Other People are Immoral

In this essay Connor Friedersdorf takes on obliquely what I regard as one of the most disturbing parts of our psychological make-up. He starts with this statement from columnist Matt Lewis, a conservative who often criticizes the right, explaining why despite his frustrations with contemporary conservatism he could never switch sides:

I am repelled by the Left's worldview, which implicitly argues that morality is subjective. This is a natural outcome of a rejection of the numinous, but it's an idea that has consequences. When there are no moral absolutes, we make policy decisions based on efficiency instead of compassion. Or we make decisions based on our own individualistic needs, not on what is right or good.

Something like this -- we are moral, they are  not -- has been said a trillion times in a billion different contexts. It it ever true? Friedersdorf considers the question of whether conservatives really believe more in objective right and wrong than anyone else:

How about torture. Is its immorality a moral absolute?

As I understand it, the right would be outraged if an American, even one guilty of a serious crime in a foreign country, were tortured by a foreign government. When Ronald Reagan signed a treaty attesting to torture as an absolute wrong that should always be prosecuted, there wasn't much dissent from the right. Yet the Bush Administration had broad support when it instituted an official program of torture. It strapped prisoners to a board, prevented them from breathing normally, repeatedly forced water down their throat till it filled their lungs, and terrified them with the sensation of drowning -- and to this day, large swaths of the right defend their doing so, without the torture having prevented the detonation of any ticking nuclear bombs in Times Square.

Is the rule of law sacrosanct?

Debating immigration policy with conservatives you'd swear that they think so. One of the most common arguments against an immigration amnesty is that it would undermine respect for the rule of law. At minimum, the right believes those who came here illegally must pay some kind of penalty. Then again, conservatives aren't so attached to the rule of law that they want to prosecute Bush Administration officials who broke it, or telecom companies that illegally provided them with information. After all, they were earnestly trying to "keep Americans safe." What if a liberal, who was earnestly trying to keep Americans safe, suggested seizing lawfully purchased firearms? Well, that's different. An outrage. Haven't they read the U.S. Constitution?

And so on. Both liberals and conservatives apply moral rules selectively and situationally; everybody applies moral rules selectively and situationally.

One of our deepest, oldest habits is dividing the world into us and them and insisting that they are worse. It seems to be essential for our psychological well being to believe that we belong to the good people, who are different from those bad people over there.

I see very little evidence that it is ever true. We are all human, and moral thinking is a deeply human thing that we all share. The non-sociopaths among us all do it in pretty much the same way, and that way is enmeshed with our politics, our interests, our group identities, and all sorts of other mental junk. I don't mean to say that all people are equally moral (or immoral); I have known some complete bastards in my time. I mean that nobody's ethics is a pure construct. In practice everybody's morality is subjective, because real world ethics is always a complicated weighing of competing interests. I mean that we all sometimes "make decisions based on our own individualistic needs, not on what is right or good." I mean that good and bad people are found in every group, and that the only way to ever show that one group is more moral than another is to decide in advance that some moral rules matter more than others do, because none of us are living up to all of them very well.