
Buy Local, Act Evil - cwan
http://www.slate.com/id/2237674/
======
brewsski
Makes more sense than you realize. I went to a very liberal college (Berkeley)
and sometimes it was hard to believe the sense of entitlement among the
students.

This was most pronounced in pedestrians: they ignore traffic lights and j-walk
at will. If you ever spoke to them about it, they would give you something
along the lines of "I am an earth-saving pedestrian, you are an environment-
killing driver of a gas guzzler- ergo I _always_ have the right of way.

Not everyone was like that, but a good percentage of people were.

~~~
camccann
You should have pointed out to them that fuel efficiency and pollution from
automobile engines are worsened by having to decelerate/accelerate. In other
words, if you force someone in a car to slow down (or, heaven forbid, stop)
you're tangibly increasing the amount of damage being done to the environment.

~~~
systemtrigger
To which the pedestrian may counter, That is true but I am also
disincentivizing drivers from driving in the future. My walking inconveniences
their driving. Over time, my community of insubordinate pedestrians may
significantly reduce the incentive to drive. It's uncool to drive in Portland
Oregon because pedestrians and bicyclists have challenged and won over
motorists.

------
astine
A thought, perhaps this like exercise? If you workout for an hour, you'll
generally get tired and need to rest. However, if you work out everyday for a
week, you'll get stronger and be able to workout longer and harder.

Suppose moral fiber works this way? At first, as you work on your behavior,
you can only do so much and simple sacrifices seem like a huge burden. As you
continue, you conscience becomes stronger and doing 'the right thing' becomes
more the norm and former behavior seems more extreme.

\---

Also possible, that 'virtuous consumption' is pursued for social status and
not virtue, and so people who engage in it for this reason are entitled jerks
as a matter of course.

~~~
camccann
It's worth noting that studies have shown that applying "willpower" works
exactly that way. Specifically, making conscious decisions to override
subconscious impulses depletes cognitive resources in a measurable way, with
some evidence that doing so repeatedly increases the amount of willpower
reserves in the long-term.

As an aside, I wouldn't assume that people are "entitled jerks" as such--even
if it's all just social status signalling, they're almost certainly not
consciously aware of it.

~~~
astine
I think we might have different understandings of what makes one an 'entitled
jerk.' Aristotle believed that people who did wrong but believed that what
they were doing was right, were ethically worse than those that knew what they
were doing was wrong. He argued that to confuse vice for virtue signaled more
fundamental problems than simply the inclination to give into temptation. With
this understanding, not being aware that you are an 'entitled jerk' simply
makes you _more_ of a jerk.

Note that I'm _not_ implying that every who buys organic produce is an
'entitled jerk.' People and their motives have to be judged on an individual
basis.

~~~
camccann
I think you, like Aristotle, wildly overestimate conscious awareness.

I'm not talking about doing wrong and believing it to be right, or even doing
something without realizing it was wrong. I'm talking about _just doing
something_ without consciously knowing _why you did it at all_. The primary
role of the conscious mind is not to make choices, but to rationalize after
the fact the actions undertaken at the (largely amoral) subconscious's
command. Expecting someone to always know why they made a decision is an
_impossibly_ high standard.

The general inability to correctly interpret one's own motivations is
discussed here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection_illusion> Note
that this is not a cognitive defect, but the _standard state of affairs_. See
also <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation> and
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia> for when it goes more wrong than
normal. A few examples:

Implicit Association Tests may be more accurate than conscious introspection
in identifying prejudice.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_Association_Test>

Grandmothers are hard-wired to be biased against some grandchildren vs.
others. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=941739>

More directly relevant to this article, skim some of the posts on social
signalling at <http://www.overcomingbias.com/tag/signaling> and realize that,
while the author uses intentional language of decisions and preferences, most
of what he's talking about are the sort of choices heavily subject to
conscious delusion.

To summarize, accurate knowledge of one's own decision-making process is the
exception, not the rule, and if questioned people are more likely to provide
an ad-hoc rationalization based on inaccurate self-perception than anything
resembling the actual reasons, and believe whole-heartedly that the
rationalization is correct. To summarize the summary, nobody's generally aware
of why they're doing whatever it is they're doing. To summarize the summary of
the summary, being a person is a problem. [0]

[0] With apologies to D. Adams.

