The Ethicist's Vice

When I started teaching philosophy, many people, especially left-wing people, believed in being tolerant and non-judgmental. People said things like, “It’s always wrong to judge people.” Being “moralistic” was a sin.

Today, there are fewer complaints about moralism. Conservatives were never bothered by moralism, and progressives have now become some of the most judgmental people on the planet. So there are few people left to complain about moralism.

The question remains: Is there a vice of excessive moralism? I think there is, and it is a particular occupational hazard for moral philosophers.

1. How Could Moralism Be Vicious?

1.1. The Freshman Objection

By saying moralism is a vice, you’re being moralistic! Therefore, you’re a hypocrite. And therefore … well, that’s the worst thing in the world to be, so don’t be that.

Likewise, ‘It’s always wrong to judge people’ is itself a judgment, directed at the people who judge people. Therefore, again, you’re being hypocritical.

True enough. But these objections are superficial, directed as they are at only the dumbest thesis. Obviously, it is not always wrong to judge anyone. It’s not morally wrong to form the judgement that Stalin was a bad leader. No serious person thinks that it is. No serious person thinks that the vice of excessive moralism is the vice of making any moral judgments at all.

The question remains: Is there such a thing as being too judgmental, or too moralistic? We need not be committing this vice if we judge that it exists. Even if we are, we might nevertheless be correct, and perhaps recognizing that might enable us to avoid behaving badly on other occasions.

1.2. The Sophomore Objection

There can’t be a vice of excessive moralism because morality always necessarily endorses itself. To say there is a vice of excessive moralism would be to say that it’s immoral in some cases to be concerned with morality. That can’t be; it’s always morally right to be concerned with moral rightness.

That isn’t correct. First, a “vice” need not be strictly speaking immoral, i.e., it need not be morally impermissible. It may merely be morally sub-optimal. Consider the famous vices of sloth, envy, gluttony, etc. None of these need be impermissible on every occasion on which they are vices. E.g., I’m displaying the vice of sloth when I lie in bed all day, even if it isn’t strictly morally impermissible to do so.

Second, being moralistic is not merely being concerned with morality. It is not, e.g., a matter of merely trying to avoid wrongful actions. What is it to be moralistic or judgmental?

a. First, it normally has to do with being overly concerned about other people’s morality. Morality might well direct us to attend closely to our own morality, but to attend less closely to that of others.

b. Along with that goes the vice of taking pleasure in making negative judgments about others. This could well be a vice even if those judgments are accurate.

c. Moralism also has to do with making overly harsh judgments, e.g., judging something to be immoral when it is merely sub-optimal, or making a big deal about small transgressions. Obviously, the vice of excessive moralism does not consist in making a big deal about genuinely horrible deeds.

1.3. De Minimis Non Curat Lex

There is a legal principle that “the law does not concern itself with trifles”. Suppose someone negligently steps on your toe in the subway, causing you a moment of pain. You file a lawsuit against the stepper for $1.50. Your suit will be dismissed because the tort is too trivial to bother the courts with.

Morality should have a similar principle. If an alleged harm or other wrong is sufficiently small, then we should not bother to make or to express moral judgements about it. Not only should you not file a lawsuit for the aforementioned toe-stepping; you should not even bother to tell the stepper that he acted wrongly, nor should you waste time thinking about how it’s wrong to negligently step on toes.

2. Philosophy’s Incentive Structure

I call this the ethicist’s vice because people who study ethics are particularly prone to excess moralism. It’s not inevitable; ethicists could, after all, limit themselves to thinking about genuinely serious moral problems. But they have incentives to engage in excessive moralism.

How so? In academia, philosophers are expected to publish a certain quantity of writings, give a certain number of talks, etc. If you fall short, you may be fired (as in being denied tenure), you’ll have trouble advancing in the field, and you’ll generally be regarded as a substandard philosopher.

But it’s inherently difficult to get published, because authors are expected to come up with something “new” to say. Pretty much all of the genuinely important topics have already been discussed to death, making it nearly impossible to find something new to say about them. This results in philosophers (like all academics) engaging increasingly small, hyper-specialized questions. The literature that emerges usually doesn’t evince any particular moral vices, though, unless being boring is a vice.

