First, I wouldn’t say “mostly.” I think in excessive amounts it interferes.
We’ve all sat around with thoughts whirling around in our heads, perseverating about ethics. Sometimes, a little ethical thinking helps us make a big decision. Other times, it’s not much different from having an annoying song stuck in your head. When we’re itchy, have the sun in our eyes, or, yes, can’t stop thinking about ethics, that discomfort shows in our face, in our bearing, and in our voice, and it makes it harder to connect with other people.
You and I both see that, just like a great song can still be incredibly annoying when it’s stuck in your head, a great ethical system can likewise give us a terrible headache when we can’t stop perseverating about it.
So, for a person who streams a lot of consequentialism on their moral Spotify, it seems like you’re telling them that if they’d just start listening to some nice virtue ethics instead and give up that nasty noise, they’d find themselves in a much more pleasant state of mind after a while. Personally, as a person who’s been conversant with all three ethical systems, interfaces with many moral communities, and has fielded a lot of complex ethical conversations with a lot of people, I don’t really see any more basis for thinking consequentialism is unusually bad as a “moral earworm,” any more than (as a musician) I think that any particular genre of music is more prone to distressing earworms.
To me, perseveration/earworms feels more like a disorder of the audio loop, in which it latches on to thoughts, words, or sounds and cycles from one to another in a way you just can’t control. It doesn’t feel particularly governed by the content of those thoughts. Even if it is enhanced by specific types of mental content, it seems like it would require psychological methodologies that do not actually exist in order to reliably detect an effect of that kind. We’d have to see the thoughts in people’s heads, find out how often they perseverate, and try and detect a causal association. I think it’s unlikely that convincing evidence exists in the literature, and I find it dubious that we could achieve confidence in our beliefs in this matter without such a careful scientific study.
We’ve all sat around with thoughts whirling around in our heads, perseverating about ethics. Sometimes, a little ethical thinking helps us make a big decision. Other times, it’s not much different from having an annoying song stuck in your head. When we’re itchy, have the sun in our eyes, or, yes, can’t stop thinking about ethics, that discomfort shows in our face, in our bearing, and in our voice, and it makes it harder to connect with other people.
You and I both see that, just like a great song can still be incredibly annoying when it’s stuck in your head, a great ethical system can likewise give us a terrible headache when we can’t stop perseverating about it.
So, for a person who streams a lot of consequentialism on their moral Spotify, it seems like you’re telling them that if they’d just start listening to some nice virtue ethics instead and give up that nasty noise, they’d find themselves in a much more pleasant state of mind after a while. Personally, as a person who’s been conversant with all three ethical systems, interfaces with many moral communities, and has fielded a lot of complex ethical conversations with a lot of people, I don’t really see any more basis for thinking consequentialism is unusually bad as a “moral earworm,” any more than (as a musician) I think that any particular genre of music is more prone to distressing earworms.
To me, perseveration/earworms feels more like a disorder of the audio loop, in which it latches on to thoughts, words, or sounds and cycles from one to another in a way you just can’t control. It doesn’t feel particularly governed by the content of those thoughts. Even if it is enhanced by specific types of mental content, it seems like it would require psychological methodologies that do not actually exist in order to reliably detect an effect of that kind. We’d have to see the thoughts in people’s heads, find out how often they perseverate, and try and detect a causal association. I think it’s unlikely that convincing evidence exists in the literature, and I find it dubious that we could achieve confidence in our beliefs in this matter without such a careful scientific study.