Here’s two sentences that I think are both probably true.
In order to do what is right, at some point in a person’s life they will have to covertly break certain widespread social norms.
Most people who covertly break widespread social norms are untrustworthy people.
(As a note on my epistemic state: I assign a higher probability to the first claim being true than the second.)
One of the things I read the OP as saying is “lots of widespread social norms are very poorly justified by using extreme cases and silencing all the fine cases (and you should fix this faulty reasoning in your own mind)”. I can get behind this. I think it’s also saying “Most people are actually covertly violating widespread social norms in some way”. I am genuinely much more confused about this. Many of the examples in the OP are more about persistent facts about people’s builds (e.g. whether they have violent impulses or whether they are homosexual) than about their active choices (e.g. whether they carry out violence or whether they had homosexual sex).
For instance I find myself sympathetic to arguments where people say that many people would prefer to receive corporal punishment than be imprisoned for a decade, but if I were to find out that one particular prison was secretly beating the prisoners and then releasing them, I would be extremely freaked out by this. (This example doesn’t quite make sense because that just isn’t a state of affairs that you could keep quiet, but hopefully it conveys the gist of what I mean.)
Mm, perhaps rather than saying that most such people are untrustworthy, I just want to instead make an argument about risk and the availability of evidence.
Some people are very manipulative and untrustworthy and covertly break widespread social norms.
Some people covertly break widespread social norms for good reasons.
Even if you find out one time people are covertly breaking a norm, you do not know how much more often they are covertly breaking social norms, and it’s hard to understand the reasoning that went into the one you have learned about.
Suppose the amount of covert social norm breaking is heavy-tailed, where 90% of people break none, 8% of people break 1, 1% of people break 2-3, and 1% of people break 4+ (and are doing it all the time).
If you find out that someone breaks one, then you find out that they’re not in the first bucket, and this is a 10x multiplier toward them being the sort of person who breaks 10+. So this is pretty scary.
And what’s worse is regardless of which bucket they’re in, they’re not going to tell you which bucket they’re in. Because they’re not going to volunteer to you info about other norms they’re breaking.
So (if this model/distribution is accurate) when you find out that someone has covertly broken a widespread social norm, you need to suddenly have your guard up, and to be safe you should probably apply a high standard before feeling confident that the person is not also violating other norms that you care about and keeping that from you.
(I just want to acknowledge in my comments I’m doing a lot of essentialism about people’s long-standing personality traits, I’m not sure I’d endorse that if I reflected longer.)
2 seems both true and obvious to me (and we have a rich historical record of many of those people being vindicated as moral development proceeded apace).
3 seems true and correct to me as well.
Our divergence is after 3, in the rough model. I think that it is waaaaaaay unlikely that a 90% bucket is the right size. I think that 50+% of people covertly break at least 1 widespread norm, and even if someone talks me out of it I do not expect them to talk me even half of the distance down to 8%.
I think it depends a lot on the norm in question. Having been privileged (by virtue of being confidant to a lot of people from a lot of walks of life) to know about a LOT of harmless-in-my-estimation covert norm-breaking that the average person never gets a whiff of, I think that my money is on 2 being simply false.
Here’s two sentences that I think are both probably true.
In order to do what is right, at some point in a person’s life they will have to covertly break certain widespread social norms.
Most people who covertly break widespread social norms are untrustworthy people.
(As a note on my epistemic state: I assign a higher probability to the first claim being true than the second.)
One of the things I read the OP as saying is “lots of widespread social norms are very poorly justified by using extreme cases and silencing all the fine cases (and you should fix this faulty reasoning in your own mind)”. I can get behind this. I think it’s also saying “Most people are actually covertly violating widespread social norms in some way”. I am genuinely much more confused about this. Many of the examples in the OP are more about persistent facts about people’s builds (e.g. whether they have violent impulses or whether they are homosexual) than about their active choices (e.g. whether they carry out violence or whether they had homosexual sex).
For instance I find myself sympathetic to arguments where people say that many people would prefer to receive corporal punishment than be imprisoned for a decade, but if I were to find out that one particular prison was secretly beating the prisoners and then releasing them, I would be extremely freaked out by this. (This example doesn’t quite make sense because that just isn’t a state of affairs that you could keep quiet, but hopefully it conveys the gist of what I mean.)
Mm, perhaps rather than saying that most such people are untrustworthy, I just want to instead make an argument about risk and the availability of evidence.
Some people are very manipulative and untrustworthy and covertly break widespread social norms.
Some people covertly break widespread social norms for good reasons.
Even if you find out one time people are covertly breaking a norm, you do not know how much more often they are covertly breaking social norms, and it’s hard to understand the reasoning that went into the one you have learned about.
Suppose the amount of covert social norm breaking is heavy-tailed, where 90% of people break none, 8% of people break 1, 1% of people break 2-3, and 1% of people break 4+ (and are doing it all the time).
If you find out that someone breaks one, then you find out that they’re not in the first bucket, and this is a 10x multiplier toward them being the sort of person who breaks 10+. So this is pretty scary.
And what’s worse is regardless of which bucket they’re in, they’re not going to tell you which bucket they’re in. Because they’re not going to volunteer to you info about other norms they’re breaking.
So (if this model/distribution is accurate) when you find out that someone has covertly broken a widespread social norm, you need to suddenly have your guard up, and to be safe you should probably apply a high standard before feeling confident that the person is not also violating other norms that you care about and keeping that from you.
(I just want to acknowledge in my comments I’m doing a lot of essentialism about people’s long-standing personality traits, I’m not sure I’d endorse that if I reflected longer.)
1 seems both true and obvious to me.
2 seems both true and obvious to me (and we have a rich historical record of many of those people being vindicated as moral development proceeded apace).
3 seems true and correct to me as well.
Our divergence is after 3, in the rough model. I think that it is waaaaaaay unlikely that a 90% bucket is the right size. I think that 50+% of people covertly break at least 1 widespread norm, and even if someone talks me out of it I do not expect them to talk me even half of the distance down to 8%.
I think it depends a lot on the norm in question. Having been privileged (by virtue of being confidant to a lot of people from a lot of walks of life) to know about a LOT of harmless-in-my-estimation covert norm-breaking that the average person never gets a whiff of, I think that my money is on 2 being simply false.