Be More Moral, Less Conformist

Humans are built to conform, but that often leads us to support horrible things

When there is a conflict between what is right and what is popular, you should do what is right. But most people don’t. When making moral decisions, you should try harder to do what’s right and not care as much about conforming.

I’ve convinced a number of people that eating meat is extremely horrible—the worst thing they’re doing by far (unless you count failing to give to effective charity). Often, they’re convinced that it’s about as bad as torturing and killing thousands of dogs over the course of their life. This isn’t a crazy comparison because eating meat involves torturing and killing thousands of animals.

Still, most people keep on eating meat. This is a bit surprising. If someone is a non-sociopath, you’d think learning that something they do is profoundly evil—much worse than the next worst thing they’re doing—would change their behavior. If you learned that every time you took some route to work, you drove over an old lady, only a monster would keep taking that route. So why do decent people keep knowingly doing horrendously evil things?

Similarly, people are often convinced by the drowning child argument that when they don’t give their money to effective charities, it’s equivalent to walking past a drowning child. Most of these people still don’t give their money to effective charities. In other words, you can convince a person that some act A is like a different act B which is so immoral that they’d never perform it. Even when convinced, they mostly keep doing A.

Why?

The answer is that most people are conformists. They don’t have that much motivation to do what’s morally right in the abstract. If they learn that the right thing to do diverges from what they want to do, they’ll mostly just keep doing what they want to do. However, people feel bad when they violate social norms or their conscience.

The Goodmaxxing sigma who does not care if their moral judgments are widely shared.

I am convinced that eating hamburgers is a lot worse than being rude to a child in public. Nonetheless, I would feel a lot worse being rude to a child in public than eating a hamburger. How ashamed we feel when we act doesn’t really track our assessment of the act’s wrongness.

Similarly, we sometimes feel sad when we do bad things. If you’re mean to your loved ones, even in private, you often feel guilty. Guilt doesn’t much correlate with assessments of objective wrongness. Learning that failing to give to effective charities is 10x as wrong doesn’t lead to one feeling 10x more guilty.

So the primary drivers of moral behavior are guilt and conformism. There’s no limit to how horribly wrong of a thing people will do, so long as they’re acting in a way that’s socially accepted and they don’t feel guilty about it. Remember, most people will torture someone because they’re instructed to by a man in a white lab coat. Throughout much of history, people have gone to neighboring cities, beheaded the men, then raped and murdered the women.

Conformism and guilt will not save you. Most people are guided by these things. That hasn’t stopped ordinary people historically from raping, enslaving, murdering, and torturing others. These are flawed and low-resolution snapshots of morality. You can’t rely on them to avoid being a bad person or to avoid doing horrendous things.

If you want to avoid doing horrible things, you will have to think hard about morality. This will require actually scrutinizing your society’s practices, rather than telling a just-so story about why whatever your society does is okay. Remember: it was ordinary Germans who led Jews into gas chambers. It was ordinary Rwandans who macheted their neighbors. Being ordinary is not enough. Being able to justify your actions is not enough. You have to be right every time or you risk doing something horrible.

Similarly, it is not enough to note some respects in which the atrocities of the past differ from what our society does. Every atrocity differs from every other atrocity. You can be engaged in grotesque evil without being exactly the same as genocidaires.

There’s another reason you should be moral instead of conformist: otherwise your decision-making hinges on completely ridiculous things. Suppose you’re considering performing some action. Surely what you do shouldn’t depend on what the people around you think about it? If the people around you are wrong, who cares what they think?

We routinely make big sacrifices for the sake of morality. Most people wouldn’t cheat on their spouse even if they could get away with it and would enjoy it. But it’s pretty ridiculous if whether you’ll make a sacrifice for the sake of doing what’s right depends on what other people think about it. I like how Michael Huemer put it in Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism:

It’s about social conformity. Jefferson “couldn’t give up” his slaves, not because he had some powerful urge to be a slave-master, and not even just because it would be so much against his interests (though it would have been), but because other people in his society had slaves and accepted the practice – that undermined his moral motivation. If he lived today, he wouldn’t dream of owning other people, because it’s so uniformly disapproved.

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If you think that you can’t do it because you have these overpowering carnivorous urges, or even that you’re just utterly selfish, then it’s unlikely that you’ll make the effort. But once you realize that you make comparable sacrifices to your interests all the time, and it’s not that difficult, then you’re more likely to do it. The reason you make other sacrifices but you’re not making this sacrifice is a really bad reason: not enough other people are pressuring you.

Now, what other people think about your action might affect the cost of the action. But that’s consistent with only taking into account costs and benefits when deciding what to do. Even if torturing dogs would benefit you by more than giving up meat would cost you, you wouldn’t do it. So your behavior really is like that of a puppet on a string—jerked around by whatever your neighbors happen to think. The conformist will often take one act over another, even if the second act is better both for them and the world.

Suppose you’re convinced that you really should think hard about doing what’s right. Where should you begin? I can’t exhaustively describe every potentially wrong societal practice and what I think about it. But I’ll note briefly that some of the things we do that might be wrong include paying for torture multiple times per day, allowing children to die, and entirely ignoring the interests of 99.999999% of sentient beings.