Concentric circles of morality
There are at least seven spheres of moral avoidance, they overlap and sometimes cross over, and there are probably more. But as a rough taxonomy they come in this order, from least to most severe:
I would be careful about doing it myself.
I would try to avoid doing it myself*
I would not do it*.
I would tell my friends and family not to do it.
I would publicly condemn it in the abstract.
I would publicly condemn specific, named individuals for doing it.
I would support making it illegal.
I think- and I believe I said this once on my old blog- that a lot of internet moralism comes from a confusion of the spheres. “I would not do it” becomes “it should be illegal”. “I would tell my family and friends not to do it” becomes public condemnation of individuals. Not only should the gaps between each of these concepts be recognized, in many cases the margin between them should be pretty hefty.
As someone with OCD, I have a burning fear of transgression. I wonder if there’s not something psychodynamic going on- I’ve taken the fire most people direct outwards about morality and directed it inwards.
But I’m always shocked at the ease with which people condemn things. So many times we hear about someone who has enthusiastically condemned the behavior of others and then been revealed to have done the wrong thing themselves. I don’t think what’s going on here is necessarily conscious hypocrisy. Rather the individual:
A) Leaves very little margin between the outer limits of what they would do, and what they would be willing to condemn.
B) And then having done that, since they do not leave much of a margin between these, it is is easy for them to find some exception or justifying circumstance for their past action so they can present it to themselves in their own mind as within the sphere of what they would do, and not past the line of condemnation.
If they’d left a wide no-mans land between what they’d condemn, and what they’d never do themselves, it’s much less likely they’d get in this mess. In a way, I think this is connected to another bit of advice I’m always given, always make generous allowances for the possibility that you’ve got things completely wrong.
I’m aware a lot of people think of major reputational blows as an ‘internet thing’. Certainly a lot of the talk about this happens on the internet, but I know personally, by my own count, over two dozen people who suffered major hits to their IRL reputation. Some of those downfalls were wholly just, others were tragic cases. Granted, I know a lot of people, that’s a high number against anyone’s denominator.
Suppose I view abstaining from excessive judgement as a form of self-protection. Life is very long. Memory is fallible. Who knows what mistakes we’ve made. When I say self-protection, I mean something special- I have zero illusions that people would leave me alone because I’d abstained from moralism- I just think that it would be really horrid to know not just that your reputation was now trash, but that you’d been a hypocrite about it too.
Perhaps another, more folksy way to frame a similar idea is that people tend to make excuses for themselves and stringencies for others. The correct approach is to make excuses for other people, and stringencies for yourself**. With regards to others, ask yourself, is there some story, any possible story, on which the wrongdoer basically means well, but got confused or acted out of character. With regards to yourself, ask whether there’s some sense in which you might be going to do the wrong thing.
*Perhaps with exceptions for unusual cases
**Just don’t take it too far and get OCD like I did