Plead the First

Oftentimes in debates on blogs and in the media you’ll find labels being stuck on both people and on arguments. Un-American. Racist. Apologist. These labels are frequently used in lieu of an actual argument against a position – many people feel that if they can dismiss a claim with a label there’s no need to argue against it.

Paul Graham writes that such labels may indicate the presence of a “moral fashion“:

Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It’s the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it.

What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They’re just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they’re much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.

Moral fashions determine what can and cannot be said at a particular period in time, and they change as times progress. The danger is that if we allow our thinking to be a slave to those fashions, we limit ourselves and our ideas.

Let’s start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you’re supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn’t. Odds are you just think whatever you’re told.

The other alternative would be that you independently considered every question and came up with the exact same answers that are now considered acceptable. That seems unlikely, because you’d also have to make the same mistakes. Mapmakers deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they can tell when someone copies them. If another map has the same mistake, that’s very convincing evidence.

Like every other era in history, our moral map almost certainly contains a few mistakes. And anyone who makes the same mistakes probably didn’t do it by accident. It would be like someone claiming they had independently decided in 1972 that bell-bottom jeans were a good idea.

If you believe everything you’re supposed to now, how can you be sure you wouldn’t also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s– or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you would have.

Graham gives a few strategies for identifying moral fashions, and has some thoughts on what should be done about them. But what you choose to do once you’ve identified a fashion seems of secondary importance to being able to think, free from constraints.

(Hat tip: Ze Frank)

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 10:36 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.