There are definitely similarities, but my point has nothing to do with relativism or tolerance. I have no problem with judging others to be doing the wrong thing by my values, or even by their values. ;-)
What I’m saying is, if I want someone else to actually follow my values, as opposed to merely scratching my protest-and-punishment itch, then I am better off eliminating the outrage part and focusing on what will actually convince them to follow my values… even if it might involve some sort of (consciously planned) display of outrage, protest, or punishment.
But the futility of using the punish-and-protest instinct in anything involving self-improvement becomes painfully obvious when you notice for the nine-jlllionth time that yelling at yourself doesn’t actually produce any improvements, nor motivate you to do anything positive. (Somehow, we feel as if merely feeling guilty is the appropriate and sufficient response to our self-punishment!)
Somehow, we feel as if merely feeling guilty is the appropriate and sufficient response to our self-punishment!
I think that’s a special case of feeling as if feeling guilty is the appropriate and sufficient response to that kind of punishment (displays of disapproval or outrage, etc.) from anyone, and that comes about because feeling guilty often is taken as the appropriate and sufficient response to that kind of punishment.
Compare to, say, a politician who’s been caught selling influence or having an affair, or a religious leader who’s been caught using crystal meth and gay prostitutes, etc. They always seem so sincere in their public apologies and statements of regret and remorse… yet, suspiciously, all that tearful regret and all those acknowledgements of moral failing weren’t enough to get them to actually stop doing the corrupt or hypocritical things in question until they got caught and publicly shamed, and even in their admissions of guilt they will still try to avoid giving up anything of substance (political office, religious leadership, etc.) if they can. I think that’s pretty much what the emotion of guilt is — it’s not a feeling of regret at actually having done something wrong, it’s a response to the feeling of being judged negatively by someone whose opinion matters to you (whether for instrumental or terminal reasons). That’s probably why self-inflicted guilt isn’t useful for self-improvement: it’s an emotion that’s primarily about convincing people that you regret something and won’t do it again, whether or not you really do regret it and plan to stop. More signaling than substance. In the social realm, this often balances out, because the things that provoke it — public displays of outrage, etc. — are often largely signaling as well, as there are plenty of reasons to appear outraged other than actually being outraged. It’s a dynamic that’s good for exerting power over people who care what you (appear to) think of them, but, for obvious reasons, not so good for self-control. Yet it’s not surprising that we try to guilt-punish ourselves; we all have self-images we’re trying to live up to, so in that sense we care about being judged negatively by ourselves, and if your ‘thinker’ and ‘doer’ have sufficiently out-of-sync preferences, such that they feel like different people to each other, then it is no surprise that they’ll often invoke adaptations and habits that formed around interpersonal dynamics. So if I’m persistently doing something that I don’t want myself to do, then the part of me that wants me to live up to some higher ideals will automatically execute the “display [and maybe feel] outrage” macro, and the part of me that wants to do something else will respond by executing by the “display and feel guilt” macro… the latter macro consisting not of necessarily changing the actual behaviour, but only changing it to the extent necessary to appear remorseful to a punisher assumed to be someone other than oneself.
(— or at least that’s my guess as to what’s going on, and I will now go off and worry about whether it’s a just-so story and whether it’s useful and whether it’s testable.)
Edit: This reminds me of something parents often do. Punishment of children by parents often amounts to extracting apologies and displays of remorse from the child, with no particular expectation that the child should genuinely understand and regret what they did, or at least regret it for any reason other than the punishment itself. (Being asked/forced to apologize was always what confused me the most — usually parents say “Say you’re sorry!” right away without actually convincing the child they did something wrong, so being told to apologize felt to me like being asked to lie.) Anyway, since people get used to being able to get away with things as long as they make a convincing show of looking sorry after getting caught (which, after enough time being a child, probably feels almost indistinguishable from actually feeling sorry), it makes sense that they’d generalize that rule and get into the habit of responding to their own self-punishment the same way, once they’re broken enough that they start inflicting that kind of self-punishment at all.
Yes, to all of the above. I think the mechanisms for learning and execution might be a bit simpler or more fundamental to the hardware than what you’ve just described, but that’s a relatively minor detail.
