Moral regress is annoying too

I wish more people rolled their eyes at the norm changes that have hurt me.

Daniel Kelly and

Evan Westra

recently wrote a widely circulated Aeon article entitled "Moral progress is annoying". It would have been more convincing – but also go against their agenda – if they added: "and so is moral regress."

The article notes that when faced with changes in social norms, like declaring a certain term offensive or being expected to share pronouns, it is common for us to react with annoyance and irritation, most visibly expressed in the physical gesture of rolling our eyes. Kelly and Westra argue that this reaction is inappropriate:

we think that the eyeroll heuristic is a serious obstacle to moral progress. Many genuinely good arguments for moral change will be initially experienced as annoying. Moreover, the emotional responses that people feel in these situations are not typically produced by psychological processes that are closely tracking argument structure or responding directly to moral reasons. Instead, they stem from psychological mechanisms that enable people to adapt to local norms – what’s called our norm psychology.

Specifically, they claim that the annoyed eyeroll represents what they call affective friction:

When a person’s norm psychology is misaligned with the rules and customs around her, norms make their presence acutely felt.... Instead of fluency, we have disfluency, which can be stressful, frustrating and exhausting – just ask any North American tourist who has been cursed at by a Berlin cyclist after wandering into a bike lane, or been panicked by their first encounter with a squat toilet. Call this affective friction.

Because it is affective friction, they argue, the eyeroll is not really a rational response: "As tempting as it can be to interpret the unpleasant feelings as your moral compass ringing alarm bells, your annoyance is just a feature of your norm psychology becoming misaligned and reacting to the unfamiliar."

Now Kelly and Westra are right that the annoyed eyeroll is a gut reaction rather than a rationally considered one. But the eyeroll is not unusual in that regard. Most of our actions, in a moral domain or any other, aren't based on considered rationality. Crucially, that is just as true of the eyeroll's opposite: namely bandwagon-jumping, the enthusiastic adoption of a new norm because it is a new norm, irrespective of whether that new norm actually benefits those it is supposed to help.

And for that reason, I am in favour of the eyeroll as a heuristic – because I have spent far too much of the past decade being the butt of the bandwagon! I spent most of the past decade, in my work and personal life, surrounded by the extremely left-wing postgraduate-educated denizens of academic-adjacent metropolitan Boston. There, white cis people around me jumped on every progressive-looking bandwagon they could, without considering the reasons not to do so, and without any consultation from the people they claimed to be helping. As one of those people, I can speak with some confidence that I wish there had been more eyerolls.

Let's start with the example Kelly and Westra use most frequently, the custom of declaring pronouns. In 2019 I was still in the closet about being gender-fluid. A work conference expected that people declare their pronouns on their name badges. I'm sure that all the cisgender organizers thought that that new norm would be helpful to people like me. But it actually put me in a difficult bind: I could list female pronouns and out myself prematurely; I could risk censure by going against the new norm and refusing to list pronouns at all; or I could take the action I actually took, which was to give myself dysphoria by putting exclusive he/him pronouns on the badge even as I was coming into my own as gender-fluid. As a person whose gender identity doesn't correspond to biological sex, I would have felt far more included, far more welcome, if they had just kept the old norm and not said anything about pronouns. I wish more people had rolled their eyes at the norm change being made in my name, without my consent.

Similarly: the term "people of colour" has been around since the '80s. But only in the '10s did the norm change such that people were expected to use it. In the '80s, people rolled their eyes whenever they heard the term – and that was good. Because "people of colour" is an awful term! It is just as ill-considered as the eyeroll makes it out to be. It reinforces the idea that whiteness is the centre of human experience, by pretending that non-white people have more in common than the bare fact that we are not white. To treat my half-Asian experience as if it's the same as a black person's experience is to mischaracterize both. But that's what people have now done because they have done the opposite of the eyeroll: they have jumped on the norm-change bandwagon. Jeremy Crawford at Wizards of the Coast was cheerfully cavalier about declaring racist the very fact of my existence as half-Asian, because despite explicitly disclaiming any expertise on the matter he just considered it obvious: the white progressive bandwagon told him that was the norm he was supposed to follow, and that was all he needed to know. If only someone in the room with Crawford had rolled their eyes, that would have given him a clearly needed signal that it wasn't just obvious. It was not the eyeroll, but the absence of an eyeroll, that did away with rational reflection on the norm change.

