I’m not sure whether I would want the level of belief in the just world to increase. According to the same ever-so-reliable wikipedia article, belief in it is associated with belief in “blaming the victim” (e.g people blaming rape victims, or stigmatizing those with diseases, especially AIDS) which is clearly wrong most of the time. It’s a comforting idea, and might in theory provoke more moral behavior if people apply it to themselves, but equality of opportunity must be achieved first otherwise it will just result in more irrational and unfair judgement about others.
The problem is it is hard to tell what amount of victim-blaming is objectively correct or incorrect. It is easy to construct the opposite, the unjust world fallacy, where what people do have totally no effect on their outcomes, they are pawns in the hands of Lady Luck. Then you need to determine where on this scale, from completely just to completely unjust, does a problem cluster lie and it is not straightforward.
In some cases, victim blaming is clearly wrong, in some other cases, failing to do that is clearly wrong, and there are a lot of cases in between. It is not intuitively clear to my why would be the AIDS stigma completely unjust, I was pounded into me from the age of 13 to never leave the house without carrying condoms, to me not using them is the equivalent of not using seat belts.
So, because the circumstances of your upbringing made you much safer from AIDS, you think blaming those with AIDS for their own problems is justified? And this is your example of why the just world fallacy might actually be a useful and accurate heuristic?
“Blame” is a moral word, and hence contentious. Let’s instead use words like “causation”, “knowledge,” and “foreseeability.”
Consider someone who got AIDS via needle-sharing. Clearly, they took actions (sharing a needle) that caused the harm in a “but-for” sense. They knew (or can be deemed to have known ) that sharing needles risks spreading blood-borne pathogens, of which AIDS is one. The harm was clearly foreseeable. So it’s quite correct to say that they caused themself to get AIDS. Indeed, if the addict had injected someone else in their sleep, which caused the injectee to get AIDS, no-one would be saying that the addict didn’t cause the injectee’s illness. Similar analysis applies for unprotected sex.
Now, whether you want to consider that “blameworthy” is complicated. Maybe you don’t think that blame is a meaningful concept, or that the “true blame” lies with the person’s genetics that predisposed them to addiction, or with their upbringing, or with drug dealers, or society generally, or whatever else. And sure, all of those other factors may well have contributed too. Which one is truly “blameworthy” is not, to me, an interesting debate.
So, if I meet someone with AIDS, I assume they probably did something avoidable and risky that caused themselves to get AIDS. On rare occasions this heuristic may be false, but in general it is a very accurate heuristic. You can call this “victim-blaming” if you like, but I don’t see any a priori reason that people can never be the authors of their own misfortune.
Well, clearly the question of whether someone got the necessary education about the dangers of AIDS stops being a problem when you’re willing to just assume they know everything they should need to know. This might be a reasonable assumption in the first world, if you also assume the vast majority of people with AIDS actually did get it from risky activities instead of just things like being born to a parent who was HIV-positive, I’m not sure what the actual statistics are on that.
No, the circumstances of my upbringing made me do things that make me safer, they did not directly, but only indirectly, through changing my behavior, caused the relative safety.
If you wouldn’t blame people for things they do, e.g. for safety precautions they have not built a habit for, then what would be the use of blame at all? You wouldn’t blame people for driving 200 km/h without a seatbelt at night blind drunk, because they had a bad upbringing where it was seen kinda normal? You gotta draw the line somewhere, and I think a sensible place to draw the blame-line is “if you would have done X and Y your outcome would be different”
Let’s not even start the free will debate, as it is entirely pointless, even if from some absolute viewpoint every behavior is externally conditioned, choice is still useful, predictive term in human interactions, because we don’t use the absolute angle, and blame just means “could have easily chosen otherwise”.
Finally, this does not demonstrate the just world heuristic is useful, it would be easy to point out there is nothing particularly just about people in 1940 could fuck everything that moves without condom and not get AIDS and in 1980 it was much harder, rather it demonstrates how the behaviors it causes are not necessarily incorrect or immoral.
