
The Case for Being Skeptical of Moral Outrage - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/the-case-for-being-skeptical-of-moral-outrage
======
hirundo
What's the right amount of moral outrage? Gedankenexperiment. Install a moral
outrage volume meter on our species, dial the the calendar back ten million
years, and play it forward with various outrage volumes. Plot moral outrage
volume against H. sapiens biomass in the present day. I'd expect a mass of
zero grams at volume zero and zero grams at volume eleven (say, by
definition), and an inverted U curve in between.

So lacking the time machine and the outrage rheostat, how do we discover the
correct amount of outrage? Do we have too much or too little now, and how can
we tell? I can't even guess.

~~~
DiseasedBadger
Your assumptions seem unlikely. There is no proof moral outrage is on the
whole a good thing. No other species requires it.

The proper null hypothesis is that it does nothing.

~~~
saghm
> Your assumptions seem unlikely. There is no proof moral outrage is on the
> whole a good thing. No other species requires it.

I don't see why that's a compelling argument; no other species requires
written languages either, but I think on the whole it's been a pretty good
investment for ours.

------
siruncledrew
> “What the researchers found is that participants’ expressions of moral
> outrage were mostly independent from their empathy for the victims of the
> transgressions. What triggered moral outrage in their study was whether a
> particular behavior seemed intrinsically wrong—that is, wrong even if it
> didn’t harm anyone.”

This is one of the problems with moral outrage in today’s internet context.
It’s easy to stir up outrage over very little, and then snowball that outrage
into a huge debacle over something that ends up being distanced and deceptive.
We can just point a finger at someone and assert they are morally guilty
without hesitation as long as enough of our peers support it. This is a system
like 1600s Salem where someone could point a finger and say “She’s a witch!”
out of speculation.

Turns out people still love a good witch hunt, and the media/Twitter is the
reverand pointing the finger at the supposed witches at a whim. We think we’ve
come a long way over 400 years, but it turns out human emotion doesn’t change
that quickly.

Another issue with moral outrage is that once the charges are dumped on the
“guilty” party it’s very hard to disprove them to the public; plus there is
little retribution on the party pointing the finger to begin with. How many of
those “witches” were actually witches? The internet “trials” of today are
about as vigorous as the witch trials back then.

I can understand why “moral outrage warriors” do what they do; they are
driving away immorality and threatening forces from society and protecting and
preserving the peace. Yet it turns out the road to hell is paved with good
intentions. We are at the point where there is not even reaction to action, we
have reaction to supposed action.

------
ykevinator
You lost me at vituperative. I hate smartest guy in the room syndrome.

~~~
duado
Vituperative? That’s a pretty common word known by most well-educated people.
I definitely hate thousand dollar word syndrome but this isn’t really it.

~~~
squish78
[https://www.reddit.com/r/iamverysmart/](https://www.reddit.com/r/iamverysmart/)