But in the special case of moral (and to some extent political) philosophy, the incentive is to look for new things to make normative judgments about — and in particular, to make moral judgements about increasingly small things, since the great evils have already been examined. To say something new in this area, you kind of have to find a way that something everyone thought was innocuous is actually morally wrong, or perhaps find a way that something previously thought to be wrong is actually fine — but the latter is much harder.

So we have the incentive to develop increasingly sensitive wrongness-detectors in moral philosophy, or injustice-detectors in political philosophy.

3. Examples

3.1. Animal exploitation

I was once party to a conversation with other philosophers about an animal sanctuary that charged people money to enter and look at the animals. One person suggested that this was immoral because the people running the sanctuary were exploiting the animals for money. N.B., the claim was not that they harmed the animals; no one claimed that the animals were suffering, that they were inadequately cared for, or anything like that. The issue was whether merely letting humans in to look at the animals, in exchange for money, was wrongfully exploitative, given that the animals hadn’t agreed to this and the humans were profiting off the animals’ cuteness.

My feeling was that, if this is any kind of harm at all, it is surely de minimis. If it’s a harm, it’s the kind of harm that could be happening all over the place, all the time, without making any noticeable difference to anyone, including the animals.

3.2. Expressive transgressions

Some people think that we should not allow people to sell their kidneys, because this expresses the wrong attitude towards the human body, that it is a “commodity” or something like that. My feeling is that, if we can save thousands of lives every year (which we in fact could) by “wrongly” expressing the view that the body is a commodity, I’m happy to express that all day. If there’s something bad about expressing that, it just seems like an utterly trivial bad in comparison to the good of saving lives.

Apart from that example, there is a lot of discussion in ethics and social philosophy of similar sorts of expressive transgressions, actions that supposedly express disrespect or fail to “take seriously” (philosophers love that expression) people’s autonomy, inherent value, or whatever. I can see how such things might be slightly bad — just not as bad as, say, stepping on someone’s toe. I’d be happy to let a billion strangers fail to take my inherent value seriously all day long in exchange for $10, as long as those people didn’t do any actual, tangible harm to me.

3.3. Micro-aggressions

Worrying about “micro-aggressions” is the epitome of excess moralism. The very name suggests that these are microscopic aggressions, aggressions so small that you need the intellectual equivalent of a microscope to see them — the microscope being provided by the latest woke theories of oppression; ordinary, non-woke people can’t see these aggressions. That’s enough to understand why we shouldn’t spend time complaining about them or trying to train people to recognize them.

What are these tiny aggressions? After looking at some examples, the best rule I can come up with is that nearly any utterance that suggests awareness of a person’s race or ethnicity, other than woke utterances about how that group is oppressed, is a micro-aggression. For example, asking an Asian American person if they can read a Chinese word is a micro-aggression. Referring to an “oppressed group” using the wrong word (that is, a word other than one officially sanctioned by woke ideologues) is another micro-aggression. E.g., referring to Native Americans as “Indians”.

4. Who Cares?

Okay, there’s such a thing as being overly moralistic. Morality isn’t a busybody searching around all day for things to scold people about. But does this matter, or am I just being excessively moralistic in complaining about excess moralism?

One way it matters is theoretically: our understanding of morality is impoverished if we keep treating things that don’t matter as being of crucial import.

Another way that it matters is that it affects how people get along in society. We can’t have a harmonious society if we’re all going around wagging fingers at each other at every opportunity. This creates tension and division in society since people don’t like being moralized to and often cannot see the point of scolding about minor transgressions.

Finally, we have to save our moral disapproval for big things. You know, like factory farming (the thing that’s probably causing more pain and suffering every few years than all the suffering in all of human history). Spending our moral disapproval on minor things diminishes the effect of moral disapproval in general. When we want to condemn something that’s really bad, people won’t take it seriously, since we’re constantly disapproving of perfectly ordinary things.

Seemingly ordinary things (like buying animal products in the store) can in fact be horrible. (It’s better to commit a thousand microaggressions than to buy one McDonald’s hamburger!) But people won’t believe this if they constantly hear all sorts of ordinary things being condemned for minor or ideologically biased reasons.