My many disagreements with r/AITAH (Am I the Asshole)

Am I The Asshole is a great source of fascinating stories, not all of them fictional. It’s also a fascinating philosophical artifact because, adjusting for some biases, it tells you something about the ethical views of educated 21st-century anglophones. Most of the time, I agree with the moral judgments of AITA. Quite often, though, I find myself disagreeing- and these disagreements tend to fall in certain patterns. Even when I agree with the judgments, I often disagree with the reasons. Here are the ways in which, time and time again, I find myself disagreeing with the sub, and by extension, folk 21st-century relational ethics. In short, I think it’s too liberal, treating people as interacting individuals who should freely choose their own entanglements.

1. Family is binding - unless someone in your family has abused you, or someone else in your family, or unless contact with you is clearly enabling them to do wrong, you should never cut contact with your family. Two caveats: 1. Abuse here includes financial abuse, emotional abuse, etc., and 2. Someone’s having abused you doesn’t mean you have to cut contact; it just means you have the option. Even if I had a kid who was a serial killer, I would visit him in prison. Bindingness in no way obligates you to obey family; just love them.

2. You do not have the right to choose your own boundaries without limit. Interaction between people isn’t a series of voluntary agreements. If my friend is hurting, I am obliged to help, even if we’ve never formally made an agreement to that effect. Even if I’d prefer not to. Once someone is your friend, they’re part of your life. Of course, you can slowly withdraw from a friendship or quickly withdraw if they wrong you severely, but if you haven’t completed that process, a friend comes needing help, and you can give it without disproportionate costs, you help. That doesn’t mean people get to take an unlimited amount from you, but it also doesn’t mean you can stop helping just because you don’t feel like it anymore. Life isn’t a series of contracts we get to choose; we are thrust into the world, and into a particular position in the world, and we need to deal with that honorably and compassionately.

3. A methodological point- perhaps with some exceptions. If someone is telling a story in a context like AITAH, you take them at their word and give a response based on the version of events they give. If they’re lying, that’s on them, and means they can’t take any comfort from you saying ‘yes, that was okay’. If someone from their life sees the post, they’ll spot the lie or omission. If they’re not lying, being told “I don’t believe you” would be unnecessarily hurtful. You might not be as good at spotting lies as you think.

4. Having affairs is bad. Yet of itself, it’s far from the worst thing in the world; a majority of people do something at least that immoral at some point in their lives. We are flawed primates. An affair might be a good reason to dump someone, but it’s not a good reason to regard someone with contempt.

5. The idea that there’s a moral event horizon that separates the flawed but basically decent from the wicked reprobates is wrong. There are terrible people out there, to be sure, but good and bad mostly shade into each other. Although your approach to someone should be deeply sensitive to their moral character, trying to draw lines beyond which someone is outside your moral community is generally foolish. Some people should be cast out of your life, but to the maximum extent possible, no one should be universally cast out of everyone’s lives. People aren’t disposable.

6. There are times when it is called for, but you should be extremely cautious in making someone choose between you and someone else. Even in an extreme situation.

7. Doing the right thing is often thankless, tiresome, not rewarded, feels weird, etc., etc. You still have to do it. There are many situations in which a lack of gratitude is a reason to stop doing something, but there are also many situations in which it is not. Life is tough.

8. Your wedding is not first and foremost for you; it is for the community.

9. Explicit and direct communication is not always the best way to approach things.

10. You should usually be more gentle than you think. People got all sorts of fancy stories about how cruelty is actually kindness. Doubtless, sometimes, they’re right, but you should always be careful, because a part of you wants them to be right.

11. The desire for vindication is so dangerous.

12. You should love everyone.

13. Therapy might be worth trying for some people without mental illnesses, but in the main, therapy is for mental illness and for unhappiness. It is not a secular replacement for church as a moral self-improvement program. If you want a secular replacement for church, hard contemplation of your own faults, and advice from trusted friends is better. Of course, mental illness is common, so many people need therapy- myself as much as anyone- but it can’t live up to its current cultural role as moral teacher.

14. Getting taken advantage of is not always a sign that you were being too vulnerable or caring; sometimes it’s just the cost of things. Trying to be good hurts.

15. Before harming anyone’s reputation, especially severely, ask yourself: A) Am I sure it’s true? and B) Am I confident it’s necessary? You’ll never be able to undo it.

16. It would be convenient if we could say ‘everyone is ultimately responsible for their own actions,’ and yes, they are, but mental illness and situational stress are often powerful mitigating factors. If you don’t appreciate that mental illness can sometimes make people do real harm and inconvenience, you don’t understand mental illness, and any sense you have that you are accepting of mental illness is built on a model of mental illness as mild depression and anxiety. More fundamentally, you lack a serious awareness of the human condition. The same is true of situational stress- if you consider yourself sympathetic to the suffering of the world, but don’t understand how bad circumstances make people do very bad things, you’ve missed something very fundamental- and if you don’t see this as somewhat exculpulating you’ve let your heart turn to stone.

17. Many people should dump their partners, but I would think three times before telling anyone to dump theirs.

18. You should be so careful in thinking you know what lies in the heart of another, especially through a second person’s account of events.

19. You should be much, much slower than AITAH to call anyone an asshole. You should look for the gaps in your understanding, not the picture you think you see emerging.

20. Life is ultimately lived with others, and reaching for a higher moral order, it is not fully lived. Happiness is only real when shared. Happiness can only be shared fully with others through far deeper connections than AITAH often seems able to understand.

21. The bare minimum is often a more impressive achievement than people realise, as we should know by how often we fail to hit it.

22. Hold yourself to a much higher standard than others.

23. Beware simple formulations. [Yes, that includes these ones]

In the final instance, I am sure many of these thoughts reflect nothing so much as the ways I have been hurt. You might use this as a basis to discard them, but the same criticism is also true, I think, of r/AITAH users. We’re all reacting to our own lives even when we think we’re reacting to others. The best palliative is balance and consideration in all things.