Kindness, mitigation

1. Mitigation, not free will

Philosophers have written about free will, and philosophers have written about the idea of mitigation- of difficult circumstances providing a partial excuse for wrongdoing- but they have spent at least a hundred times more words on the former than the latter.

I am starting to think that the idea of free will is the greatest distraction in history. We know that when we understand people’s pasts, and where they’re coming from, we tend to love and forgive them more. This is the overwhelmingly important aspect of moral accountability and its relationship with a person’s past. In comparison, the largely verbal debate over whether or not people’s notion of “free will” can be made compatible with determinism is pointless because it’s a vague concept anyway. People will restructure ‘free will’ in line with their values and judgements in particular cases ad infinitum- it’s a moving target. The relationship between mercy and understanding a person’s past is much more interesting, and generally follows a formula like this:

The larger the contribution of personal misfortunes to a person’s wrongdoing, the greater our leniency.

It plays a much more active role and has the potential to change behavior- especially punishing behavior. Free will- which is largely defined and redefined to follow what people already think- mostly doesn’t.

The concept of mitigation is not necessarily mediated through the abstract linguistic and metaphysical concerns of free will. If anything, I suspect the inverse. I suspect mitigation is a much older idea than free will, and much more primal- system one not system two. Whatever free will is and however we choose to draw the line around it mitigation is prior to it. It honestly wouldn’t surprise me if mitigation predates humanity- if monkeys forgive more quickly when a monkey who just lost a grape lashes out then when a monkey lashes out ‘for no reason’.

The idea of free will is an attempt to channel mercy and justice through metaphysics and elaborate concepts. Running social policy on metaphysics or ethics on linguistic games seems like a mistake to me.

2. Identity & kindness

In addition to many theoretical concerns, I’ve always had a chip on my shoulder about a cluster of ideas sometimes called privilege politics because I feel unjustly left out by them.

I remember once indicating (perhaps not very clearly) that I didn’t want to sit in a public space for a meeting of a leftwing group, because I would get nervous about strangers walking around me due to my OCD. I was ignored. One of the people who had instigated the decision to sit in the middle of a crowded cafe, despite my misgivings, later complained I wasn’t listening to her properly in the meeting and indicated she felt this was an issue of sexism.

All my struggles with my body, gender, OCD, autism, lack of awareness of middle-class norms, experiences of sexual violence, and struggles to get and retain employment- all of it discarded because of how I look. If I’m going to be honest, it makes me unfathomably bitter. There’s an easy way to prevent this, but no one wants to hear it.

Many people think much politics is interpersonal. I have doubts about this framework, but If you actually, honest to God, want not to contribute to oppression, or more generally, the cruelty of the system, in your day-to-day conduct, then you need to be kind and loving to virtually everyone. This is because you don’t know someone’s gender identity, sexuality, financial situation, class history, history of trauma, mental illnesses, invisible disabilities, in some cases racial background, and so on. I fear this will never happen though, because people find instructions to be indiscriminately kind almost impossible to follow. We don’t want to do this. We want ranking systems. We want to play status politics, even if it’s just an inversion of society at large.

Class is famously neglected by this sort of politics and always has been. Mental illness is often overlooked because there is a sense -especially on the left- that everyone has one, but this ignores finer aspects of graduation and variety. Gender identity famously, need not be worn on one’s sleeve. Various miscellaneous hardships and difficulties without widely recognized labels are often deeply implicated in systems of power and structural oppression, but their miscellaneous nature means they’re often badly accounted for in the granting of dispensations.

I’ve been luckier than many, especially as I’ve gained confidence and status. But for others it’s worse than what I’ve said thus far would indicate.

It’s not just that you’ll make random errors if you’re mean to people who ‘don’t seem oppressed’, but that you’ll disproportionately hurt some of the most vulnerable people- those with problems you have a blind spot for. People with invisible problems who feel they need to keep those problems hidden. People who don’t have the language or appetite to sell their personal stories.

And worst of all, people, even good people tend to unconsciously hunt for those they think they can lash out against safely. Such people will often be:

1. Those who have faced barriers (and are thus lower status)

2. But have done so out of sight or in a way often forgotten (so the aggressor does not appear to be targeting the weak).

As Douglas Jay Green, a US soldier wrote shortly before his 2011 death- in a quote that his since been misattributed to Plato, Aurelius and Robin Williams, and as Darielys Tejera said in a 2009 book about surviving the suicide of a loved one, before and apparently independently of Green:

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle

Or words to that effect. There’s no route but kindness.

3. The paradox of reputation

The paradox of reputation:

Most people deserve a better reputation than their own deeds, if known, would give them

By ‘deserve’ here, I don’t mean by my standards (although this is also true), I mean by common standards. Why do most people deserve a better reputation than their own deeds, if known, would give them? Because if you took the worst things a given person had done and made them public, most people would not look so crash hot.

The way reputation works is that a subset of what you’ve done becomes known, and is taken as a sample. If you yell at a waiter one time, and it becomes public, people won’t so much be angry at that incident, as at the thought that you are the kind of person who yells at waiters, has probably done so before, and will probably do so again.

