What if it isn’t actually possible to be “not racist” or otherwise “a good person”, at least on short timescales? What if almost every person’s behavior is morally depraved a lot of the time (according to their standards of what behavior makes someone a “good person”)? What if there are bad things that are your fault? What would be the right thing to do, then?
This paragraph (and the entire concept described in this last part of the post) is—if the words therein are taken to have their usual meanings—inherently self-contradictory.
If it’s not possible for you to do something, then it cannot possibly be your fault that you don’t do that thing. (“Ought implies can” is the classic formulation of this idea.)
Rejecting “ought implies can” turns the concepts of fault, good, etc., into parodies of themselves, and morality into nonsense. If morality isn’t about how to make the right choices, then what could it be about? Whatever that thing is, it’s not morality. If you say that according to your “morality”, I can’t be “good”, on account of there being no “right” choice available to me, my answer is: clearly, whatever you mean by “good” and “right” and “morality” isn’t what I mean by those words, and I am probably uninterested in discussing these things that you mean by those words. In other words: by my lights, you have not said anything about good or right or morality, only about some different, unrelated things (for which you have, regrettably, chosen to use these already-existing words).
“Integers,” it was once said, “are slippery … If you say something unconventional about integers, you cease to talk about them.”
I’m going to clarify what I mean by “what if it’s not possible to be a good person?”
Most people have a confused notion of what a “good person” is. According to this notion, being a “good person” requires having properties X, Y, and Z. Well, it turns out that no one, or nearly no one, has properties X&Y&Z, and also couldn’t achieve them quickly even with effort. Therefore, no one is a “good person” by that definition.
If you apply moral philosophy to this, you can find (as you point out) that this definition of “good person” is rather useless, as it isn’t even actionable. Therefore, the notion should either be amended or discarded. However, to realize this, you have to first realize that no one has properties X&Y&Z. And, to someone who accepts this notion of “good person”, this is going to feel, from the inside, like no one is a good person.
Therefore, it’s useful to ask people who have this kind of confused notion of “good person” to imagine the hypothetical where no one is a good person. Imagining such a hypothetical can lead them to refine their moral intuitions.
[EDIT: I also want to clarify “some behavior is unethical and also hard to stop”. What I mean here is that a lot of behavior is, judged for itself, unethical, in the sense that it’s bad for non-zero-sum coordination, and also that it’s hard to change one’s overall behavioral pattern to behave ethically with consistency. Which doesn’t at all imply that people who haven’t already done this are “bad people”, it just means they still take actions that are bad for non-zero-sum coordination.]
being a “good person” requires having properties X, Y, and Z. Well, it turns out that no one, or nearly no one, has properties X&Y&Z, and also couldn’t achieve them quickly even with effort. Therefore, no one is a “good person” by that definition.
Some examples of varying flavour, to see if I’ve understood:
Being a good person means not being racist, *but* being racist involves unconscious components (which Susan has limited control over because they are below conscious awareness) and structural components (which Susan has limited control over because she is not a world dictator). Therefore Susan is racist, therefore not good.
Being a good person means not exploiting other people abusively, *but* large parts of the world economy rely on exploiting people, and Bob, so long as he lives and breathes, cannot help passively exploiting people, so he cannot be good.
Alice likes to think of herself as a good person, but according to Robin Hanson, most of what she is doing turns out to be signalling. Alice is dismayed that she is a much shallower and more egotistical person than she had previously imagined.
But the problem with these criteria isn’t that they’re unsatisfiable! The problem is that they are subverted by malicious actors, who use equivocation (plus cache invalidation lag) as a sort of ‘exploit’ on people’s sense of morality. Consider:
Everyone agrees that being a good person means not being racist… if by that is meant “not knowingly behaving in a racist way”, “treating people equally regardless of race”, etc. But along come the equivocators, who declare that actually, “being racist involves unconscious and structural components”; and because people tend to be bad at keeping track of these sorts of equivocations, and their epistemic consequences, they still believe that being a good person means not being racist; but in combination with this new definition of “racist” (which was not operative when that initial belief was constructed), they are now faced with this “no one is a good person” conclusion, which is the result of an exploit.
Everyone agrees that being a good person means not exploiting people abusively… if by that is meant “not betraying trusts, not personally choosing to abuse anyone, not knowingly participating in abusive dynamics if you can easily avoid it”, etc. But along come the equivocators again, who declare that actually, “large parts of the world economy rely on exploiting people”, and that as a consequence, just existing in the modern world is exploitative! And once again, people still believe that being good means not being exploitative, yet in combination with this new definition (which, again, was not operative when the original moral belief was constructed), they’re faced with the “moral paradox” and are led to Calvinism.
