If your intentions are good, if they conform to the general received values of your friends, family, and co-workers, what a person of your class and social milieu is supposed to think, everything is fine. You are that “good” person. You are ratified. You can do anything you wish. It doesn’t matter in the slightest what the results of those ideas and beliefs are, or how society, the country, and in some cases, the world suffers from them. It doesn’t matter that they misfire completely, cause terror attacks, illness, death, riots in the inner city, or national bankruptcy. You will be applauded and approved of.
…Moral narcissism is the ultimate “Get out of jail free” card in a real-life Monopoly game. No matter what you do, if you have the right opinions, if you say the right things to the right people, you’re exempt from punishment. People will remember your pronouncements, not your actions.
This is from a forthcoming book.
He attempts to rope social conservatives and libertarians into his thesis. I am not sure that this works so well. Social conservatives may be wrong-headed, and some turn out to be hypocritical, but I do not see them as trying to use political posturing in order to avoid accountability for the consequences of their actions. Perhaps you can come up with enough examples to prove me wrong on that.
I think that the charge sticks better with some libertarians. When they agree with progressives, libertarians can be as preening and morally narcissistic as, well, progressives.
Also, I think that libertarians share with progressives a certain adolescent inability to admit the benefits of an institution they dislike. In the case of progressives, the difficulty is with admitting the benefits of free markets. In the case of libertarians, the difficulty is with admitting the benefits of government. For all the misguided actions that government takes, you should not take it for granted that you will have internal peace or effective urban sanitation without it.
Moral narcissism allows one to disengage from reality. Paradoxically, the moral narcissist tends to deny that humans have a propensity to be evil while believing in the evil of one’s political opponents.
Great post. Pretty quickly it reminded me of some of the topics covered in Robert L. Triver’s fairly recent book _The folly of fools: The logic of deceit and self-deception in human life_.
A deep (that is to say, core) idea in much of Triver’s work is that many of the bugs or “faults” in the human mind are “not bugs but features.” Self-deception is one of these, the better to deceive others, with the ultimate victory being “reproductive success.”
Getting back to the blog post of the day, moral narcissism might possibly be linked with self-deceit–so it’s hard to get people to realize they are doing it. And why is it it good? Probably increased opportunities for income / resources / status–or at least that’s a good working hypothesis.
Conservatives have difficulty admitting to the downsides of church and religion.
It’s boring and it takes up time we could spend doing something more productive.
Wow, you’re right, that was difficult!
At first, I read this as “taking the time to admit would be boring take up time.” What’s funny is I agreed.
That is kind of funny, yeah.
Liberals sit around thinking “is there a god?” Conservatives sit in church thinking “where’s lunch?”
“Social conservatives may be wrong-headed, and some turn out to be hypocritical, but I do not see them as trying to use political posturing in order to avoid accountability for the consequences of their actions. […] I think that the charge sticks better with some libertarians.”
Indeed though this will be an unpopular fact to state in this forum, the entire point of abortion is avoiding accountability for the consequences of your actions.
What we have here is a straight-forward case of what we call “projection.”
Good point, Andrew. I think the hotel analogy describes the moral problem of abortion quite well.
I think abortion was a poor choice on Mr. Simon’s part to demonstrate conservative narcissism (there are ample better examples). Take this quote for instance:
> Similarly, social conservatives, putatively strong adherents of small government, veer equally strongly to the side of government intervention where abortion is concerned, wanting it forbidden by the state. Again, this frequently works at cross-purposes, since the women whose abortions they wish to forbid are often already opposed to abortion themselves.
This struck me as completely nonsensical for two major reasons:
– Conservatives are for small government, but not no government. The support government intervention in a few core areas, like preventing/punishing murder because that’s one of the few actual purposes for having a government.
– Most women (and most people in general) who appose abortion do so because they believe it is murder. Does he really think there is much of an overlap between those who think abortion is murder and those who think it should still be the woman’s choice? I don’t know of any such overlap.
Honest question: does anyone else know people who appose abortion on moral grounds but still think it should be the woman’s legal choice?
“Honest question: does anyone else know people who appose abortion on moral grounds but still think it should be the woman’s legal choice?”
That’s roughly my position. There are many things I find morally distasteful* but think others who do not share my preferences should be allowed to do.
* (does this qualify as “oppose”?)
I can understand having such an attitude about gambling or being a drunk. But not all moral questions are live and let live issues. That’s nihilistic.
That’s mostly right. I can see viewing abortion as the taking of innocent life, and favoring it’s legality. However, to be intellectually consistent, you’d have to view government power as so dangerous that your politics would be minarchist at most.