There are definitely similarities, but my point has nothing to do with relativism or tolerance. I have no problem with judging others to be doing the wrong thing by my values, or even by their values. ;-)
What I’m saying is, if I want someone else to actually follow my values, as opposed to merely scratching my protest-and-punishment itch, then I am better off eliminating the outrage part and focusing on what will actually convince them to follow my values… even if it might involve some sort of (consciously planned) display of outrage, protest, or punishment.
But the futility of using the punish-and-protest instinct in anything involving self-improvement becomes painfully obvious when you notice for the nine-jlllionth time that yelling at yourself doesn’t actually produce any improvements, nor motivate you to do anything positive. (Somehow, we feel as if merely feeling guilty is the appropriate and sufficient response to our self-punishment!)
I think that’s a special case of feeling as if feeling guilty is the appropriate and sufficient response to that kind of punishment (displays of disapproval or outrage, etc.) from anyone, and that comes about because feeling guilty often is taken as the appropriate and sufficient response to that kind of punishment.
Compare to, say, a politician who’s been caught selling influence or having an affair, or a religious leader who’s been caught using crystal meth and gay prostitutes, etc. They always seem so sincere in their public apologies and statements of regret and remorse… yet, suspiciously, all that tearful regret and all those acknowledgements of moral failing weren’t enough to get them to actually stop doing the corrupt or hypocritical things in question until they got caught and publicly shamed, and even in their admissions of guilt they will still try to avoid giving up anything of substance (political office, religious leadership, etc.) if they can. I think that’s pretty much what the emotion of guilt is — it’s not a feeling of regret at actually having done something wrong, it’s a response to the feeling of being judged negatively by someone whose opinion matters to you (whether for instrumental or terminal reasons). That’s probably why self-inflicted guilt isn’t useful for self-improvement: it’s an emotion that’s primarily about convincing people that you regret something and won’t do it again, whether or not you really do regret it and plan to stop. More signaling than substance. In the social realm, this often balances out, because the things that provoke it — public displays of outrage, etc. — are often largely signaling as well, as there are plenty of reasons to appear outraged other than actually being outraged. It’s a dynamic that’s good for exerting power over people who care what you (appear to) think of them, but, for obvious reasons, not so good for self-control. Yet it’s not surprising that we try to guilt-punish ourselves; we all have self-images we’re trying to live up to, so in that sense we care about being judged negatively by ourselves, and if your ‘thinker’ and ‘doer’ have sufficiently out-of-sync preferences, such that they feel like different people to each other, then it is no surprise that they’ll often invoke adaptations and habits that formed around interpersonal dynamics. So if I’m persistently doing something that I don’t want myself to do, then the part of me that wants me to live up to some higher ideals will automatically execute the “display [and maybe feel] outrage” macro, and the part of me that wants to do something else will respond by executing by the “display and feel guilt” macro… the latter macro consisting not of necessarily changing the actual behaviour, but only changing it to the extent necessary to appear remorseful to a punisher assumed to be someone other than oneself.
(— or at least that’s my guess as to what’s going on, and I will now go off and worry about whether it’s a just-so story and whether it’s useful and whether it’s testable.)
Edit: This reminds me of something parents often do. Punishment of children by parents often amounts to extracting apologies and displays of remorse from the child, with no particular expectation that the child should genuinely understand and regret what they did, or at least regret it for any reason other than the punishment itself. (Being asked/forced to apologize was always what confused me the most — usually parents say “Say you’re sorry!” right away without actually convincing the child they did something wrong, so being told to apologize felt to me like being asked to lie.) Anyway, since people get used to being able to get away with things as long as they make a convincing show of looking sorry after getting caught (which, after enough time being a child, probably feels almost indistinguishable from actually feeling sorry), it makes sense that they’d generalize that rule and get into the habit of responding to their own self-punishment the same way, once they’re broken enough that they start inflicting that kind of self-punishment at all.
The amusing part is that then people worry that displays of remorse extracted under punishment might not be sincere.
Yes, to all of the above. I think the mechanisms for learning and execution might be a bit simpler or more fundamental to the hardware than what you’ve just described, but that’s a relatively minor detail.