You're Not As Virtuous As You Think

The line between good and evil runs through every human heart

I’m a pretty even-tempered guy. I rarely get annoyed (except at dumb internet commenters). I maintain a generally cheery disposition. Recently, someone was praising me for this—while commenting negatively on someone else’s greater irritability. In response, I remarked that while I think it’s good for people not to be irritable, I don’t get even a single virtue point for it.

Why is this? Well, I hit the irritability lottery! Things that annoy most people just happen not to annoy me. I’m just built different! It’s not a choice on my part. And it takes no great virtue to not act irritated when you are not irritated.

It’s easy to see other people’s vices and pat yourself on the back that you don’t possess them. For instance, you might see a compulsive gambler and think to yourself, “what a fool he is, gambling away his fortune. I would never do something as foolish as that.” But presumably you’ve never really felt the pull of gambling addiction. You’ve never felt a giddy obsession with gambling—a deep desire to spend all your money on it.

If you want to compare yourself to an irritable person, don’t compare how you respond to things that irritate them but don’t irritate you. That’s like boasting of your resilience by noting that you respond better to peanuts than a man who is allergic. Instead note how you behave when you feel quite annoyed—when you feel the same way the person who is behaving badly does.

When you do this, your sense of superiority weakens substantially. While I am annoyed less frequently than the irritable person mentioned at the start of the essay, that’s because I feel annoyed less frequently. When I do feel annoyed, I behave quite a bit like he does.

There’s a priggish tendency to presume that one is in possession of unique virtues. We see our own vices from the inside. Our failure to give to charity, our rude comments, our spiteful thoughts towards very decent people—we don’t feel too bad about these things because we understand why we have them. We feel above those evildoers around us. The evildoers get angry for no reason—we, in contrast, have a very good reason for getting angry. We cannot witness the thought processes of others; these thought processes preceding their bad behavior tend to be quite similar to our thought processes preceding bad behavior. Our sense of superiority is quite unearned.

One inevitably has more empathy for a person the more they understand them. The person we most intimately understand is, of course, ourself. Thus, we have the most—indeed, far too much—empathy for our wrongdoing and too little for the wrongdoing of others.

If you want to understand what life is like for an irritable person, don’t imagine what it’s like when you experience the things he does and don’t feel annoyed. For instance, if the irritable person gets annoyed over a game of cards, do not compare his behavior to how you feel when you lose a game of cards. Likely—though not certainly—he feels much more irritation than you do. Instead, compare it to how you feel when you are annoyed. Compare him, perhaps to when you are stalled in traffic or interrupted constantly or when Ape in the Coat leaves long and error-filled comments about anthropics. Perhaps you behave better than the irritable person does, but certainly not as much as you’d naively expect.

This is not, of course, to say that everyone is equally virtuous. I don’t think that. In fact, it’s quite valuable to cultivate dispositions so that you don’t need to behave virtuously in any particular case. I don’t need to exercise virtue in refraining from random homicide as a result of having no disposition to engage in homicide. That’s a good thing! I’m quite glad I don’t want to kill people—and wouldn’t want to change that just so that I can exercise virtue more regularly.

But one only exercises genuine virtue when doing the right thing requires going against some other desire one has. There are cases where you do get virtue points for being even tempered. If you feel annoyed—perhaps you’re being badgered about something—but behave well, you display genuine virtue. You get real virtue points. Scott Alexander summarizes:

After some thought I agree with Chesterton’s point. There are a lot of people who say “I forgive you” when they mean “No harm done”, and a lot of people who say “That was unforgiveable” when they mean “That was genuinely really bad”. Whether or not forgiveness is right is a complicated topic I do not want to get in here. But since forgiveness is generally considered a virtue, and one that many want credit for having, I think it’s fair to say you only earn the right to call yourself ‘forgiving’ if you forgive things that genuinely hurt you.

To borrow Chesterton’s example, if you think divorce is a-ok, then you don’t get to “forgive” people their divorces, you merely ignore them. Someone who thinks divorce is abhorrent can “forgive” divorce. You can forgive theft, or murder, or tax evasion, or something you find abhorrent.

I mean, from a utilitarian point of view, you are still doing the correct action of not giving people grief because they’re a divorcee. You can have all the Utility Points you want. All I’m saying is that if you “forgive” something you don’t care about, you don’t earn any Virtue Points.

(by way of illustration: a billionaire who gives $100 to charity gets as many Utility Points as an impoverished pensioner who donates the same amount, but the latter gets a lot more Virtue Points)

In this sense, virtues are not identical to merely fortunate dispositions. It’s quite fortunate that I have no disposition to engage in homicide, but that’s not a virtue. I did not have to work for that. It takes no willpower to refrain from killing.

I sometimes feel annoyed at people who ignore moral appeals for caring about shrimp and insects. I feel they’re almost willfully blind to these powerful arguments. But really, I shouldn’t feel so superior. There are often times I’ve been intellectually convinced by some argument but have ignored it practically.

To judge another person, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you’re judging them, you’re a mile away and have their shoes. Similarly, if I want to judge people for ignoring the plight of the shrimp, I shouldn’t compare their attitudes to how I feel about shrimp. Intuitively I feel the pull of shrimp welfare’s importance. Instead, I should compare how I react to weirder stuff—e.g. the welfare of the weird ocean organisms like Rotifers that almost definitely aren’t conscious but are so numerous that even a tiny chance they’re conscious is significant. Even though I’m intellectually convinced that #Rotiferlivesmatterinexpectationbecausetherearesomanyofthem, I rarely behave this way.

I’m not so different from the people who ignore shrimp and insect welfare. We both have a bad habit of ignoring ethical issues that don’t resonate with us intuitively. I simply have been blessed with slightly less defective moral intuitions than them.

I do get some virtue points for giving to shrimp welfare, just as people get virtue points generally for giving to charity. But I don’t get any special virtue points for open mindedness. I’m not more open minded than they are—I just have more substantively reasonable intuitions.

This doesn’t just apply to moral failings—it applies to intellectual failing too. I often lament the severe intellectual errors made by other people. “How do they not see it?” I wonder. “They seem so biased!” Yet these are things that I too did not see just a few years ago.

It’s true that other people have extraordinary blindspots. But they are not unique in this. You do too. We are often accurate in judging intellectual vices in others (though, of course, we tend to overstate their culpability). But we err in assuming that we do not similarly possess those vices.

In short, we are all quite a bit more alike than we think. We often blame others for their wrongdoing while ignoring similar vices in ourselves. Given that we have different psychologies—different psychological pulls towards different vices—we do not have a neat intuitive gauge of how easily other people give way to wicked temptations. When we carefully reflect, we come to realize that our tendency to do what is wrong when we are tempted is quite a bit more similar to evildoers than we might initially think. The gap between you, me, and Ted Bundy is not as vast as we’d naively expect.