It almost always took a personal plea from a persecuted person for altruism to kick in. Once they weren’t just an anonymous member of indifferent crowd, once they were left with no escape but to do a personal moral choice, they often found out that they are not able to refuse help.
This is a crux. I think a better way to look at it is they didn’t have an opportunity to clarify their preference until the situation was in front of them. Otherwise, it’s too distant and hypothetical to process, similar to scope insensitivity (the 2,000⁄20,000/200,000 oil-covered birds thing).
The post-hoc cognitive dissonance angle seems like a big find, and strongly indicates that reliably moral supermen can be produced at scale given an optimized equilibria for them to emerge from.
Stable traits (possibly partially genetic) are likely highly relevant to not-yet-clarified preferences, of course. Epistemics here are difficult due to expecting short inferential distances; Duncan Sabien gave an interesting take on this in a facebook post:
Also, if your worldview is such that, like. *Everyone* makes awful comments like that in the locker room, *everyone* does angle-shooting and tries to scheme and scam their way to the top, *everyone* is looking out for number one, *everyone* lies …
… then *given* that premise, it makes sense to view Trump in a positive light. He’s no worse than everybody else, he’s just doing the normal things that everyone does, with the *added layer* that he’s brave enough and candid enough and strong enough that he *doesn’t have to pretend he doesn’t.*
Admirable! Refreshingly honest and clean!
So long as you can’t conceive of the fact that lots of people are actually just …...............… good. They’re not fighting against urges to be violent or to rape, they’re not biting their tongues when they want to say scathing and hurtful things, they’re not jealous and bitter and willing to throw others under the bus to get ahead. They’re just … fundamentally not interested in any of that.
(To be clear: if you are feeling such impulses all the time and you’re successfully containing them or channeling them and presenting a cooperative and prosocial mask: that is *also* good, and you are a good person by virtue of your deliberate choice to be good. But like. Some people just really *are* the way that other people have to *make* themselves be.)
It sort of vaguely rhymes, in my head, with the type of person who thinks that *everyone* is constantly struggling against the urge to engage in homosexual behavior, how dare *those* people give up the good fight and just *indulge* themselves … without realizing that, hey, bro, did you know that a lot of people are just straight? And that your internal experience is, uh, *different* from theirs?
This is a crux. I think a better way to look at it is they didn’t have an opportunity to clarify their preference until the situation was in front of them. Otherwise, it’s too distant and hypothetical to process, similar to scope insensitivity (the 2,000⁄20,000/200,000 oil-covered birds thing).
The post-hoc cognitive dissonance angle seems like a big find, and strongly indicates that reliably moral supermen can be produced at scale given an optimized equilibria for them to emerge from.
Stable traits (possibly partially genetic) are likely highly relevant to not-yet-clarified preferences, of course. Epistemics here are difficult due to expecting short inferential distances; Duncan Sabien gave an interesting take on this in a facebook post: