Why not be awful?
I was going over the Sequences on metaethics, and it was leaving a bad taste in my mouth. The examples are all about killing or saving children (both of which are far outside my personal experience). The assumption is that the participants in a discussion about metaethics are, in fact, moral in the normal sense of the word. That they’re talking about justifications behind beliefs they actually act on, like not killing babies. That, when the philosophical discussion is over, they will go back to being basically good people, and so part of the purpose of the philosophical discussion is to explain to them why they shouldn’t stress out too much. If there were no “morality,” you still wouldn’t kill babies, Eliezer presumes. Philosophy is just so much verbal dressing on something basically secure.
But my situation is a little different. From time to time, like Pierre, I don’t care. I get emotionally nihilistic. I find myself doing things that are morally awful in the conventional meaning of the word: procrastinating, sneaking other people’s food out of the communal fridge, being casually unkind and unhelpful, breaking promises. I don’t doubt that these are awful things to do. I figure any moral theory worth its salt will condemn them—except the moral theory “I don’t care,” which sometimes seems strangely compelling. In an “I don’t care” mood, I generally don’t care about the truth or falsehood of factual claims either. What does it matter? Penguins are green and they are a deadly menace to human society.
What I want to know is: what goes through people’s heads when they’re motivated not to be awful? What could you tell someone as a reason not to be awful? If you are, in fact, not awful, why aren’t you awful?
Edit: the kind of why I mean is not a justification (Humans have natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) or an explanation (Humans care about the things evolution leads them to care about.) I’m talking about an internal heuristic or a gesture at an intuition. What do you think, or feel, when you care about things? What would you tell someone who claims “I just don’t care” if you wanted to get her to care? What would you tell yourself, in your nihilistic moments?
I’m not so much into stealing food, but nihilistic procrastination, yeah I’ve been there. I try to get myself out of it by asking if I would expect people of the opposite sex would find me attractive doing it.
In short whether I am being awesome. Which nihilistic procrastination is not, so it should not be done. Getting that thought out tends to be hard because I tend to do stuff that keeps the mind occupied.
That is a brilliant heuristic. I am stealing it forever and ever.
Seconded.
T-shirt! Coffee mug slogan! Cube grenade! “Am I being awesome?”
Hugh Macleod (who I linked to in the parent) takes commissions. Not cheap—his clients are primarily businesses—but a Hugh Macleod cartoon of “Am I being awesome?” to put on the wall would be...awesome.
Awesomeness is a great razor when considering the best course of action, but my tendency to use it as the only criteria kept getting me in trouble. Legendary trouble.
But I’m thinking that “awesome” means “fitting with my ideals”, and is a useful and fun way to deflect both the apathy in question and the question itself by not really thinking, just following the programing. Recommendable.
Bad advice—on 2 levels.
First, people drastically overestimate the expected awesomeness of their plans and underestimate the expected awfulness.
(From now on, I will write just “awful” where I mean “expectedly awful”.)
The way to counteract this natural human bias is to cultivate a visceral aversion to any awful effects of one’s decisions and actions, and never to trade awful effects for even much larger awesome effects. (Some people are too scrupulous about avoiding awful effects, but most should be more scrupulous.) Sure, according to consequentialism, the ends do justify the means, but consequentialism should be used IMHO mainly to evaluate conflicting non-consequentialist systems of ethics. The human mind is too prone to self-serving biases and motivated cognition for anyone to run consequentialism straight.
The other reason this is bad advice for heterosexual men is that many straight women will tolerate extreme awfulness in a sexual partner if the partner has wealth or status. Crime bosses, for example, even convicted ones, have more—and probably better—sexual and relationship options than most men reading these words do.
So for a straight man I would modify parent’s advice about how to try to get himself out of nihilistic procrastination as follows: he should ask himself if he would expect a man he admires and would like to work with to find it attractive.
I didn’t mean it as planning advice, I meant it as evaluating your current action/state. That is you do not have to maximise it, you simply use it as a hack to stop doing things you would regret later, by expecting it to give you a little spurt of feeling awesome for having stopped doing the bad action.
Awesomeness is a person specific state as well as Echoing Horror noted. There is no point being attractive to the members of your preferred sex that are antithetical to your ideals.
Some women like men that can achieve things (even if it isn’t typical money+power), so any thing that helps you achieve your goals can be awesome. Be it Maths or learning ruby on rails.
Empathy. Imagining the feelings of whoever would be negatively affected is usually enough to pick up the slack of the actual morality.
For example, in the case of the most awful thing I have ever seriously intended to do, I was feeling selfish and also very angry at one of the people who’d be most hurt by it. These took precedence over the empathy which usually kept me from doing it. (Luckily, the mood passed.)
I expect to care. And I expect to need to act as though I have always cared, in the moments that I do care.
