Jun 26, 2024 06:31 AM
https://aeon.co/essays/why-does-moral-pr...d-annoying
EXCERPT: What is happening here? Why, rather than taking the moral concerns behind social reforms seriously, do we so often respond with this kind of petulant, knee-jerk defensiveness? It’s not that we don’t care about right and wrong. But cases like these can feel like a far cry from the sort of moral issues that we’re inclined to take seriously – you know, like murder and human rights.
In fact, there seems to be an unspoken expectation that when we’re confronted with genuine, important arguments for moral change, they’ll be easy to recognise. Probably they’ll be accompanied by a flash of righteous anger, or a pang of compassion. And of course we will rise to the occasion.
Annoyance and irritation, though, are often taken as a sign that the concerns aren’t that big of a deal, that the arguments are mere quibbles that can be safely dismissed. Call this the eyeroll heuristic: if it’s preachy and annoying, it’s OK to ignore it. As philosophers who work on moral cognition, we think that the eyeroll heuristic is a serious obstacle to moral progress.
[...] You can curse around your friends but not your grandmother. In familiar environments, navigating norms like these is second nature.
Still, sometimes we do notice norms. The loud talker at the table next to you in the restaurant grates on your nerves not just because they’re distracting, but because they’re breaking one of these unspoken rules. Norm violations grab our attention and, even when perfectly harmless, can still trigger a flash of irritation. This is because our norm psychology tunes our emotions to our social expectations. When those expectations are met, it feels fluent and smooth. When we are surprised by a rule-breaker, we experience it as an emotional signal that something in our social environment has gone awry.
[...] Moving from one social world to another throws off the predictions of our norm psychology. This, in turn, colours our experiences. Instead of fluency, we have disfluency, which can be stressful, frustrating and exhausting – just ask any North American tourist who has been cursed at by a Berlin cyclist after wandering into a bike lane, or been panicked by their first encounter with a squat toilet. Call this affective friction.
Affective friction can also strike closer to home. Even within a culture, times change, currents shift, and old norms give way to new ones. As this happens, some individuals can find that their norm psychologies have fallen out of sync with their own culture...
[...] Then there are all the ways that the social enforcement of norms can aggravate affective friction. Norm psychologies incline people to react disapprovingly towards whomever breaks one of these unwritten social rules. ... This sort of experience can lead to resentment. It can sow the seeds of backlash, especially in situations where a new norm is not spreading uniformly within the community...
[...] This picture of norm psychology highlights several ways that norms can act as obstacles for those who seek to bring about positive moral changes in society. ... A modest first step will be to recognise that the eyeroll heuristic is deeply unreliable.
The fact that some new norm strikes us as annoying, or that those advancing it strike us as self-righteous, preachy or otherwise offputting, tells us nothing about whether the norm is an improvement or not, whether it represents moral progress or moral backslide... (MORE - details)
EXCERPT: What is happening here? Why, rather than taking the moral concerns behind social reforms seriously, do we so often respond with this kind of petulant, knee-jerk defensiveness? It’s not that we don’t care about right and wrong. But cases like these can feel like a far cry from the sort of moral issues that we’re inclined to take seriously – you know, like murder and human rights.
In fact, there seems to be an unspoken expectation that when we’re confronted with genuine, important arguments for moral change, they’ll be easy to recognise. Probably they’ll be accompanied by a flash of righteous anger, or a pang of compassion. And of course we will rise to the occasion.
Annoyance and irritation, though, are often taken as a sign that the concerns aren’t that big of a deal, that the arguments are mere quibbles that can be safely dismissed. Call this the eyeroll heuristic: if it’s preachy and annoying, it’s OK to ignore it. As philosophers who work on moral cognition, we think that the eyeroll heuristic is a serious obstacle to moral progress.
[...] You can curse around your friends but not your grandmother. In familiar environments, navigating norms like these is second nature.
Still, sometimes we do notice norms. The loud talker at the table next to you in the restaurant grates on your nerves not just because they’re distracting, but because they’re breaking one of these unspoken rules. Norm violations grab our attention and, even when perfectly harmless, can still trigger a flash of irritation. This is because our norm psychology tunes our emotions to our social expectations. When those expectations are met, it feels fluent and smooth. When we are surprised by a rule-breaker, we experience it as an emotional signal that something in our social environment has gone awry.
[...] Moving from one social world to another throws off the predictions of our norm psychology. This, in turn, colours our experiences. Instead of fluency, we have disfluency, which can be stressful, frustrating and exhausting – just ask any North American tourist who has been cursed at by a Berlin cyclist after wandering into a bike lane, or been panicked by their first encounter with a squat toilet. Call this affective friction.
Affective friction can also strike closer to home. Even within a culture, times change, currents shift, and old norms give way to new ones. As this happens, some individuals can find that their norm psychologies have fallen out of sync with their own culture...
[...] Then there are all the ways that the social enforcement of norms can aggravate affective friction. Norm psychologies incline people to react disapprovingly towards whomever breaks one of these unwritten social rules. ... This sort of experience can lead to resentment. It can sow the seeds of backlash, especially in situations where a new norm is not spreading uniformly within the community...
[...] This picture of norm psychology highlights several ways that norms can act as obstacles for those who seek to bring about positive moral changes in society. ... A modest first step will be to recognise that the eyeroll heuristic is deeply unreliable.
The fact that some new norm strikes us as annoying, or that those advancing it strike us as self-righteous, preachy or otherwise offputting, tells us nothing about whether the norm is an improvement or not, whether it represents moral progress or moral backslide... (MORE - details)