~~~
astine
I have no idea what the any of that has to do with the discussion at hand. My
point is that it's what you do and how you behave that makes you an entitled
jerk or not, not whether you have introspection or not.

~~~
camccann
My point is that you're calling people jerks for something they probably have
very little control over and are helplessly unaware of. If you're walking
behind someone with a broken leg, do you complain that they should be walking
faster?

Perhaps you don't intend the term "jerk" to carry overtones of moral
responsibility or social judgement, but that's a fairly common connotation.

~~~
astine
You're implying nobody has any real control over what their actions and
thereby assigning killers and rocks about the same level moral culpability.
This may be rational if you accept a mechanist understanding of human behavior
(as you explicated in your previous post) but if that's the case, it becomes
ridiculous to argue about 'morality' in general. Moral judgment becomes just a
tool to modify undesirable behavior and indignation in this case is perfectly
'justified.'

Put another way, yelling at a cripple is not likely to give them their health
back, but guilting an insensitive 'jerk' will (likely) cause them to change
their behavior to something more socially acceptable.

~~~
camccann
_You're implying nobody has any real control over what their actions and
thereby assigning killers and rocks about the same level moral culpability._

No, I'm just saying that the default state is to have neither control nor
awareness of decision-making. Actual conscious decision-making is possible
with effort and, to the extent that morality is a well-defined concept, it
applies only to conscious minds.

 _guilting an insensitive 'jerk' will (likely) cause them to change their
behavior to something more socially acceptable._

Not necessarily, if their reasons for behaving that way are unknown to them.
More likely their mind will confabulate something sensible-sounding that fits
their pre-existing world-view and (unless they already hold a positive
disposition toward you) they'll just write _you_ off as being a jerk, after
all, you're attacking them for something they had a perfectly valid reason to
do... they think.

~~~
astine
_No, I'm just saying that the default state is to have neither control nor
awareness of decision-making. Actual conscious decision-making is possible
with effort and, to the extent that morality is a well-defined concept, it
applies only to conscious minds._

In which case they are culpable for not forming good habits (and we are back
at Aristotle.) You're not going to get very far telling me that people are not
responsible for acting like jerks because either you deny human moral choice
altogether, or at some level they are.

------
zaphar

        But new research by Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong at the
        University of Toronto levels an even graver charge: that
        virtuous shopping can actually lead to immoral behavior.
        In their study (described in a paper now in press at
        Psychological Science), subjects who made simulated
        eco-friendly purchases ended up less likely to exhibit
        altruism in a laboratory game and more likely to cheat
        and steal.
    

The conclusion the story draws from the study is really more of a correlation
than a causation. It's just as possible that the people who buy virtuously are
the type of people who cheat and are stingy rather than buying virtuously
causing the "evil" behaviour. The linked study actually doesn't seem to imply
causation so Slate is obviously spicing up the story a little.

~~~
lionhearted
It was random assignment/controlled:

> In an experiment, participants were randomly assigned to select items they
> wanted to buy in one of two online stores. One store sold predominantly
> green products, the other mostly conventional items.

That said, interesting point by you. I'd guess the causation can run both ways
- doing superficial good gives you the moral license they were talking about,
but also maybe bad people want to compensate and wash their sins away with
some public good behavior.

------
hexis
I tend to think that a lot of human activity comes down to seeking status and
exercising status. "Buy local" is seeking status and "act evil" is exercising
status. I'm sure it's more complicated that than, but I think this is a good
framework for getting a rough draft of understanding the behavior.

------
polynomial
Makes perfect sense, really, if evil is just the most _local_ scope of self-
interest…