If “racism” had always been understood to have “unconscious and structural components”, its avoidance (which is obviously impossible, under this formulation) could never have been accepted as a component of general virtue; and similarly for “exploitation”—if one can “exploit” merely by existing, and if this had always been understood to be part of the concept of “exploitation”, then “exploitation” wouldn’t be considered unvirtuous. But in fact the “moral exploit” consists precisely of abusing the slowness of conceptual cache invalidation, so to speak, by substituting malicious concepts for ordinary ones.
The Hansonian case is different, of course, and more complicated. It involves deeper questions, and not only moral ones but also questions of free will, etc. I do not think it is a good example of what we’re talking about, but in any case it ought to be discussed separately; it follows a very different pattern from the others.
Certainly many people do the sort of thing you’re describing, but I think you’re fighting the hypothetical. The post as I understand it is talking about people who fail to live up to their own definitions of being a good person.
For example, someone might believe that they are not a racist, because they treat people equally regardless of race, while in fact they are reluctant to shake the hands of black people in circumstances where they would be happy to shake the hands of white people. This hypothetical person has not consciously noticed that this is a pattern of behavior; from their perspective they make the individual decisions based on their feelings at the time, which do not involve any conscious intention to treat black people differently than white, and they haven’t considered the data closely enough to notice that those feelings are reliably more negative with regards to black people than white. If they heard that someone else avoided shaking black people’s hands, they would think that was a racist thing to do.
Our example, if they are heavily invested in an internal narrative of being a good non-racist sort of person, might react very negatively to having this behavior pointed out to them. It is a true fact about their behavior, and not even a very negative one, but in their own internal ontology it is the sort of thing Bad People do, as a Good Person they do not do bad things, and therefore telling them they’re doing it is (when it comes to their emotional experience) the same as telling them they are a Bad Person.
This feels very bad! Fortunately, there is a convenient loophole: if you’re a Good Person, then whoever told you you’re a Bad Person must have been trying to hurt you. How awful they are, to make such a good person as you feel so bad! (To be clear, most of this is usually not consciously reasoned through—if it were it would be easier to notice the faulty logic—but rather directly experienced as though it were true.)
I think the dynamic I describe is the same one jessicata is describing, and it is a very common human failing.
When it comes to the difficulty of being or not being a good person, I think this is a matter of whether or not it’s possible to be or not be a good person by one’s own standards (e.g., one might believe that it’s wrong to consume animal products, but be unable to become a vegan due to health concerns). If you fail to live up to your own moral standards and are invested in your self-image as the sort of person who meets them, it is tempting to revise the moral standards, internally avoid thinking about the fact that your actions lead to consequences you consider negative, treat people who point out your failings as attackers, etc.; jessicata’s proposal is one potential way to avoid falling into that trap (if you already aren’t a Good Person, then it’s not so frightening to have done something a Good Person wouldn’t do).
I think it also depends on what model of morality you subscribe to.
In the consequentialist framework, there is a best action in the set of your possible actions, and that’s what you should do. (Though we may argue that no person chooses the best action consistently all the time, and thus we are all bad.)
In the deontologist framework, sometimes all your possible actions either break some rule, or neglect some duty, if you get into a bad situation where the only possible way to fulfill a duty is to break a rule. (Here it is possible to turn all duties up to 11, so it becomes impossible for everyone to fulfill them.)
I think you get similar answers whether consequentialist or deontological.
Consequentialist: the consequences end up terrible irrespective of your actions.
Deontological: the set of rules and duties is contradictory (as you suggest) or requires superhuman control over your environment/society, or your subconscious mind.
Most people have a confused notion of what a “good person” is. According to this notion, being a “good person” requires having properties X, Y, and Z. Well, it turns out that no one, or nearly no one, has properties X&Y&Z, and also couldn’t achieve them quickly even with effort. Therefore, no one is a “good person” by that definition.
What sorts of X, Y, and Z do you have in mind? It is hard to tell whether what you’re saying here is sensible, without a bit more concreteness…
I also want to clarify “some behavior is unethical and also hard to stop”. What I mean here is that a lot of behavior is, judged for itself, unethical, in the sense that it’s bad for non-zero-sum coordination, and also that it’s hard to change one’s overall behavioral pattern to behave ethically with consistency. Which doesn’t at all imply that people who haven’t already done this are “bad people”, it just means they still take actions that are bad for non-zero-sum coordination.
Same question as above: what sorts of behavior do you have in mind, when you say this?
Also, and orthogonally to the above question: you appear to be implying (correct me if I’m misunderstanding you) that “sometimes does unethical things” implies “bad person” (either in your morality, or in the morality you impute to “most people”, or both). But this implication seems, to me, neither to hold “in truth” (that is, in anything that seems to me to be a correct morality) nor to be held as true by most people.
