Studies in pessimism, part 2. (Part 1 was my post "How good is the universe?", describing why the universe may be infinitely bad.) I think people may be, on average, horrible.
Sometimes people debate about "human nature". I've heard that liberals, for example, tend to think people are "basically good". I guess conservatives think people are basically flawed. When it comes up, I usually say, in most moods, that people are basically average. I.e., most people are not especially good or especially bad, but in between.
Other times, though, I think people are basically horrifyingly immoral. Most people you interact with seem like nice, decent people -- they won't steal, they won't deliberately injure anyone, they don't condone violence except in politics. But that's only because you interact with them in very narrow, favorable circumstances, and you only look at how they treat you and people like you in those circumstances. Beneath the surface, they're potential murderers. If circumstances should change so that it becomes socially acceptable and profitable to murder you, they will murder you. No moral test is too easy for the average person to fail it. No moral reason is too weighty, no personal discomfort too trivial, for them to put the latter ahead of the former.
I start with the Holocaust, predictably. Adolf Hitler couldn't do that by himself. He had to have millions of people helping him. And it's not as if he went around the world recruiting the worst criminals from every country. No, he worked with the average people around him. Now, apart from that historical episode, Germans don't in general seem to be particularly worse than the people of other countries. The reasonable inference is that most human beings would participate in a genocide, given the right circumstances.
And we're not talking about circumstances in early childhood that would help form people's character. No, the Nazis were mainly already adults with their characters fully formed (as much as they ever are) when they became Nazis.
I use that example only because it's the most famous, and perhaps the only such incident in history that actually has the reputation it deserves. But there have been many, many instances throughout history of people behaving similarly, engaging in mass oppression and slaughter of outgroups.
In case you want to think that maybe Americans are better, or modern-day people are better, there is the Milgram experiment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) -- which proves that about two thirds of ordinary people can be persuaded to electrocute another, innocent person. In that case, it's not even against an outgroup; the victim is part of their own social group. Are there any limits to ordinary people's evil? I guess maybe they wouldn't actually murder their own families if ordered to do so by an authority figure?
And it's not like the people were subjected to some inhuman psychological pressure. It's not like Milgram had to torture people or threaten their families to get them to electrocute an innocent stranger. The pressure was a man in a white coat repeatedly telling you to do something. That is not a sort of pressure that should be irresistible to any minimally decent person, if someone else's life is at stake.
It's not only that most human beings would participate in a holocaust given the opportunity. Most already are participating in a holocaust-like evil every day, with little to no compunction. They know that other animals feel pain, yet they are completely untroubled by the idea of other sentient beings being tortured, killed, and cut into pieces so that humans can have the sensory pleasure of munching on their flesh.
If told about this, nearly everyone -- probably over 95% -- will either (a) refuse to listen, (b) make a series of absurd, obvious rationalizations, or (c) admit that it's wrong and then just keep doing it. It's like pulling teeth to get a person to accept the most basic, obvious points, if they're inconvenient to the person. Even if you do, they just resort to (c). Basically no matter what you say, most people will do one of those three things. I don't know which of those responses is worst. I imagine that this is similar to the experience you'd have trying to reason with Nazis, or psychopaths.
This is true even about groups of people you'd think would care about morality. It's true about smart intellectuals, it's true about professional ethicists who spend their careers talking about right and wrong, it's true of ideologues who go on all day about the importance of combating prejudice and challenging the dominant paradigm. In any of those groups, no more than 10% can actually be persuaded to accept the tiniest personal inconvenience for moral reasons, if the cause isn't trendy in their social group. For most, moral issues mean nothing but an opportunity for tribal signaling.
Why aren't your neighbors participating in any (human) genocides right now? Why aren't they enslaving other races, or calling for colonizing other countries?
Reason #1: Because it has gone out of fashion. If it comes back in fashion, they'll embrace it -- or more accurately, they'll go along with it, because they don't really care one way or another. Moral progress is driven by the tiny minority of society who have a conscience.
Reason #2: Today, the people we used to step on have political power (to some degree), which means now we care about their rights (to some degree). The average human doesn't give a crap about anyone who doesn't have power. If a human doesn't fear you, then they don't care about you.
That's also the lesson from the history of government. When government agents feel that they have all the power and don't fear the people, then they oppress and kill for the hell of it.
Would assassination markets make genocides less likely?
For the animals, I really only care that they're not tortured (I can't imagine why someone would care whether a chicken does or does not live out their natural lifespan), and accordingly, 25% of my Giving What We Can Pledge goes to animal welfare charities (or at least it will once I set that up again, I need to get my finances a bit in order before I start it up again). Going vegan seems like a largely symbolic gesture, and therefore not worth the hassle.
But yeah, people go along with whatever their context tells them is right, it's really quite difficult for a human to go against their context, probably because we evolved in tribes where being attuned with the context was critical to survival.
Since the context is so important, it's an extremely important task that the right people are in charge of defining it, which involves the right people knowing how to define the context in the first place.