On Norm-Engineering a Moral Future.
In an entertaining essay [HT: Dailynous] in a recent issue of Aeon (21 June 2024), “Moral progress is annoying,” Daniel Kelly and Evan Westra (both philosophers at Purdue University in Indiana) diagnose and invite us to ignore the so-called ‘eyeroll heuristic’ as an impediment to moral progress. This heuristic they summarize as “if it’s preachy and annoying, ignore it it.” Let me quote them:
They suggest that the eyeroll heuristic does not typically track arguments, but it is generated by “psychological mechanisms that enable people to adapt to local norms.”
They don’t propose to genetically engineer humans to rid us of the eyeroll heuristic, because they recognize it “is a critical part of our facility for navigating our social world on a day-to-day basis.” In fact, some of the interest in their essay, is their account of why irritation is often an epistemically useful response.
In addition, they recognize that often irritation is an apt response to rule violations. They even introduce a useful term ‘affective friction,’ which I wish I had available when I wrote on Adam Smith’s account of the mismatch between our expectations and such rule violations. As they note, “even seemingly trivial changes in norms can be a source of minor bursts of affective friction.”
But as they note irritation comes with a cost (to repeat) “it can also make us resistant to social change – even when that change is for the better.” That is, affective friction is a kind of status quo bias. Let me take this as common ground with Kelly and Westra, and also let’s stipulate that sometimes the ‘eyeroll heuristic’ may well slow down the rate of moral progress, if any.
Now, it is worth noting that the idea of moral progress that they embrace presupposes that our moral progress is held back by an attachment to what we may call ‘localism’ or situated prejudices that are rooted in emotions. After all, “often, real moral progress means replacing harmful norms with positive ones.” In fact, on one side of the ledger we heave reason, arguments, and general rules (or imperatives) on the other side we have emotions, prejudices, and local attachments. One doesn’t need to be a historian of philosophy to see in this opposition a caricature of Enlightenment optimism vs reactionary conservatism.
And, in fact, they also claim as a kind of empirical fact that “our norm psychology helps us track and adapt to whatever norms happen to structure the social interactions in our communities and cultures. And, crucially, it does this regardless of whether those norms and conventions are just or unjust, harmful or beneficial, serious or silly.” (Emphasis in original.) Now, there is a perfectly innocent way of reading this that we may simply call the functional understanding of norm psychology: its function is to make us alert to mismatches between our expectations and dispositions and the social environment.
But there is also an inflationary way of reading this that suggests affective friction is a wholly unreliable guide to moral life because there is nothing to be said in favor of existing norms and conventions in virtue of the fact that they are existing norms and conventions. And, so affective friction, is useless as a “bullshit” moral innovation “detector.” It’s pretty clear that Kelly & Westra incline toward the inflationary stance: “irritation, anger and other negatively valenced feelings stemming from misalignment are not reliable trackers of morality.”
So, instead they propose:
A better response would be to treat your feelings of irritation as a cue for further reflection. Instead of simply going along with your immediate gut reaction, step back and take those feelings under advisement, along with any other relevant factors, and then consider whether your response is reasonable: ‘Is this new thing actually bad, or does it just feel that way because it’s unfamiliar?’
Now, since I still have a philosophy PhD union card (and regrettably am over 50—I really wish I had encountered this essay in my 20s and could speak with the enthusiasm and indignation of youth), I hesitate to write the following sentence: but not all affective friction or feelings of irritation should be a cue for further reflection. This really depends on context. Reflection is time-consuming and costly, and involves lots of opportunity costs.
As it happens, Kelly & Westra recognize something in the vicinity of this concern by drawing on important work by Céline Leboeuf in defense of righteous anger. But they seem to think the aptness of reactive attitudes depends wholly on social position. As they claim, for minorities “anger is often a fitting response to oppressive social circumstances, one that can play an important role in changing them.” So, somewhat peculiarly, for the upper classes they suggest Stoic Waspy self-command and open-mindedness, while an ethic grounded in reactive attitudes is permitted to vulnerable populations because of its emancipatory potential.
I think this reflects (recall this post) the increasing ‘frustration intolerance’ among social elites. (This is not wholly new, of course, because it was diagnosed by Ernest Callenbach, in his novel Ecotopia). But a side-effect of such frustration intolerance reflects a kind of farming out of moral compass-hood to more vulnerable populations; the new Enlightenment motto lurking here is, ‘let others feel for you!’
Of course, the previous two paragraphs are unfair to their position. They recognize that “in practice, affective friction will sometimes prevent us from adopting harmful norms.” However, it’s not wholly unfair; notice their use of ‘sometimes.’ (This is why I attribute the inflationary view to them.) Why not frequently?
Lurking here is a silly, even dangerous doctrine that welcomes all violations of local norms and conventions by an approved moral vanguard or elect as a means toward moral progress. This doctrine is reinforced by a narrative that cherry-picks episodes of affective friction (shaped by sexism, racism and homophobia) that we are likely to treat as moral progress now. (We see something similar in claims that student protests are always on the side of progress.) As my psychologists friends note, selective attention is another familiar heuristic.
Let me wrap up. Today my interest is not to defend moral sentimentalism or the judicious use of heuristics in our moral agency. I also don’t want to diss experiments in living as a means toward moral progress. As regular readers know, I am myself committed to the idea that such experiments are part of welcome social process with unknown destination. But I tend to use ‘experiments in living’ because that language reminds us that lots of experiments lead nowhere.
The problem here is not that Kelly & Westra are wrong about the fact that actual moral progress may well induce unfairly the eyeroll heuristic. But rather that they don’t seem to allow that a lot of insipid and dangerous stuff will also quite frequently and quite rightly induce the eyeroll heuristic. This prevents us from giving a hearing to lots of proposals that, on balance, we should be grateful to ignore. Life is short, after all, and nobody is immune from stupidity. That is, heuristics are by no means perfectly reliable, but they are rarely wholly wrong.
But that’s not why I wrote this post (I am not Gerd Gigerenzer, after all). Rather what set me off on this rant is this sentence: “changing the social world for the better will very often mean changing some old, harmful norms and replacing them with better ones.” (emphasis in original) It’s the very same commitment that, back in the day, annoyed me about MacAskill’s narrative (who also cherry-picks his history). Let’s stipulate there is a germ of truth here. But we don’t consciously norm-engineer our way to a morally improved social world primarily or even very often; the drivers of moral progress are not the moral elect; rather collective action, prophecy (religious and philosophic), institutional change, and the unintended side-effects of long-range patterns of behavior. God help me. Amen.