What about someone raised in a bizarre alternate universe where tradition, culture and religious belief dictate that those who go faster than 30km/h while sober or in bindings have their souls eaten by demons, so everyone has to drive blind drunk without a seatbelt? It seems obvious to me that the scale on which a line has to be drawn somewhere is the extent to which you consider external factors affecting the decision when assigning blame, in which case your “sensible place” is the furthest extreme on the blame end of the scale.
What about someone raised in a bizarre alternate universe where tradition, culture and religious belief dictate that those who go faster than 30km/h while sober or in bindings have their souls eaten by demons, so everyone has to drive blind drunk without a seatbelt?
How could such a world possibly exist for more then a couple of years without people noticing that there is a problem?
I’m quite confident it wouldn’t, hence “bizarre”, but I don’t think that matters to the questions I’m actually trying to address with the hypothetical. I just used a drunk driver because that’s what DeVliegendeHollander used.
The point is that traditions, especially long established traditions, generally do in fact contain good advice.
I think the point is weaker: long established traditions do not contain self-destructive advice and contain good advice for the times in which they were created. If the circumstances have changed sufficiently, the advice of ancient traditions could, in fact, be bad.
That tendency exists, and is part of why I’m confident the thing I described as a bizarre alternate universe wouldn’t really happen, but it seems as true-but-irrelevant as the simple fact that such a tradition probably wouldn’t develop.
It is not intuitively clear to my why would be the AIDS stigma completely unjust, I was pounded into me from the age of 13 to never leave the house without carrying condoms, to me not using them is the equivalent of not using seat belts.
Are there actually parents who do that?
As far as I know, basically everyone agrees their children should be prevented from having sex for as long as possible. No, I don’t know how this makes any sense, given that for as long as possible is forever—unless you get raped, I guess. At any rate, giving you condoms implies you might have sex, so it should be unthinkable.
At the end of the day, the best remedy against sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies, as well as all kinds of social ills like drug use, is social isolation. As a bonus, the lack of social pressures to keep some personal hygiene and not become a fat slob, and generally a disgusting loser, helps you stay isolated. This will become a huge problem for you as an adult, of course, but then it’s your problem alone—it’s no longer anyone else’s responsibility.
I’m not sure whether I would want the level of belief in the just world to increase. According to the same ever-so-reliable wikipedia article, belief in it is associated with belief in “blaming the victim” (e.g people blaming rape victims, or stigmatizing those with diseases, especially AIDS) which is clearly wrong most of the time. It’s a comforting idea, and might in theory provoke more moral behavior if people apply it to themselves, but equality of opportunity must be achieved first otherwise it will just result in more irrational and unfair judgement about others.
The problem is it is hard to tell what amount of victim-blaming is objectively correct or incorrect. It is easy to construct the opposite, the unjust world fallacy, where what people do have totally no effect on their outcomes, they are pawns in the hands of Lady Luck. Then you need to determine where on this scale, from completely just to completely unjust, does a problem cluster lie and it is not straightforward.
In some cases, victim blaming is clearly wrong, in some other cases, failing to do that is clearly wrong, and there are a lot of cases in between. It is not intuitively clear to my why would be the AIDS stigma completely unjust, I was pounded into me from the age of 13 to never leave the house without carrying condoms, to me not using them is the equivalent of not using seat belts.
So, because the circumstances of your upbringing made you much safer from AIDS, you think blaming those with AIDS for their own problems is justified? And this is your example of why the just world fallacy might actually be a useful and accurate heuristic?
“Blame” is a moral word, and hence contentious. Let’s instead use words like “causation”, “knowledge,” and “foreseeability.”
Consider someone who got AIDS via needle-sharing. Clearly, they took actions (sharing a needle) that caused the harm in a “but-for” sense. They knew (or can be deemed to have known ) that sharing needles risks spreading blood-borne pathogens, of which AIDS is one. The harm was clearly foreseeable. So it’s quite correct to say that they caused themself to get AIDS. Indeed, if the addict had injected someone else in their sleep, which caused the injectee to get AIDS, no-one would be saying that the addict didn’t cause the injectee’s illness. Similar analysis applies for unprotected sex.