After all, if it were not as I say, then there would be no such notion as the morally imperfect, yet good, person! Now, it is true that, e.g., Christianity famously divides the world into saints and sinners, yet even most Christians—when they are reasoning in an everyday fashion about people they interact with, rather than reciting Sunday-school lessons—have no trouble at all thinking of people as being flawed but good.
There is, of course, also the matter that the implication of “behavior is ‘bad for non-zero-sum coordination’ → behavior is unethical” seems rather dubious, at best… but I cannot speak with any certainty on this point without seeing some examples of just what kinds of behaviors you’re talking about.
This paragraph (and the entire concept described in this last part of the post) is—if the words therein are taken to have their usual meanings—inherently self-contradictory.
If it’s not possible for you to do something, then it cannot possibly be your fault that you don’t do that thing. (“Ought implies can” is the classic formulation of this idea.)
Rejecting “ought implies can” turns the concepts of fault, good, etc., into parodies of themselves, and morality into nonsense. If morality isn’t about how to make the right choices, then what could it be about? Whatever that thing is, it’s not morality. If you say that according to your “morality”, I can’t be “good”, on account of there being no “right” choice available to me, my answer is: clearly, whatever you mean by “good” and “right” and “morality” isn’t what I mean by those words, and I am probably uninterested in discussing these things that you mean by those words. In other words: by my lights, you have not said anything about good or right or morality, only about some different, unrelated things (for which you have, regrettably, chosen to use these already-existing words).
“Integers,” it was once said, “are slippery … If you say something unconventional about integers, you cease to talk about them.”
And so with morality.
I’m going to clarify what I mean by “what if it’s not possible to be a good person?”
Most people have a confused notion of what a “good person” is. According to this notion, being a “good person” requires having properties X, Y, and Z. Well, it turns out that no one, or nearly no one, has properties X&Y&Z, and also couldn’t achieve them quickly even with effort. Therefore, no one is a “good person” by that definition.
If you apply moral philosophy to this, you can find (as you point out) that this definition of “good person” is rather useless, as it isn’t even actionable. Therefore, the notion should either be amended or discarded. However, to realize this, you have to first realize that no one has properties X&Y&Z. And, to someone who accepts this notion of “good person”, this is going to feel, from the inside, like no one is a good person.
Therefore, it’s useful to ask people who have this kind of confused notion of “good person” to imagine the hypothetical where no one is a good person. Imagining such a hypothetical can lead them to refine their moral intuitions.
[EDIT: I also want to clarify “some behavior is unethical and also hard to stop”. What I mean here is that a lot of behavior is, judged for itself, unethical, in the sense that it’s bad for non-zero-sum coordination, and also that it’s hard to change one’s overall behavioral pattern to behave ethically with consistency. Which doesn’t at all imply that people who haven’t already done this are “bad people”, it just means they still take actions that are bad for non-zero-sum coordination.]
Some examples of varying flavour, to see if I’ve understood:
Being a good person means not being racist, *but* being racist involves unconscious components (which Susan has limited control over because they are below conscious awareness) and structural components (which Susan has limited control over because she is not a world dictator). Therefore Susan is racist, therefore not good.
Being a good person means not exploiting other people abusively, *but* large parts of the world economy rely on exploiting people, and Bob, so long as he lives and breathes, cannot help passively exploiting people, so he cannot be good.
Alice likes to think of herself as a good person, but according to Robin Hanson, most of what she is doing turns out to be signalling. Alice is dismayed that she is a much shallower and more egotistical person than she had previously imagined.
But the problem with these criteria isn’t that they’re unsatisfiable! The problem is that they are subverted by malicious actors, who use equivocation (plus cache invalidation lag) as a sort of ‘exploit’ on people’s sense of morality. Consider:
Everyone agrees that being a good person means not being racist… if by that is meant “not knowingly behaving in a racist way”, “treating people equally regardless of race”, etc. But along come the equivocators, who declare that actually, “being racist involves unconscious and structural components”; and because people tend to be bad at keeping track of these sorts of equivocations, and their epistemic consequences, they still believe that being a good person means not being racist; but in combination with this new definition of “racist” (which was not operative when that initial belief was constructed), they are now faced with this “no one is a good person” conclusion, which is the result of an exploit.
Everyone agrees that being a good person means not exploiting people abusively… if by that is meant “not betraying trusts, not personally choosing to abuse anyone, not knowingly participating in abusive dynamics if you can easily avoid it”, etc. But along come the equivocators again, who declare that actually, “large parts of the world economy rely on exploiting people”, and that as a consequence, just existing in the modern world is exploitative! And once again, people still believe that being good means not being exploitative, yet in combination with this new definition (which, again, was not operative when the original moral belief was constructed), they’re faced with the “moral paradox” and are led to Calvinism.
