Mechanics Before Ethics
Moral judgements tend to short-circuit the critical thinking process. Once something has been declared “morally wrong,” we rarely revise our opinions.
This makes sense from a practical standpoint. We don’t want a bunch of people sitting around puzzling about philosophy, seriously re-considering the idea that murder, rape, and theft are immoral. But if we care about critical thinking, we need to be extremely cautious about moral judgements. Too often, the moral judgement comes way too early—before the basic mechanics of cause and effect are sorted out—and the critical thinking process gets permanently short-circuited.
We can end up making very big mistakes.
The Worst Error is Evil
Our morality-system is hardwired and connects to our entire belief system. You can feel the depth of this hardwiring with a simple exercise.
Take note of your feelings. Imagine somebody claims, “The earth is in the center of the solar system.” You might find that amusing, but it does not activate your moral circuitry. If they are wrong about the structure of the solar system, it doesn’t really matter.
Now imagine they claim, “Rape is morally neutral. It is neither bad nor good.” That feels very different. It generates outrage, anger, disgust. These are powerful emotions which lessen our ability to think critically. It feels urgent to say, “Thinking that rape is morally neutral is itself morally wrong.”
Now hijack your rational faculties completely. Imagine listening to somebody, who you believed was serious, claim that “Rape is morally virtuous.” Would you be able to entertain a conversation with them? Probably not. You would feel too much rage, disgust, or even hatred. You might consider violence towards that person.
It’s bad to claim that “Rape is morally neutral,” but it is downright evil to claim that “Rape is virtuous.” The latter sounds like an opinion from Satan himself (and you probably won’t be able to persuade him otherwise.)
Our moral programming is so deep, it generates emotions that are powerful enough to completely override our rational faculties—and that’s a good thing. It’s there for a reason.
Premature Moralization
The trouble happens when we are too quick to judge. We might, accidentally, end up with complete moral inversion: claiming something is good that is actually bad, or vice-versa.
I call this mistake “premature moralization,” and from what I can tell, it happens at least 90% of the time people arrive at moral judgements about anything. The easiest examples are in the domain of politics:
“The minimum wage is good. Increasing it is good. Decreasing it is bad.” When the mechanics of the minimum wage have not been sorted out!
Let’s ask first: what actually happens, in the real world, when the minimum wage increases or decreases?
If it turns out that low-skilled workers are actually harmed by the minimum wage, then its strongest supporters are actually harming the people they (claim to) want to help. That’s a perfect inversion of good and bad.
Think about the relationship between economic growth and environmental health.
“Glyphosate is good because it helps farmers grow more food to feed the world!”
“Glyphosate is bad because it pollutes the environment and is dangerous to our health!”
Before we take a moral position, we must first ask: “What does glyphosate actually do, and how do we know?” We need to figure out what the costs and benefits are before we can compare them.
Of course, actually sorting out the mechanics turns out to be difficult indeed. The complexity problem is real. We need to give careful thought to the question, “How do we act when the actual costs are unknown and will remain unknown for years or decades?”
Consider the COVID-19 vaccines. There’s a whole lot of people with strong opinions about it. Their moral circuitry is activated, and by the looks of it, their rational faculties are completely shut off. In fact, they might even think it’s immoral to engage with the skeptics—that it’s akin to giving Satan a platform to explain why rape is actually virtuous.
The trouble is, the mechanics have not been sorted out. We do not know the real-world effects of the vaccines, and we will not know their full effects for decades.
The premature moralization was so extreme, people argued for mandatory vaccinations, for punishing the skeptics, censoring the dissidents, without having understood the mechanics at all. Without even trying to understand the mechanics.
Evidence is emerging that the vaccines are, in fact, not safe. And at best, they are minimally effective. So it’s actually possible that the mass vaccination campaign was one of the worst things that ever happened to humanity. The catastrophic outcome is not guaranteed, but the fact that it’s possible is a catastrophe itself.
The moral circuity was activated, which crosses wires with the fear circuitry, the hygiene circuitry, the tribal circuitry, the self-preservation circuity, etc. This made critical thinking literally impossible for millions of people, and the result is a possibly-unprecedented global disaster.
Mechanics before Ethics
As critical thinkers, we must be extremely cautious about moral judgements. If we get them wrong—if we have not actually sorted out the relevant mechanics—we greatly increase our chances of doing evil, thinking it’s good.
If you look for cases of premature moralization, I guarantee you will see them everywhere. It’s a universal problem, but if we keep our eyes open, we can mitigate it.
Let’s agree beforehand: first we sort out the mechanics, then we might graduate to the ethical discussion. If we disagree about the mechanics, we have no business talking about the ethics.
If approached this way, I suspect most moral disagreements will evaporate, because we actually disagree about the mechanics, not the ethics. Moral disagreements are usually mechanical disagreements in disguise.