Now, whether you want to consider that “blameworthy” is complicated. Maybe you don’t think that blame is a meaningful concept, or that the “true blame” lies with the person’s genetics that predisposed them to addiction, or with their upbringing, or with drug dealers, or society generally, or whatever else. And sure, all of those other factors may well have contributed too. Which one is truly “blameworthy” is not, to me, an interesting debate.
So, if I meet someone with AIDS, I assume they probably did something avoidable and risky that caused themselves to get AIDS. On rare occasions this heuristic may be false, but in general it is a very accurate heuristic. You can call this “victim-blaming” if you like, but I don’t see any a priori reason that people can never be the authors of their own misfortune.
Well, clearly the question of whether someone got the necessary education about the dangers of AIDS stops being a problem when you’re willing to just assume they know everything they should need to know. This might be a reasonable assumption in the first world, if you also assume the vast majority of people with AIDS actually did get it from risky activities instead of just things like being born to a parent who was HIV-positive, I’m not sure what the actual statistics are on that.
No, the circumstances of my upbringing made me do things that make me safer, they did not directly, but only indirectly, through changing my behavior, caused the relative safety.
If you wouldn’t blame people for things they do, e.g. for safety precautions they have not built a habit for, then what would be the use of blame at all? You wouldn’t blame people for driving 200 km/h without a seatbelt at night blind drunk, because they had a bad upbringing where it was seen kinda normal? You gotta draw the line somewhere, and I think a sensible place to draw the blame-line is “if you would have done X and Y your outcome would be different”
Let’s not even start the free will debate, as it is entirely pointless, even if from some absolute viewpoint every behavior is externally conditioned, choice is still useful, predictive term in human interactions, because we don’t use the absolute angle, and blame just means “could have easily chosen otherwise”.
Finally, this does not demonstrate the just world heuristic is useful, it would be easy to point out there is nothing particularly just about people in 1940 could fuck everything that moves without condom and not get AIDS and in 1980 it was much harder, rather it demonstrates how the behaviors it causes are not necessarily incorrect or immoral.
What about someone raised in a bizarre alternate universe where tradition, culture and religious belief dictate that those who go faster than 30km/h while sober or in bindings have their souls eaten by demons, so everyone has to drive blind drunk without a seatbelt? It seems obvious to me that the scale on which a line has to be drawn somewhere is the extent to which you consider external factors affecting the decision when assigning blame, in which case your “sensible place” is the furthest extreme on the blame end of the scale.
How could such a world possibly exist for more then a couple of years without people noticing that there is a problem?
I’m quite confident it wouldn’t, hence “bizarre”, but I don’t think that matters to the questions I’m actually trying to address with the hypothetical. I just used a drunk driver because that’s what DeVliegendeHollander used.
The point is that traditions, especially long established traditions, generally do in fact contain good advice.
I think the point is weaker: long established traditions do not contain self-destructive advice and contain good advice for the times in which they were created. If the circumstances have changed sufficiently, the advice of ancient traditions could, in fact, be bad.
That tendency exists, and is part of why I’m confident the thing I described as a bizarre alternate universe wouldn’t really happen, but it seems as true-but-irrelevant as the simple fact that such a tradition probably wouldn’t develop.
Are there actually parents who do that?
As far as I know, basically everyone agrees their children should be prevented from having sex for as long as possible. No, I don’t know how this makes any sense, given that for as long as possible is forever—unless you get raped, I guess. At any rate, giving you condoms implies you might have sex, so it should be unthinkable.
At the end of the day, the best remedy against sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies, as well as all kinds of social ills like drug use, is social isolation. As a bonus, the lack of social pressures to keep some personal hygiene and not become a fat slob, and generally a disgusting loser, helps you stay isolated. This will become a huge problem for you as an adult, of course, but then it’s your problem alone—it’s no longer anyone else’s responsibility.