Wrongness and Dislikability are Orthogonal

Emotional reactions are out of accordance with moral judgments

I’m currently watching the Netflix show You. In it, the main character is a charming and good-looking serial killer who becomes obsessed with women, stalks them, and kills lots of people in the process whom he thinks make the women’s lives worse. The show is remarkable in that despite the main character doing constant horrible things, you end up, at various points, rooting for him to succeed. Despite knowing that he’s evil when you consider his actions, you can’t help but like him.

Many other characters do various things that are, in the grand scheme of things, much less bad than being a serial killer. Almost everything is much less bad than being a serial killer. But despite this, you end up disliking them much more than you dislike the main character. Somehow, being rude to waiters fills us with more visceral disgust than being a charming serial killer.

The show highlights something quite crucial about human nature: there’s a radical divergence between how wrong we recognize various actions to be and our emotional reaction to them. Some actions are super wrong but when performed in the right context elicit only minimal emotional reactions. Most of us could never find ourselves charmed by someone who beats women, but we could very easily find ourselves charmed by a serial killer, even though serial killing is worse.

Now, of course, some of why we don’t hate the main character is that he’s good looking. Lots of people spent a great deal of time and fervor talking about how awesome Luigi Mangione was—many fewer people spent any time talking about how awesome the attempted Trump assassin was. This despite the fact that Mangione’s killing was way more obviously unjustified than the attempted Trump assassin’s attempted killing (to be clear, I think they were both morally wrong). It’s much more obvious that it’s immoral to kill random mostly unremarkable healthcare CEOs than that it’s wrong to kill world leaders whose policies will affect the lives of millions (note: I’d say the same thing about someone attempting to kill Biden—it’s a lot more obvious that killing random CEOs is wrong than that killing world leaders is, though I of course believe both to be wrong).

But part of why we don’t hate the main character in You is that the qualities that disgust and horrify us are orthogonal to wrongness. We can intuitively recognize that an act is extremely morally wrong yet not be appalled by it. I think eating meat is morally much worse than being rude to a waiter—if you’re choosing whether to be rude to a thousand waiters or to eat one chicken sandwich, you should choose to be rude to the waiters. But despite this, while I could eat meat without a second thought—and in fact sometimes feel tempted to do so—I’d find it almost psychologically impossible to be rude to a waiter.

I’ve elsewhere written that most people don’t care about morality. While I think there’s some truth to this, it’s a subtly off. Most people care a great deal about the emotionally salient features of morality. Most people would be very averse to beating their spouse, raping, killing, or carrying out most other immoral actions. This isn’t just because they’re worried about social pressure; even if most people would get away with murder, they still wouldn’t do it.

Put another way, morality and dislikability are orthogonal. Most people care a great deal about avoiding actions that make a person dislikable, that make us feel enraged and sickened when we think of them.

In contrast, people care very little about non-emotionally salient bits of morality. If you convince someone that eating meat is the worst thing they are doing, potentially even worse than if they routinely savagely beat random people, they’ll generally just continue doing it. Even when they recognize eating meat on a rational level to be extremely evil, this fact only weighs minimally on their conscience, and they continue to devour the corpses of abused and tortured animals. People don’t care about morality in the abstract: instead they care about social pressure and the kind of moral disgust that makes one dislikable and accompanies certain wrong acts.

But it just so happens that the only acts that instill in us this kind of emotional revulsion are those that are socially sanctioned. Because eating meat is socially acceptable, few people find it viscerally horrifying. Spending great sums of money on lavish expenses, when you could have saved a child’s life, is socially acceptable, so no one is appalled by it, even when people recognize it to be very morally wrong. For most of history, because slavery was seen by society as a legitimate institution, few people found it particularly enraging. Opposition to slavery is historically quite rare.

While we spend great effort getting outraged about all sorts of things, really our outrage is just toeing the party line. We get outraged about the things that other people get outraged by—that society looks down on. Few spend much time actually thinking about how they can improve the world. Most only care about whichever kinds of immorality happen to cause them to have a strong emotional reaction. It’s why you can’t get people to care about shrimp welfare, despite the total absence of remotely compelling objections; shrimp do not tug at our conscience. They are not cute or cuddly and caring about them is seen as weird. So we kill trillions of them in the most horrendous ways imaginable for trivial reasons and no one bats an eye.

As should be obvious, only caring about wrong things that offend you is no way to approach morality. If things are evil, you shouldn’t do them even if they don’t cause you to be particularly disgusted and outraged. If you only follow the moral norms that you happen to care about, morally you are no different from a serial killer who doesn’t care about the norms against murder; you and he just happen to have different preferences regarding which moral norms you’d like to violate. If you never find yourself thinking to yourself “though I would like to perform this action, I will not because it is immoral,” then you are just completely failing to treat morality with the seriousness that it deserves.