Expanded: Sometimes I don’t care. Sometimes I do care. When I do care, I might or might not retroactively care about wrongs I’ve committed in the past. (Usually not, turns out.) However, I will be strongly motivated to act rightly in the moments that I spend caring, and this is easier to do if I have a track record of acting rightly. This isn’t always enough to make me act rightly when I don’t care, but it does mean that I trouble to make sure I have an excuse for not doing so in those times. So later I can say “I have always acted rightly except in extenuating circumstances such as X, which doesn’t apply here because Y, so now I will act rightly because that’s just the sort of person I am.”
This post resonated with me a lot, thanks. I definitely think of myself as an awful person—I’ve done things that were more like murdering kittens than stealing food from the communal fridge. In some areas (e.g. on LW) I’m nice because I want people to admire me. In other areas (e.g. with women) I’m very nasty and don’t care about anyone except myself. Green penguins like me are a deadly menace to human society.
If they were awful to me or mine, I’d leave them. If they were awful to other people, I would ignore it.
It seems like this could be understood as a compartmentalization phenomenon. Epistemically you know “these are awful things to do”, but this doesn’t propagate to the system that’s generating your “I don’t care mood”.
Sometimes when I find myself being awful it’s simply because I’m not paying enough attention. For example, I’ll end up procrastinating by watching YouTube videos without globally seeing the situation, and realizing how I’d actually rather be doing something I cared about.
Like Alicorn, I expect to have wanted to care, so I maximize what I think my (human equivalent of a) utility function is ultimately going to be when I’m smarter and wiser and awesomer.
“‘I don’t care’ is a trivial solution” is what I think when I care. It sets everything equal to zero. From that point forward, that line of thinking has an arbitrarily low probability of being worth my time. As a matter of efficiently using my mental faculties, I have to care.
In the scenario where I’m trying to change someone’s mood, I’d go on to say that I don’t necessarily have to care about everything, but if unimportant things have a predictable effect on important things, I care about them too.
Then I’d set traps to reveal their motivation to care about something, either through exposing the dedication to reaffirming they don’t care or through saying their ability to question whether they should care requires an answer entangled with what they value, so the only possible answers exclude not caring.
And I’d blather on like that until the real trap, which is where they get invested in something to distract from the conversation with me and start to care out of spite.
I hope this helps or is at least amusing.
As far as I’ve been able to deduce, a very large part of “morality” is a (pre)commitment to override “I don’t care” with “Do it anyway”: spend time while you’re in a “caring” mood mentally preparing yourself to overcome apathy when it strikes. Make it automatic.
Me personally, I run into trouble not with apathy but with anger/vengeance. In these scenarios, the main reason I don’t do anything immoral is that I manage to fume about it mentally and burn out before actually acting on anything.
I also get more into trouble with anger/vengeance. In this case I get a real high from doing whatever “bad thing” it is.
Usually when moral apathy comes into play (i.e. not doing petty things like stealing food) it’s the fear of getting caught that prevents me from doing anything bad.
Insofar as possible I try to approach problems with my mood or mental state as physical problems to be solved in physical ways, i.e. matter-over-mind. I find that I can often cure a mental state of nihilism in myself by taking a nap. If I’ve had adequate sleep then vigorous exercise is a good thing to try. Sexual intimacy (in my case without release) or a good flogging would probably be even better but may not be as easily available. Checking if I’ve been eating right is also worthwhile.
But what to do when you’re punched in at a desk job procrastinating and can’t bring yourself to actually do the job you’ve been assigned? I was never able to solve that one, which is why I quit my job as a programmer and went back into academia. Swet, sweet Athene, I am never leaving you again.
Some other commentators mentioned guilt. Certainly this plays a role, but for myself feeling emotionally nihilistic is unpleasant because the associated mentality strips life of meaning and is associated with a distinct absence of positive emotions.
That’s definitely true.
“I’d be happier if I wasn’t in this foul mood” is the best way I’ve found to shorten the duration of foul moods (and the bad behavior associated with them.)
I would advise scrapping the word “procrastinating” from this post, or replacing it with eg. “idling at work”.
“I don’t care about others” and “I don’t care about future-me” are expressed with nearly-identical emotions, but only the former is a relevant problem for conventional morality. There’s already been one reply that mixed up the two (whpearson’s) and if this confusion continues it could severely compromise the quality of your answers, by providing an easy out to the tough question.
The two things that seem to work for me most of the time: “will I feel proud / good about myself for doing this?” or, if that fails, “would person X (whose opinion of me is generally important to me) be impressed or disgusted with this behaviour if they knew about it?”. Essentially, “is this behaviour consistent with the kind of person I wish myself and (particular) others to perceive me to be?”.
