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The Case for Being Skeptical of Moral Outrage
- ykevinator 8y agoYou lost me at vituperative. I hate smartest guy in the room syndrome.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- duado 8y agoVituperative? That’s a pretty common word known by most well-educated people. I definitely hate thousand dollar word syndrome but this isn’t really it.
- squish78 8y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/iamverysmart/ https://www.reddit.com/r/iamverysmart/
- ionised 8y agoYou stopped reading because the author used a word you didn't recognise?
- hirundo 8y agoWhat's the right amount of moral outrage? Gedankenexperiment. Install a moral outrage volume meter on our species, dial the the calendar back ten million years, and play it forward with various outrage volumes. Plot moral outrage volume against H. sapiens biomass in the present day. I'd expect a mass of zero grams at volume zero and zero grams at volume eleven (say, by definition), and an inverted U curve in between. So lacking the time machine and the outrage rheostat, how do we discover the correct amount of outrage? Do we have too much or too little now, and how can we tell? I can't even guess.
- DiseasedBadger 8y agoYour assumptions seem unlikely. There is no proof moral outrage is on the whole a good thing. No other species requires it. The proper null hypothesis is that it does nothing.
- aaron695 8y agoWe know it hurts people on the end of the moral outrage so the default would be negative. We also know state actors are trying to use it to destabilize countries.
- saghm 8y ago> Your assumptions seem unlikely. There is no proof moral outrage is on the whole a good thing. No other species requires it. I don't see why that's a compelling argument; no other species requires written languages either, but I think on the whole it's been a pretty good investment for ours.
- jdsully 8y agoI see my dogs punish each other for benign behavior - just things they disagree with. It certainly appears to be a form of moral policing within the pack.
- siruncledrew 8y ago> “What the researchers found is that participants’ expressions of moral outrage were mostly independent from their empathy for the victims of the transgressions. What triggered moral outrage in their study was whether a particular behavior seemed intrinsically wrong—that is, wrong even if it didn’t harm anyone.” This is one of the problems with moral outrage in today’s internet context. It’s easy to stir up outrage over very little, and then snowball that outrage into a huge debacle over something that ends up being distanced and deceptive. We can just point a finger at someone and assert they are morally guilty without hesitation as long as enough of our peers support it. This is a system like 1600s Salem where someone could point a finger and say “She’s a witch!” out of speculation. Turns out people still love a good witch hunt, and the media/Twitter is the reverand pointing the finger at the supposed witches at a whim. We think we’ve come a long way over 400 years, but it turns out human emotion doesn’t change that quickly. Another issue with moral outrage is that once the charges are dumped on the “guilty” party it’s very hard to disprove them to the public; plus there is little retribution on the party pointing the finger to begin with. How many of those “witches” were actually witches? The internet “trials” of today are about as vigorous as the witch trials back then. I can understand why “moral outrage warriors” do what they do; they are driving away immorality and threatening forces from society and protecting and preserving the peace. Yet it turns out the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We are at the point where there is not even reaction to action, we have reaction to supposed action.