(Adobe stock photo)

The bandwagon effect might be clearest in the case of "Latinx", the supposedly gender-neutral replacement for "Latino", which anglophone institutions like Boston University jumped on recommending in their style guides in their eager effort to appear "inclusive". This term is ungrammatical in Spanish, a language where even chairs and rocks have gender. In a 2021 poll of the Americans the term is applied to, only 2% selected it as their preferred term for the group. (Most preferred "Hispanic" – though the poll didn't give the option they usually prefer more strongly still, which is to avoid such lumping terms entirely and referring instead to individual national origins like Mexican and Cuban.) A much larger proportion of the group, 40% – twenty times as large as the proportion who use the term – stated that the use of the term "Latinx" bothers or offends them. You better believe that Latin Americans are rolling their eyes when they hear "Latinx". Something would be wrong if they weren't doing that, in the face of white Anglos telling them without their consent what they now have to call themselves. They are rightly reacting with annoyance to moral regress.

Initially, when the new movement first started pushing norm changes in the mid-'10s, I reacted with eyerolls of my own. As the decade rolled on and the moral panics intensified, I stopped rolling my eyes publicly, because I was scared to. Why? Because that is how norms work: there are social sanctions for breaking them, and as the norms cemented I saw those sanctions getting applied to people who dared to do so. I stopped speaking from my experience as a non-white gender-fluid person because I was afraid of what the cis white people would do to me if I did. Too many of those cis white people thought the way that Kelly and Westra did, and assumed that any resistance to norm change comes irrationally from being an old outdated backward hick standing in the way of progress. If only more cis white people had kept rolling their eyes instead, it would have opened the gates to make dissent possible, and I would have been less afraid to speak my truth to the cis white people as a gender-fluid half-Asian.

In my experience, people rarely if ever react with eyerolls to norm changes on which we have been consulted, ones where there was a consultative or democratic process that solicited our input: ones where we have the opportunity to say "we think this norm change is bad", and see that the norm is adjusted accordingly. The annoyance is about a norm being enforced on us without our consultation: being told from on high, "this is how you're going to do things now". (Or worse, just being expected to follow the new norm without even getting the dignity of an announcement.) Nobody gave me a say even in the norm changes that they thought were for my benefit, let alone in the norm changes where I was told to shut up because I was too privileged for my opinions to matter. Such diktats themselves exclude reason from the process of norm formation. When that's the case, even if the effect is beneficial, the irrationality of the process is itself still enough to justify annoyance – at a minimum.

For reasons closely aligned with these, the psychologist

Paul Bloom

rightly pushes back on the psychology of Kelly and Westra's account. "Affective friction" – the misalignment with custom felt by the tourist – is not a sufficient explanation of the eye-rolling reaction to norm change. As Kelly and Westra themselves note, the tourist's reaction to a squat toilet is not eye-rolling annoyance, but panic. That's because we know that the foreign ways of doing things are not better or worse, just different. Moral norm changes, on the other hand, are explicitly pushed on us as morally superior. But in practice that pushing, and that claim of moral superiority, typically involve no more rational reflection than the annoyance; rather, they simply enforce social disapproval and a threat of shunning (or worse) for those who dare to think differently. The eyeroll expresses disagreement – a disagreement whose rationality the movement rarely respects, and Kelly and Westra are no exception.

Sure, Kelly and Westra admit the theoretical possibility of norms getting worse: Westra says "We just think that moral progress usually requires norm change. We don't think all norm changes are progressive." But at no point do they ever consider this as anything that actually happens, anything more than a bare theoretical possibility. As

Doug Bates

noted, while Kelly and Westra note that annoyance doesn't tell us "whether [norm change] represents moral progress or moral backslide", they give many examples that they consider moral progress but not even one single example of moral backslide. As a result, while they (poorly) psychologize their opponents, they utterly fail to psychologize themselves. If they did the latter, they could recognize the fact that we often jump on a new norm just because our friends are doing it and it feels good and exciting to join them. And they could then invert one of their own paragraphs to give advice that, in the current context, is desperately needed:

Knowing this fact about yourself should lead you to pause the next time you reflexively adopt some new norm and the changes its advocates are asking you to make. That excitement is not your righteous recognition of social progress. As tempting as it can be to interpret the pleasant feelings as your moral compass, your excitement is just a feature of your norm psychology becoming misaligned and reacting to social influence. A better response would be to treat your feelings of excitement as a cue for further reflection. Instead of simply going along with your immediate gut reaction, step back and take those feelings under advisement, along with any other relevant factors, and then consider whether your response is reasonable: ‘Is this new thing actually good, or does it just feel that way because people around me are doing it?’