The boundaries for the justification of taking another life is not always clean and can be recognized as legitimately varying between people. Suppose somebody shoots a burglar carrying away his expensive computer from his house. One might say it is not right to kill somebody when there is no other life being threatened, but accept that somebody else should be allowed to shoot without penalty.
People’s opinions on matters of morality can and do vary widely. There were serious arguments for the moral uprightness of slavery. I have to admit rather than having the impulse to just live with such a wide moral space, I’m more unnerved by it, and the implied bounds on socially acceptable behavior. People whose view of what constitutes murder different drastically from your own are not desirable to live amongst.
The limiting case for widely varying views as to what constitutes murder, is the murderer who does not think he’s a murderer because he’s a sociopath who regards everyone else as a lesser being without the right to live.
But I consider myself a minarchist, so the point about state power is well taken. I think there are ways to peacefully exclude those with such views.
Hm, maybe the tack of William Lloyd Garrison. No Union with Abortionists!
“For all the misguided actions that government takes, you should not take it for granted that you will have internal peace or effective urban sanitation without it.”
I think there are some well-argued theories of how we could handle those problems and many examples of how we have without the state.
Libertarians aren’t all utilitarians. The fundamental moral claim most libertarians make is deontological: no one has a right to engage in initiatory violence against someone else.
The state may be effective to one degree or another at taking out the garbage, but libertarians argue it is an inherently rights-violating institution.
What do you think the split between utilitarian and deontological libertarians is? I used to be a utilitarian libertarian myself, and what aspects I still find useful I retain. If we talk solely about academic libertarians maybe its more deontological, but if we include your garden variety small L libertarian middle class person?
I get the impression that with nearly all moral philosophies there is a mixture of the two, but that in rhetorical terms we tend to emphasize the deontological more then we really weight it for decision making. It’s way easier to argue, “this is RIGHT,” as opposed to, “this is probably the best of a series of tradeoffs given the information we have right now. Furthermore, we will never be able to understand the entire context but real life requires action to be taken at some point.”
“The fundamental moral claim most libertarians make is deontological: no one has a right to engage in initiatory violence against someone else.”
My own experience talking with self-identified libertarians, sadly, is that the definition of “initiatory violence” is liable to change without warning – sometimes even multiple times – as problems that follow from the initial implied definition (practical problems such as are broached in the original blog post above) are pointed out.
Thus, however honestly it may be meant as a position statement, “no one has a right to engage in initiatory violence against someone else” is quite vacuous as long as there is no agreement on the definition of “initiatory violence”.
A very good article in general.
On the social conservative front I agree with him on abortion. I don’t like it morally, but the political campaign has been a massive misdirected waste. If anything abortion has been one of those ways that gullible religious folks are conned into voting for GOP shysters who will check off the against abortion box. How many people have I seen vote for someone they disagree with on the economy, war, education, etc all because they’re against abortion (and not really, its just a con).
On this though I’ll disagree.
“Here certain beliefs work at cross-purposes, as in the opposition to gay marriage when the impulse that gays have to formalize their union is often highly bourgeois and essentially conservative. ”
I here this all the time, but I see zero actual evidence of it. The number of gay people getting and staying married is very small. This hasn’t changed with the advent of gay marriage, nor is it any better in the liberal parts of the country. If anything, behavior patterns in many of the big liberal cities are worse.
Gays are dysfunctional. Something went wrong in the wiring. Supporting gay marriage isn’t really about marriage, its about supporting the gay lifestyle. Which is essentially the “consenting adults” philosophy. This has had devastating affects on both the gay and straight community, though obviously its worse with gays because they are off in the head. I see it every day in the STD stats at my job, and we can all see it on display at those pride parades.
One way you can tell gay marriage isn’t about marriage is how the central issue of the movement is punishing and humiliating others. Whether its getting Brandon Eich fired or going around town to find the one christian baker so that you can make demands on them. People looking to form a loving relationship don’t do that sort of thing. If anything, they want to be left alone to live their lives.
I think the confusion comes form the fact that people socialize with people like themselves. The condo next to me has what appears to be a stable gay couple. One is a Harvard surgeon. They seem to have it together and be pretty normal. I imagine that is what upper middle class people think when they think gay marriage.
They are the exception though. Their behavior has more to do with who they are (the kind of people who become Harvard surgeons) then it is a proxy for what the gay community is like. UMC people meet people of all races, religions and orientations who have passed the social filters to be a part of their community, and then assume that is how the rest of the world is. Little do they realize these are the rare exceptions, and that is part of why they seem so underrepresented.