Of course, this means, in the occasional, tragic case, we end up thinking much, much worse of someone than they deserve. Either we learn of a deed that was actually an isolated mistake, or we learn of an event but not this or that mitigating detail. Still, so long as we’re judicious and pay attention to context, tragic mishaps should be relatively rare. Based on my own work with dark secrets, I think if you had a power to know the worst thing everyone you met had done, you’d be shocked.

The internet famously, has thrown a wrench in this process to some degree. I think it’s much, much worse in most cases for someone to suffer a reputation worse than they deserve, than for someone to enjoy a reputation better than they deserve, but there is good in many types of wicked people being exposed. I think we’re probably too close to the situation right now to assess whether the internet has done more harm than good in this regard. I always think of a quote from the Hollow Men by eliot: Life is very long. There are so many opportunities to make mistakes, and my OCD makes that clear to me.

I suppose my intuition and personal experience with OCD will always make me lean to the side of mercy, but then, even good and righteous moral revolutions have excesses and harm a few people who were more innocent than we are comfortable with. It’s so easy to focus in on the occasional person fired for a tasteless but non-malicious joke, or for misreading what they thought were romantic cues, and forget the scores of cruel and arrogant people cleared out, and myriads more would be bullies and predators put on notice. By now we’ve probably all seen this Mark Twain quote:

“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

I’ve previously said I think we should judge less, and judge less severely on the whole- relative to our practice circa 2023. I’ve also argued that judgement is a kind of spectacle- we feel like we are participating in shaping the world through issuing angry moral judgements, but we’re not- we’re playing with toys. I stand by all this. Nevertheless, there’s some good in a system of reputational incentives, and I don’t think we can discard it entirely. I think although it hasn’t changed structure- and is to a huge extent a busy box to keep us distracted- nonetheless it’s reshaped individual lives for better and worse.

I also reject entirely the popular idea that being publicly shamed isn’t a big deal. It’s a story we tell themselves to feel better about the times we’ve shamed, and the possibility we might be shamed. We’re people, not beasts, of course being shamed lances all the way out through the heart.

But there’s a middle path of sorts- although it won’t make everything better. I think once you grasp that everyone has skeletons in their closet you can look on reputational hits through a different lens- as tragic. We don’t really know whether people are good or bad, especially not at this distance, but while we should almost certainly suspend judgment in more cases than we do- suspending judgment in all cases isn’t an option. Hence we have to run our very imperfect system of judgments. In crude terms, I think we should do it, but feel sad about it, and recognize the tragedy- the awe inspiring capriciousness of it all. Perhaps we should be relatively severe, but not cruel. At the moment though it seems like we are cruel, but not severe.

Here’s a fascinating way to think about it. At the moment, language models are basically trained on all the good text on the internet. It seems likely to me that one day we will have computers that can sort through the whole internet and search for all the dirt on you that can be found. When that happens, we’ll likely have to soften a bit. Keep that in mind as you make your judgments now.

I think what I worry about, more than anything is not so much that we’re running a court of public opinion- I think that’s probably unavoidable- as that we’re running it without a proper sense of tragedy- with confident righteousness, rather than melancholy awe at the capriciousness of it all.

Appendix a previous essay I wrote on judgement: Social media outrage is based on something like a base rates fallacy

Consider the following two statements:

Statement 1: “80% of incidents of X are done by bastards.”

Statement 2: “80% of people who have done X at some point are bastards”

If you want an example of X, try “getting into conflict with service staff.

The two statements do not imply each other, because it could be, for example, that while bastards fight with service staff numerous times and thus commit a solid majority of overall offenses, many non-bastards, perhaps even a majority, have got into an argument with service staff at some point in their long lives. The point that people get mixed up between these things is well-established in the cognitive science and behavioral economics literatures.

But let’s say you know statement 1 to be true. If you see someone fighting with service staff in naturalistic conditions, and without any distorting factors or selection bias, that would be, on this evidence, a reasonable indication that the perpetrator is a bastard (in fact, an 80% chance).

Suppose though you had an fightingwithservicestaff-o-scope and you could point it at someone, and if they’d ever fought with service staff, they would come up glowing red.

The internet, both in what it stores and in the collective memory it networks, is sort of a generalized bad-deeds-O-Scope.

People assume that learning something bad about a person by the internet is just as damning as learning it about that person in real life, because, hey, why wouldn’t it be? It’s the same information, just a different channel. Actually, the channel through which you learn information should shape how it alters your evaluation of their character, even if there is zero doubt as to the accuracy of the information.

We all have moments in life that don’t speak highly of us. I’d say for most of us, the worst of them is probably far worse than “fought with service staff”. Getting a sense of someone’s character can be seen as a sampling problem- what proportion of their moments are bad moments? It’s a huge problem if your sample is biased because there are very few people who wouldn’t look bad if the only thing you knew about them was their or even one of their worst moments.

If you run into bad moments in another person’s life “by accident”- say, by watching them do that-, that’s an indication they probably have many more such dark moments- what are the odds that you just happened to be looking at them during their worst moment? On the other hand, if you run into a dark moment of theirs on the dark moment aggregator, that gives us little evidence of anything [unless it’s unambiguously bad: rape, murder, torture, that sort of thing.]

So why don’t we cotton onto this and stop making this mistake?

1. The main reason is that cognitive biases make us not notice base rates etc.

2. However, I also think there’s a secondary factor: People genuinely do have darker secrets than we used to believe before the internet and it is taking us time as a culture to adjust to that.