I think a simpler explanation is just that people are not absolutists about following social norms, so they’ll regularly violate a norm if it comes into conflict with another norm or something else. To take one example, there is a clear social norm against lying which children learn (they are told not to lie and chastised when they are caught lying). But people still lie all the time, and not just for personal benefit but also to spare other people’s feelings and, perhaps most commonly, to make social interactions go more smoothly. And instead of seeing these cases as violating the norm against lying because something else is even more important here, it seems like liars often don’t even feel like they are breaking a norm against lying. Instead, the norm against lying doesn’t even get applied to this case.
How do people manage to pull off this flexibility in applying norms? The main trick may be something as simple as: once you’ve decided on something and have a norm that matches your decision, other norms are irrelevant—there’s no need to even consider them. Although that leaves open the important question of how one norm wins in the first place. (Another possibility is that people are using something like modus tollens: lying is wrong, this is not wrong, therefore this doesn’t really count as lying.)
Eliezer and many others here are absolutists about the truth norm, but most people see it as on par with other norms, like the norm in favor of being upbeat or optimistic and the norm about people being entitled to their beliefs. And when norm absolutists run into people who are mushy about their favored norm, they may doubt that those people even have the norm.
I think a simpler explanation is just that people are not absolutists about following social norms, so they’ll regularly violate a norm if it comes into conflict with another norm or something else. To take one example, there is a clear social norm against lying which children learn (they are told not to lie and chastised when they are caught lying). But people still lie all the time, and not just for personal benefit but also to spare other people’s feelings and, perhaps most commonly, to make social interactions go more smoothly. And instead of seeing these cases as violating the norm against lying because something else is even more important here, it seems like liars often don’t even feel like they are breaking a norm against lying. Instead, the norm against lying doesn’t even get applied to this case.
How do people manage to pull off this flexibility in applying norms? The main trick may be something as simple as: once you’ve decided on something and have a norm that matches your decision, other norms are irrelevant—there’s no need to even consider them. Although that leaves open the important question of how one norm wins in the first place. (Another possibility is that people are using something like modus tollens: lying is wrong, this is not wrong, therefore this doesn’t really count as lying.)
Eliezer and many others here are absolutists about the truth norm, but most people see it as on par with other norms, like the norm in favor of being upbeat or optimistic and the norm about people being entitled to their beliefs. And when norm absolutists run into people who are mushy about their favored norm, they may doubt that those people even have the norm.