All the way down the social class ladder, gay behavior is worse then equivalent straight behavior. At the higher levels sometimes there is enough conscientiousness to keep it secret on the weekends.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/09/europe/chemsex-drugs-death-henry-hendron-lawyer/?iid=ob_lockedrail_bottomlist
And farther down the ladder things get worse:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xufh8XysHJ4
How this plays out at the church level I have a good example of. A little while back we had a young gay man come by wanting to be a part of our community. He had read a few Christian books and decided he was a Christian. It was pretty easy to see through this. He was a young pencil necked intellectual, and he had a new philosophy every few months based on something he read. A real novelty addict. And despite wanting to be Catholic he didn’t want to accept the churches teachings on gays. He didn’t just want marriage changed either, he was still sleeping around when he wanted to join.
I told my friend that this was a fad, and that this guy was just going to burn out on his new novelty in three months, and that in the meantime his plan to recruit new gay Christians from his anarchist/marxist book club (contradiction much) was just going to cause all sorts of problems. But don’t you know JESUS LOVES. And of course gay marriage is the new evolution in human kindness that Jesus would want. Or if not that, we should at least love and accept this person *as they are*.
Well, the gay dude moves in with him because he needs a place to live (not reliable enough to hold a job and pay rent). Predictably, there is a lot of drugs and sex going on in the apartment for a year, after which he gets the person to leave and admits to me that gays are pretty messed up and all that stuff he though was hateful stereotyping seemed to be true. Maybe that Bible’s stance on homosexuality wasn’t totally random.
As to nice gay couples like the guy next door, gay marriage hasn’t changed all that much for them. I know people like them from a generation before and they just shacked up and played house. People who want to be together find a way, they don’t need a piece of paper.
Why is he ignoring the centrality of “moral narcissism” to liberals/progressives? I don’t think they consider the possibility of failure of their programs. When was the last time a lib/prog admitted that a major initiative failed or actually made things worse?
Off the top of my head; 1. the centrist left seems to be turning en masse against the anti-crime policies they supported in the 90s. 2. Obama himself has cited how he handled Libya as one of his greatest regrets. 3. Welfare reform probably serves as a double example of the left deciding they were wrong to support a policy — centrist dems decided they were wrong to support AFDC when they embraced TANF in the 90s, now Dems seem to be saying, “Nope, we were right the first time and AFDC was better than TANF.” 4. While Dems think the ACA is (mostly) working great, they all admitted that the tech side of it was a disaster. 5.
Lots of dems have publically stated they were wrong to support the Iraq war. 6. Lots have said they were wrong to support civil unions instead of marriage equality, 7. Dems overwhelming supported no child left behind but have said it has problems and overwhelming voted to replace it by supporting the Every Student Succeeds Act.
2. Obama would never admit that the whole operation was misguided, but only that the implementation was not good. 3. Dems always hated it and Obama has tried to reverse it, in spite of its clearly beneficial effects 4. Yeah, right. They can’t admit what a stinker it us, kept afloat only by arbitrary illegal changes to the plain text of the law. 5. Most of them claim that Bush lied to them. Of course, Obama also pissed away a peaceful Iraq because he wants to say that he had gotten us out, but we are sneaking back in to fix the mess. 6. If any Dems did this, it is only because Dem voters moved left more quickly. I don’t think gay “marriage” was any hot shakes. Once the initial euphoria died down, the left moved quickly to the transgender insanity. I don’t think many such gay “marriages” have really taken place.
The anti-crime policies the “center”-left is turning against were conservative policies that mainstream Democrats supported, back in the 90s, out of political duress and calculation. Even Democratic voters were sick of crime and demanded that the politicians do something about it. Leftist politicians are always ready to apologize for not being as far left as their base would like, and to place the blame on evil GOP demagoguery and stupid voters who don’t know what’s good for them (like leniency toward violent criminals, which will no doubt be a great boon to those of us who don’t live in gated communities or have armed bodyguards). Leftist politicians also stand ready to apologize to their self-adoring base for not being vicious enough to their political opponents. What wonderful people.
Well if your standard is “they are ideological narcissist unless they admit they are wrong about everything and apologize for supporting leftist positions” then I think you’ve revealed more about your ideological narcissism than theirs.
Point is no, of course liberals rarely admit the core tenants of liberalism are false and denounce the welfare state, or something, and of course most of their Meae culpae don’t challenge their core beliefs. Question is whether they have enough honesty to face facts and change their mind at the margin and I think a lot of them do. Just so, libertarians rarely say “I looked into it and big government is actually great,” but you can still tell the difference between the libertarian who thinks he was always right about everything and the one who says “this made me rethink immigration reform” or “this made me consider basic income” or whatever.
Clinton foundation pays women less, but Hillary is for equal pay, so she’s fine.
It’s more of an ontological failure. Libertarians believe their moral reasonings are, to the extent possible, perfect. So there fore, the real world outcomes must be perfect as well. Anyone who thinks differently is thus, by definition, seeking to do harm.
