People Mostly Don't Care About Morality
"I'm Against Abortion/Meat Eating, But It's A Personal Choice," Is Deeply Absurd
(If you thought my second most recent article was polemical, wait till you see this one).
If you regularly have conversations with people about the wrongness of meat eating, you’ll pretty quickly encounter people saying something like “well, stop forcing your beliefs on others, it’s a personal choice.” Similarly, when it comes to abortion, many people who are pro-life will say things like “I’m personally against abortion, but it’s a personal choice.”
This is a very silly position.
Imagine that someone was going around poking people in the eye. You suggest that he should stop poking people in the eye because he’s doing something immoral. He’s causing others unnecessary suffering. It would not be reasonable for him to respond by suggesting that poking people in the eye is a personal choice and that if you don’t like eye-poking, don’t do it! But don’t force your anti-eye-poking agenda on other people.
Everyone recognizes that this would be absurd. No one thinks there’s anything wrong with having laws against murder or theft or assault on the grounds that these are each personal choices. No one thinks that these laws impermissibly infringe on personal choice and that it should be up to a person how much they kill people.
But what vegans and pro-life people claim is that their issue is similar. Eating meat, vegans claim, is seriously morally wrong (and we happen to be right about this). Doing immoral things is not just a personal choice—if you’re doing evil things, you should stop immediately, and there’s nothing impermissible about telling people to cease their grossly immoral acts.
Similarly, if abortion is equivalent to intentional homicide, well then it’s not a personal choice in any important sense. Just as we don’t say that one can go around killing people because it corresponds with their values, if the pro-lifers are right about abortion, we shouldn’t say that abortion is a personal choice.
So given that these claims are very silly, why do people make them? People say these things about abortion and meat eating, but almost nothing else. No one, for example, opposes prosecuting people for blackmail on the grounds that blackmail is a personal decision.
The answer: people don’t care very much about morality. They treat morality as little more than a social convention. As a result, when morality is in conflict with the norms of a society, people treat the social convention as winning out, as being more significant. Morality is seen as an irrelevant aside, something to shame others with, but not something to be taken seriously when it diverges from the norms of society.
It’s the same thing that causes people to think pro-lifers or vegans are preachy. If it really is the case that a grave injustice is being done to helpless creatures—an injustice whose wrongness dwarfs that of any other crime in history—then the least one can do is talk about it, rather than eat their kale or not abort their kids in silence. We don’t think, for instance, that the abolitionists were objectionably preachy. But if eating meat is a grave wrong, if it is like slavery in that it’s a hideous blot on the morality of our society, then talking about it is obviously justified. Similarly, if society is killing half a million babies a year, as pro-lifers claim, then talking about that holocaust of vulnerable humans is gravely important. I don’t think the pro-lifers are right about their claim, but clearly, if they were, discussing it would be important!
It’s hard to accept that people barely care at all about doing the right thing unless it appeals to them personally. But it’s near impossible to deny if one considers the fact that: A) almost no one does good in ways that are socially taboo; B) when there’s a conflict between morality and social norms, social norms always win out; and C) even when people are convinced that certain things they do are grotesquely, horrendously, comically evil, they mostly just do them anyways while occasionally feeling a bit contrite about it.
I remember when I was young and naive—about 3 years ago—I thought it wouldn’t be hard to convince people to be effective altruists. Just tell them about the Giving Pledge, about how many lives they can save, and surely they’d take it. Doesn’t everyone value a hundred or so lives more than a small percent of their annual income?
The answer, it turns out, is no. Many people continue giving to ineffective charities that do nothing important, while children die preventable deaths. They do this because they feel more of a connection to those ineffective charities. These people care less about the lives of dozens of kids than they do about the particular kind of warm glow they get from giving to a charity that appeals to them in some way. Kids are drowning, and most people walk past them on their way to buy a new car or give to shitty charities, and then they pat themselves on the back based on how moral they are. Billions of animals lie in feces and filth, in exquisite discomfort every moment of their lives. We can do something about that, but most people do nothing, and continue to stuff their faces with those animals tortured corpses.
When I think about this, I’m often reminded of a phrase from an article I read a while back. It’s not a very nice phrase, it has some language that you’re not supposed to say in polite society, and I’m not even sure if I endorse it, but it always goes through my mind.
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