If “racism” had always been understood to have “unconscious and structural components”, its avoidance (which is obviously impossible, under this formulation) could never have been accepted as a component of general virtue; and similarly for “exploitation”—if one can “exploit” merely by existing, and if this had always been understood to be part of the concept of “exploitation”, then “exploitation” wouldn’t be considered unvirtuous. But in fact the “moral exploit” consists precisely of abusing the slowness of conceptual cache invalidation, so to speak, by substituting malicious concepts for ordinary ones.
The Hansonian case is different, of course, and more complicated. It involves deeper questions, and not only moral ones but also questions of free will, etc. I do not think it is a good example of what we’re talking about, but in any case it ought to be discussed separately; it follows a very different pattern from the others.
Certainly many people do the sort of thing you’re describing, but I think you’re fighting the hypothetical. The post as I understand it is talking about people who fail to live up to their own definitions of being a good person.
For example, someone might believe that they are not a racist, because they treat people equally regardless of race, while in fact they are reluctant to shake the hands of black people in circumstances where they would be happy to shake the hands of white people. This hypothetical person has not consciously noticed that this is a pattern of behavior; from their perspective they make the individual decisions based on their feelings at the time, which do not involve any conscious intention to treat black people differently than white, and they haven’t considered the data closely enough to notice that those feelings are reliably more negative with regards to black people than white. If they heard that someone else avoided shaking black people’s hands, they would think that was a racist thing to do.
Our example, if they are heavily invested in an internal narrative of being a good non-racist sort of person, might react very negatively to having this behavior pointed out to them. It is a true fact about their behavior, and not even a very negative one, but in their own internal ontology it is the sort of thing Bad People do, as a Good Person they do not do bad things, and therefore telling them they’re doing it is (when it comes to their emotional experience) the same as telling them they are a Bad Person.
This feels very bad! Fortunately, there is a convenient loophole: if you’re a Good Person, then whoever told you you’re a Bad Person must have been trying to hurt you. How awful they are, to make such a good person as you feel so bad! (To be clear, most of this is usually not consciously reasoned through—if it were it would be easier to notice the faulty logic—but rather directly experienced as though it were true.)
I think the dynamic I describe is the same one jessicata is describing, and it is a very common human failing.
When it comes to the difficulty of being or not being a good person, I think this is a matter of whether or not it’s possible to be or not be a good person by one’s own standards (e.g., one might believe that it’s wrong to consume animal products, but be unable to become a vegan due to health concerns). If you fail to live up to your own moral standards and are invested in your self-image as the sort of person who meets them, it is tempting to revise the moral standards, internally avoid thinking about the fact that your actions lead to consequences you consider negative, treat people who point out your failings as attackers, etc.; jessicata’s proposal is one potential way to avoid falling into that trap (if you already aren’t a Good Person, then it’s not so frightening to have done something a Good Person wouldn’t do).
Yes, this is exactly what I mean.
I think it also depends on what model of morality you subscribe to.
In the consequentialist framework, there is a best action in the set of your possible actions, and that’s what you should do. (Though we may argue that no person chooses the best action consistently all the time, and thus we are all bad.)
In the deontologist framework, sometimes all your possible actions either break some rule, or neglect some duty, if you get into a bad situation where the only possible way to fulfill a duty is to break a rule. (Here it is possible to turn all duties up to 11, so it becomes impossible for everyone to fulfill them.)
I think you get similar answers whether consequentialist or deontological.
Consequentialist: the consequences end up terrible irrespective of your actions.
Deontological: the set of rules and duties is contradictory (as you suggest) or requires superhuman control over your environment/society, or your subconscious mind.
What sorts of X, Y, and Z do you have in mind? It is hard to tell whether what you’re saying here is sensible, without a bit more concreteness…
Same question as above: what sorts of behavior do you have in mind, when you say this?
Also, and orthogonally to the above question: you appear to be implying (correct me if I’m misunderstanding you) that “sometimes does unethical things” implies “bad person” (either in your morality, or in the morality you impute to “most people”, or both). But this implication seems, to me, neither to hold “in truth” (that is, in anything that seems to me to be a correct morality) nor to be held as true by most people.
After all, if it were not as I say, then there would be no such notion as the morally imperfect, yet good, person! Now, it is true that, e.g., Christianity famously divides the world into saints and sinners, yet even most Christians—when they are reasoning in an everyday fashion about people they interact with, rather than reciting Sunday-school lessons—have no trouble at all thinking of people as being flawed but good.
There is, of course, also the matter that the implication of “behavior is ‘bad for non-zero-sum coordination’ → behavior is unethical” seems rather dubious, at best… but I cannot speak with any certainty on this point without seeing some examples of just what kinds of behaviors you’re talking about.