For me it’s mostly weapons-grade empathy. In passive mode (which I am basically unable to turn off), considering an action that might harm someone else will cause me to feel a significant fraction of the amount of pain I expect them to feel. In active mode, when I am purposefully considering repercussions, I feel about as much pain as I expect the other person to feel.
This mostly applies to emotional pain, as I’ve not seriously considered violence for several years. Not that that makes much of a difference; empathy can literally disable me with pain, especially when I realize that I’ve harmed someone in hindsight. I’ve had to break up with a romantic partner on two occasions, for very good reasons, and both times I was a complete wreck for about a week.
So basically I’m not awful because if I am it hurts.
Generally, I’m careful to not hurt people’s feelings. Some of it is conflict aversion, some of it is a suspicion that I wouldn’t be very good at it due to lack of practice, and a lot of it is a belief that I hate being hurt that way and I don’t want to do that to other people.
Occasionally, that last has just gone away for no apparent reason. This leaves me thinking that this sort of empathy has a physiological basis, and also makes me a less inclined to judge people harshly for not handling things the way I do. If it takes a physiological basis that not everyone has, then it isn’t reasonable to blame people for not achieving it. This doesn’t stop me from nudging and arguing.
However, when the empathy goes off-line for me, the only thing that causes me to maintain courtesy is regard for my reputation as a reasonable person.
I am not awful because I don’t want to deal with the consequences, one of which is feeling guilty.
I don’t think there’s anything you can tell someone who just doesn’t care, except maybe “you’ll probably regret it when you do start caring”. And that doesn’t work very well, eg. people who act like assholes towards their girl/boyfriend and consistently get away with it.
What makes me care? Well, when I contemplate taking my flatmates stuff or even going into his room without explicit permission I feel extremely guilty, even though I know that he doesn’t mind if I go into his room, take his clothes off the drying rack, and then make off with the drying rack for my own use. But that’s only when I’m in the act of transgressing or strongly considering a transgression. Before I get to that point I don’t think caring feels like anything in particular. It’s more a matter of having strong enough internal rules that it doesn’t occur to me that I’m allowed to go against them.
Feeling like you’re a good person, or at least like you can make a credible case for being one, is an essential reward for most people. I don’t see it as either psychopath vs. normal; on a continuum, some normal people are more willing to sacrifice this reward than others.
It’s also easy to imagine being comfortable with acts of great malice or selfishness from a safe distance (e.g. hypothetical scenarios where there’s no possible downside for you personally except the memory of having done evil); when actually in position to pull the trigger, empathy or caution will become more telling. I wouldn’t become overly concerned with this sort of moral abstraction.
To imagine being content to do great harm to others, you have to imagine being extremely compartmentalized and delusional (in order to maintain the satisfaction of feeling like a good person), or else extremely unhappy. This is unattractive, and I can’t imagine anyone choosing it who values clear and honest thinking about their own nature, unless their situation is desperate.
People who actually don’t feel bad when they harm others are ultimately going to be extremely cautious to disguise this if they’re intelligent, but wherever they’re sure of some great benefit and can act with impunity, will likely do so. I don’t rule out such people choosing to live by some strict set of ethics, but generally they’re better off only pretending to do so unless they find deception especially taxing.
I’ll just note that in many cases, “do I want to do this” and “do I want to want to do this” seem to return different answers. This is pretty relevant to the justification for metaethics, in my opinion.
“What would you tell yourself, in your nihilistic moments?” In my nihilistic moments, the process of telling myself something, or just general thinking, is not very coherent. But I remember something I read many years ago, an arabic saying : “If you have no problems, buy a goat”. I could not understand why I liked this seemingly useless piece of advice; it took a long time to creep up on me . . . . .your wrote “I generally don’t care about the truth or falsehood of factual claims either. What does it matter?” This interests me, because it fronts as an observation but this is a feeling isn’t? I suspect that this feeling is connected to deeper feelings that are not so easily seen. I am sure that that is where we find what matters. These deeper feelings usually surface via 2 routes, trauma, or, a particular focussed kind of looking. So, why buy a goat? It’s about being with people. How much do you want to be with people? And why? If you do not know, look underneath the “don’t know”. If you find “not caring” look underneath that. This kind of looking is scary but very cool . . . . . Good luck !
Guilt, of course. I don’t (usually) do things like steal from the communal fridge because I know I’ll feel bad about it later. (But, when my roommate’s food looks tasty enough...)
However, this is the explanation for why I don’t do awful things, not the justification. We should be very careful not to confuse the two. The explanation for why I am not awful comes from my emotions, whereas the justifications come from consequentialism, etc. I don’t always think about metaethics when assessing an action—I trust my judgment in most cases. But, when an issue is sticky, I turn to my justifications to figure out what to do.
I don’t want justifications, I want to know what you’re thinking. So “guilt” is a good example of what I’m looking for.