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The conclusion is unexpected: No doubt, the two cops who sat around a hotel room trading violent fantasies with DePew and Lambey saw themselves as on the side

The conclusion is unexpected: No doubt, the two cops who sat around a hotel room trading violent fantasies with DePew and Lambey saw themselves as on the side of social justice. So do all of us rushing to pronounce guilty verdicts on anyone accused of sexual misdeeds now. We, too, have predator quotas to fill. As with the DePew jury or the Meese Commission, for sexual-justice-seeking Twitter mobs, evidence is still optional. Fantasies about perpetrators permeated all levels of Dan DePew’s case, and we’re never more beset by fantasy than when asserting the purity of our motives. Never more perverse—and punitive—than when trying to prove that it’s other people who are the sadists.

vanderZwan 8y ago
Not if you take into account that moral outrage has a self-serving component: > When people publicly rage about perceived injustices that don't affect them personally, we tend to assume this expression is rooted in altruism—a "disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others." But new research suggests that professing such third-party concern—what social scientists refer to as "moral outrage"—is often a function of self-interest, wielded to assuage feelings of personal culpability for societal harms or reinforce (to the self and others) one's own status as a Very Good Person. > Feelings of guilt are a direct threat to one's sense that they are a moral person and, accordingly, research on guilt ﬁnds that this emotion elicits strategies aimed at alleviating guilt that do not always involve undoing one's actions. Furthermore, research shows that individuals respond to reminders of their group's moral culpability with feelings of outrage at third-party harm-doing. These findings suggest that feelings of moral outrage, long thought to be grounded solely in concerns with maintaining justice, may sometimes reflect efforts to maintain a moral identity. Emphasis on the "outrage" part, which I presume to be a step or two beyond simply acknowledging that something is unfair and wanting to address it. [0] http://reason.com/blog/2017/03/01/moral-outrage-is-self-serving http://reason.com/blog/2017/03/01/moral-outrage-is-self-serv...

vanderZwan 8y ago

Not if you take into account that moral outrage has a self-serving component: > When people publicly rage about perceived injustices that don't affect them personally, we tend to assume this expression is rooted in altruism—a "disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others." But new research suggests that professing such third-party concern—what social scientists refer to as "moral outrage"—is often a function of self-interest, wielded to assuage feelings of personal culpability for societal harms or reinforce (to the self and others) one's own status as a Very Good Person. > Feelings of guilt are a direct threat to one's sense that they are a moral person and, accordingly, research on guilt ﬁnds that this emotion elicits strategies aimed at alleviating guilt that do not always involve undoing one's actions. Furthermore, research shows that individuals respond to reminders of their group's moral culpability with feelings of outrage at third-party harm-doing. These findings suggest that feelings of moral outrage, long thought to be grounded solely in concerns with maintaining justice, may sometimes reflect efforts to maintain a moral identity. Emphasis on the "outrage" part, which I presume to be a step or two beyond simply acknowledging that something is unfair and wanting to address it. [0] http://reason.com/blog/2017/03/01/moral-outrage-is-self-serving http://reason.com/blog/2017/03/01/moral-outrage-is-self-serv...