Aiming for Moral Mediocrity
I've been working on this essay off and on for years, "Aiming for Moral Mediocrity". I think I've finally pounded it into circulating shape and I'm ready for feedback.
I have an empirical thesis and a normative thesis. The empirical thesis is that most people aim to be morally mediocre. They aim to be about as morally good as their peers, not especially better, not especially worse. This mediocrity has two aspects. It is peer-relative rather than absolute, and it is middling rather than extreme. We do not aim to be good, or non-bad, or to act permissibly rather than impermissibly, by fixed moral standards. Rather, we notice the typical behavior of people we regard as our peers and we aim to behave broadly within that range. We -- most of us -- look around, notice how others are acting, then calibrate toward so-so.
This empirical thesis is, I think, plausible on the face of it. It also receives some support from two recent subliteratures in social psychology and behavioral economics.
One is the literature on following the (im-)moral crowd. I'm thinking especially of the work of Robert B. Cialdini and Cristina Bicchieri. Cialdini argues that "injunctive norms" (that is, social or moral admonitions) most effectively promote norm-compliant behavior when they align with "descriptive norms" (that is, facts about how people actually behave). People are less likely to litter when they see others being neat, more likely to reuse their hotel towels when they learn that others also do so, and more likely to reduce their household energy consumption when they see that they are using more than their neighbors. Bicchieri argues that people are more likely to be selfish in "dictator games" when they are led to believe that earlier participants had mostly been selfish and that convincing communities to adopt new health practices like family planning and indoor toilet use typically requires persuading people that their neighbors will also comply. It appears that people are more likely to abide by social or moral norms if they believe that others are also doing so.
The other relevant literature concerns moral self-licensing. A number of studies suggest that after having performed good acts, people are likely to behave less morally well than after performing a bad or neutral act. For example, after having done something good for the environment, people might tend to make more selfish choices in a dictator game. Even just recalling recent ethical behavior might reduce people's intentions to donate blood, money, and time. The idea is that people are more motivated to behave well when their previous bad behavior is salient and less motivated to behave well when their previous good behavior is salient. They appear to calibrate toward some middle state.
One alternative hypothesis is that people aim not for mediocrity but rather for something better than that, though short of sainthood. Phenomenologically, that might be how it seems to people. Most people think that they are somewhat above average in moral traits like honesty and fairness (Tappin and McKay 2017); and maybe then people mostly think that they should more or less stay the course. An eminent ethicist once told me he was aiming for a moral "B+". However, I suspect that most of us who like to think of ourselves as aiming for substantially above-average moral goodness aren't really willing to put in the work and sacrifice required. A close examination of how we actually calibrate our behavior will reveal us wiggling and veering toward a lower target. (Compare the undergraduate who says they're "aiming for B+" in a class but who wouldn't be willing to put in more work if they received a C on the first exam. It's probably better to say that they are hoping for a B+ than that they are aiming for one.)
My normative thesis is that it's morally mediocre to aim for moral mediocrity. Generally speaking, it's somewhat morally bad, but not terribly bad, to aim for the moral middle.
In defending this view, I'm mostly concerned to rebut the charge that it's perfectly morally fine to aim for mediocrity. Two common excuses, which I think wither upon critical scrutiny, are the Happy Coincidence Defense and The-Most-You-Can-Do Sweet Spot. The Happy Coincidence Defense is an attractive rationalization strategy that attempts to justify doing what you prefer to do by arguing that it's also for the moral best -- for example, that taking this expensive vacation now is really the morally best choice because you owe it to you family, and it will refresh you for your very important work, and.... The Most-You-Can-Do Sweet Spot is a similarly attractive rationalization strategy that relies on the idea that if you tried to be any morally better than you in fact are, you would end up being morally worse -- because you would collapse along the way, maybe, or you would become sanctimonious and intolerant, or you would lose the energy and joie de vivre on which your good deeds depend, or.... Of course it can sometimes be true that by Happy Coincidence your preferences align with the moral best or that you are already precisely in The-Most-You-Can-Do Sweet Spot. But this reasoning is suspicious when deployed repeatedly to justify otherwise seemingly mediocre moral choices.
Another normative objection is the Fairness Objection, which I discussed on the blog last month. Since (by stipulation) most of your peers aren't making the sacrifices necessary for peer-relative moral excellence, it's unfair for you to be blamed for also declining to make such sacrifices. If the average person in your financial condition gives X% to charity, for example, it would be unfair to blame you for not giving more. If your colleagues down the hall cheat, shirk, lie, and flake X amount of the time, it's only fair that you should get to do the same.
The simplest response to the Fairness Objection is to appeal to absolute moral standards. Although some norms are peer-relative, so that they become morally optional if most of your peers fail to comply with them, other norms aren't like that. A Nazi death camp guard is wrong to kill Jews even if that is normal behavior among his peers. More moderately, sexism, racism, ableism, elitism, and so forth are wrong and blameworthy, even if they are common among your peers (though blame is probably also partly mitigated if you are less biased than average). If you're an insurance adjuster who denies or slow-walks important health benefits on shaky grounds because you guess the person won't sue, the fact that other insurance adjusters might do the same in your place is again at best only partly mitigating. It would likely be unfair to blame you more than your peers are blamed; but if you violate absolute moral standards you deserve some blame, regardless of your peers' behavior.
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Full length version of the paper here.
As always, comments welcome either by email to me or in the comments field of this post. Please don't feel obliged to read the full paper before commenting, if you have thoughts based on the summary arguments in this post.
[Note: Somehow my final round of revisions on this post was lost and an old version was posted. The current version has been revised in attempt to recover the lost changes.]