One of the worst intellectual crimes one can commit in good conscience (according to me, supreme authority) is moralizing. Moralizing, in this context and the contexts I am used to reading about it, refers to making moral judgments unrelated to the effects of the choices.
An example would be to place moral weight on how someone dresses or expresses themself. Their self-expression does not directly affect others and so placing a moral weight upon it is counterproductive (and dangerous).
In more left-leaning crowds (i.e. amongst the people I more regularly talk with), this kind of moralizing is less common. More common are those placing moral weight in conversations about “farmers” or “water use” or “recycling” without consideration for effects.
Talking about it this way makes me seem cold. Am I arguing against the rights of farmers, the problem of water shortage, or the solution of recycling?
It is this gut reaction that is so dangerous. Without my specifying, there is immediately a moral weight on the words I used. The implications drawn from the void of context place me in moral prison ahead of the crime.
The crowd has some less stellar associations, but the “effective altruism” movement has a great pull for me. It argues that making charitable donations while ignorant of what that money is doing leaves you susceptible to some kind of moralizing.
You place a positive moral weight on charity to a cause that sounds pleasing. And because of this good you have done, you are relieved from your obligation to others.
It is possible (and often quite likely) that your money is spent less efficiently. Money in this case is a proxy for power and movement. You have allocated power inefficiently and thus solved a problem much more slowly than you could have or perhaps not at all.
To be against moralizing is not to be against a moral framework. The EA movement requires moral weights, which can get hairy and carry their own blend of moral ambiguity, but are nevertheless present.
If you assume pain is bad and life is good, you can weigh moral wrongness with some general alignment. Something that causes much pain and little life is bad. The less life and the more pain, the worse it is.
Notably, the slower you are to act, the more pain and the shorter life becomes. This is because much pain converts into death. Act too slowly and the pain turns into a shorter life.
Thus we have our enemy. If you plan effectively, the result should be lowered pain and longer life, hopefully starting from the worst offenders and working backwards. You need not improve the happiness of the few before lowering the severe pain of the many.
EA makes some carve-outs, though. They promote tithing.
Tithing is dedicating a tenth of your income to charity. This is in contrast to something more severe, like 100% of your income.
If you dedicate all you have, you won’t have any to give. More than that, you won’t have anything in the future to give and no power left to promote more giving. It is good then to donate up to the amount that is sustainable.
Assuming the goal, you work backwards. Moralizing does the dangerous thing of working forwards, from your moral obligation.
To take your moral obligation of being kind and work forwards from it, you must latch onto the base instinct of how any cause makes you feel and attack yourself and others for it. Not for the result, but for the base moral obligation.
It doesn’t matter that you alienate your friends and ruin your own enjoyment. The goal was never to be happy or make others happy — it was to do what’s required.
This is some real religious thinking. It’s the kind of neoreligion that preys on intellectuals. It’s the Myers-Briggs of an astrology skeptic. That’s what makes it all the more dangerous.
Think about turning off the lightbulbs when you leave the house to “save energy”. This seems good, right? Harmless, at least. And it makes sense — you are using less electricity, surely.
But LED bulbs are efficient. Very efficient. Over an hour, you’re paying something like 1¢ for a well-lit room. A full month of lighting my apartment (24 hours a day) would cost something like $10.
Over a hot NYC summer, my daily AC costs might hit something like $4/day. In a shared apartment, it may even hit $15/day, aggregating the cost of the window-mounted units.
The heat on those days is such a bother, you’d do so much to avoid it. It matters more to you than the light that you don’t see while out. So you turn off the lights, but you keep on the AC.
Even then, surely it’s still good to save that little energy? It adds up, does it not?
Over the course of a year, turning off the lights whenever not home, you might save something like $30 in electricity costs. I’m told this equates to ~140 lbs of CO2 emissions annually. Sounds like a lot!
But your electricity bill in a city like NYC will regularly be $100-200 a month. Your fridge eats up $20, your microwave another $5. All your plugged-in devices might add another $5. ConEd charges around $20 for the privilege of being grid-connected.
Being smarter about your AC usage during the summer would have much greater returns. Fixating on light bulbs gives you busywork with no external impact. Without focus on the problem, you are spending power on the wrong thing.
To avoid moralizing, you have to work from the problem backwards. And this needs to be socially acceptable.