense of indignation is so innate that it might lead us to get angry at a zoo animal that kills a child that has wandered into its cage. That anger won’t deter other zoo animals, but the basic instinct that makes us angry is appropriate in the vast majority of cases where children are intentionally harmed.
Indeed there have been times when I’ve yelled at my computer.
PS. In politics, we are reassured if we find evidence that voters on the “other side” are merely being stupid, rather than malicious.
READER COMMENTS
AJ
Mar 25 2021 at 11:00pm
Perhaps, but I also think it is used vastly more as a tool for manipulation and for the person assigning blame to feel better about himself. Our culture seems to relish in assigning blame, especially on social media, where the people assigning blame have very little context into the circumstances surrounding the action or person being blamed but act as judges in their condemnation. It’s odd but also very disappointing.
KevinDC
Mar 26 2021 at 9:50am
Another possible theory (competing or complementary, take your pick) which occurred to me after a few minutes of pondering this comes to mind.
While it’s possible to both improve ones intellectual and moral faculties, I think people also factor in how “easy” it is to make these changes when assigning blame. Most people would agree that while we can make ourselves a little smarter, I think most would also agree that it takes a lot of significant effort, and the improvements are only minor. So we can’t blame Forrest Gump for not becoming Johann von Neumann, and we can’t even blame Gump for not being average – that’s expecting too much.
By contrast, people who are quick to blame others for moral failings also tend to think that improvements in moral behavior are relatively easy. We can’t blame Forrest Gump for being simple minded because a lifetime of strenuous effort would have barely changed the outcome, but we can blame Ted Bundy for being a serial killer because not being a serial killer is (presumably) “easy”, and much easier than raising your intellect. This could also explain why even people who are prone to blame others for harmful moral failings make exceptions in cases where there seems to be an underlying biological cause. Consider the case of a person who commits a violent crime and is found to have a brain tumor in exactly the place you’d expect a tumor to turn violent impulses up to 10 and self control down to 1, and who upon removal of that tumor loses their violent urges and is horrified by what they had previously done. I suspect even most of the “blame” crowd would lessen their blame of him.
Scott Sumner
Mar 26 2021 at 6:37pm
You said:
“By contrast, people who are quick to blame others for moral failings also tend to think that improvements in moral behavior are relatively easy.”
Perhaps they believe that, but it’s almost certainly not true. Not even close.
Michael Rulle
Mar 26 2021 at 11:01am
Not sure what you mean by “stupid”. Stupid, I believe, refers to innate inability —-for example, one might say people with low IQs or even EQs are “stupid”. But you seem to use the word as if it means “ignorant”. Ignorant people can be stupid too, but it’s meaning refers to being uneducated. One can have an high IQ and be ignorant, but not stupid.
I also think you use the term “bad” incorrectly. The word “Bad” generally does not have a moral connotation ——it refers to characteristics or qualities—-although it may show up in the 5th meaning in a dictionary referring to morality. I think the terms “moral” or immoral are better words to describe what you are discussing.
Why we are what we are re:ignorance or immorality is a tough one. All of us can recall times we permitted ourselves to be ignorant (not studying hard enough) or immoral (stealing food from a grocery) in some way. But purposely behaving in a certain way is an act of will. But generally, most people can feel guilty, and change behavior.
The Ted Buddy example is a good one. What was he? We use the term psychopath to describe such people, but that is kicking the can down the road by changing the word to describe him. I do think at some point —-maybe at birth—-he became who he was. Does that mean he had no free will? No. It means he permitted his desires to be unfettered. But if he just felt like killing because it was fun——what do we we say about him?
Could he have stopped? He could have but he had no inner reason to do so. Should we then excuse him in some way? Was he the equivalent of a rattlesnake? Maybe. But if that’s the case, just kill him. Which we did. Do we “blame” him? Maybe, maybe not. He did have will however—-he just had no reason to stop exercising his desire to kill.
Brian
Mar 27 2021 at 2:05pm
If we don’t assign blame for stupidity then we’ll have too much of it. The problem we face is that if we point out stupidity then others may do the same of our own words and actions and we will feel shame. So in shame avoidance we politely avoid drawing attention to stupidity. Fear of retaliation. People care more about avoiding shame than they do about improvement. Saying something is wrong is not met with a word of gratitude even when it should be.
I used to accept the notion that Asian cultures were more concerned about the “face” sociological concept than our own culture. I no longer accept that there is much cross cultural difference in the valence of status. Our own culture is also highly political and the more I listen to and read about politics and government and business strategy and workplace and personal advancement, the more I see status considerations.
Where I see a mistake is when people fail to recognize that another person has done much more work in an area. Our culture wants to place less value than it should on expertise because we want a healthy level of mistrust or we want to be prudently cautious. It’s humiliating to be an expert because an expert has to make what might be tedious offers to skeptics. The way for experts to overcome this problem is to generate enthusiasm by offering to wager. It is fitting that wagers are said to make a matter “interesting”.
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