Social conservatives may be wrong-headed, and some turn out to be hypocritical, but I do not see them as trying to use political posturing in order to avoid accountability for the consequences of their actions. Perhaps you can come up with enough examples to prove me wrong on that.
I don’t think Social conservatives are not wrong-headed, but their ideas depend upon local institutions to manage their populations. But they don’t have the support of the global economics which limits their impact and leads very clunky state laws.
> But they don’t have the support of the global economics which limits their impact and leads very clunky state laws.
Indeed, but that’s the point. Genuine conservative politics is decidedly local in its focus, and what some might call “clunkly state laws” others might call “laws which reflect the traditions and mores of the people governed”.
“In the case of progressives, the difficulty is with admitting the benefits of free markets.”
This seems unfair. The Dems have been nominating pro-market New Democrats for 25 years. I mean, DLC democrats obviously don’t go as far as libertarians in embracing free markets, but it’s still a party run by pro-free trade, “the free market needs regulation but is good” type liberals, not protectionist, “socialize the means of production!” type liberals. Here’s Obama on free trade: “There are some who believe that we must try to turn back the clock on this new world; that the only chance to maintain our living standards is to build a fortress around America; to stop trading with other countries, shut down immigration, and rely on old industries. I disagree. Not only is it impossible to turn back the tide of globalization, but efforts to do so can make us worse off.”
Obviously Clintonite dems are more socialist in the realms of education and medicine than in other sectors of the economy, but so are Bush republicans!
Just as obviously, if you go looking you can certainly find tons of progressives who are stolidly anti-market, and you could argue the party is drifting more in that direction, but with Trump running a protectionist campaign and getting the nomination I think you could levy the same charge on the right.
Except Obama’s statement is wrong. Shutting off immigration would be great for the American middle class. As would not running massive trade deficits we finance with debt we can’t repay (hint: when they buy treasuries that isn’t “investing in America”, unless you’ve decided all of a sudden the government invested that money well). Do you think running up a current account with a country that had to buy our Iraq war debt and Fannie/Freddie bonds to hold the peg and then plow it all back into building ghost cities is a successful free market enterprise?
Then again “free market” today just means saying nice things about rich people, regardless of how they got their money or what they are doing with it. Who cares if your trade deal is based on government run currency peg, leads to massive economic imbalances and a distortion of productive capacity, and is thousands of pages of legislation written by lobbyists. FREE TRADE!!! What are you racist?
Dems have adopted free market stances in the worst ways to be free market. All the anti-middle class ways. If anything they’ve double downed on supporting their wing of the crony capitalists while invoking free enterprise to justify it. I don’t see them challenging law, medicine, or banking. No free market there, those are donors!
Obamacare is a great example actually. It’s a miserable failure of a program (don’t tell me more people are covered, its all payed for by middle class people that got nothing out of the deal. I can cover more people by spending other people’s money too). It has none of the efficiencies of either a heavily free market solution or single payer. It merely extends the existing public/private clusterfuck model that has made our healthcare system the least efficient in the developed world.
That’s what “centrist” democrats are about now. Getting more government money thrown at some new 2,000 page legislation that they can get hired on as high priced consultants to navigate. I know, I watched the whole thing when I worked on Obamacare.
The mainstream of both left and right is pro-free market when it means driving down middle class living standards and anti-free market when it means competing themselves. There’s been no “evolution” of market opinion of the Dem side. They realized underclass votes are cheaper to buy then middle class union votes, so they they abandoned the white working class for a high/low coalition of protected UMC professional guilds and EBT recipient vote banks. EBT cards were way cheaper then middle class wages, and also you could get your kid a job running the program distributing the EBT.
No it couldn’t possibly have anything to say about conservatives who have nothing to say about morality other than always being 100% correct whatever shortcomings they may have in practice.
The limitation of markets is they don’t provide morals or values.
There are some useful points made in this brief interpretive essay about Burnham’s
_Suicide of the West_.
http://www.chiltonwilliamson.com/books/the_conservative_bookshelf_suicide_of_the_west.html
Especially I am thinking about this paragraph. Burnham’s work came out during the Cold War, but it still is useful today. The following quote is Chilton’s essay:
“Universalism, relativism, materialism, moral perfectionism, guilt, self-criticism amounting to self-hatred, ideological reflex self-disguised as scientific thinking, anti-establishmentarianism, perpetual social and spiritual restlessness, endless reform and the ceaseless sturm und drang accompanying it-plainly, liberalism is not the governing philosophy appropriate to a beleaguered civilization engaged in the greatest struggle for existence in its history.”
Am I missing something in saying… what about banning things? Like drugs and, as someone says above, abortion?