This is the version flight of a new paper that I'm thinking about for a long time and I'm not totally happy with,
so I'd be very interested to hear your take on it.
So I have two thesis. I have an empirical thesis and a normative thesis.
The empirical thesis is that most people aim to be morally mediocre.
They aim to be about as morally good as the people around them.
Not especially better, not especially worse. This mediocrity has two aspects.
It's peer relative rather than absolute.
That is, they're aiming for not to be good or bad by absolute standards, but rather by peer relative standards.
And it's middling rather than extreme. What we do is we, most of us notice the typical behaviour of people around us and so we missed our option.
We could have had a free tablet computer.
We we look around at people around us and we aim to be about morally within that range, not being among the very best, not being among the very worst.
We look around us and then calibrate towards so, so.
So that's the empirical thesis. And then the normative thesis is that this is a somewhat bad way to be, but it's not a terribly bad way to be.
Also, it's a somewhat good way to be, but it's not a wonderfully good way to be.
It's got good and bad points. It's morally mediocre to aim for moral mediocrity.
Now, that way of phrasing, it sounds so bland as to be almost a tautology.
But it's not a tautology. Someone with a stringent normative you might think it's horrible to aim to be about as good as your peers,
someone with much less stringent views might think. It's perfectly fine to aim for mediocrity as long as you avoid being among the worst.
So I'll argue that aiming for mediocrity is neither perfectly fine nor inexcusably rotten.
It's kind of blah. We're morally blameworthy for not aspiring to be better, but we can also be legitimately praised for not being worse.
All right. So that's the general set of the theses.
So let's work on the empirical stuff. So following the moral crowd.
So Robert Cialdini and collaborators went to Sorry My Shoes Untied, went to Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park.
The park had been losing about a ton of petrified wood per month, mostly stolen by casual visitors, one small piece at a time.
Chiellini and his collaborators posted four different signs at the head to discourage theft at the heads of different trails.
And then they rotated the placement of the science. Two of the signs were explicit injunctions.
One said, Please don't remove petrified wood from the park with a picture of a visitor stealing wooden grass by a red circle in a bar.
Another one said, Please leave petrified wood in the park.
There's a picture of a visitor admiring, photographing a piece of wood.
So those are two normative signs. And then there were two descriptive signs.
One said Past visitor. Many past visitors have removed petrified wood from the park,
changing the state of the petrified forest and at a picture of three visitors stealing wood.
And then the final sign said The vast majority of past visitors have left petrified wood in the park,
preserving the natural state of the petrified forest.
So there are these four signs two injunctive one positive one negative, two descriptive one positive or negative.
What children and collaborators then notice? Is this going to restart on me?
No. Then noticed how frequently visitors stole wood from these paths with the different signs.
What they found was that the visitors took the least wood from the path when they were explicitly enjoined not to take wood.
So the positive of the negative injunction and the rates of test work theft were highest up to 8% of visitors stored when
visitors were told the many past visitors had removed wood being told that many of that past visitors had removed wood.
Changing the state of the forest might even have increased the rates of theft, which are normally estimated to be 1 to 4% of visitors.
So might have doubled or tripled the rates of threat theft. They did.
They didn't find these visitors and ask them to return the wood. All right.
Here's another one. Also by children, he's got a whole series of these.
He found that hotel guests were substantially more likely to reuse towels when a message
to help save the environment was supplemented with the information that 75% of the guests
who stayed in this room and then listed the actual room number they were in participated
in our new research savings program by using their towels more than once and quote.
And that was more effective than a longer message, a longer inductive message or message that included other kinds of descriptive detail.
Certainly there's evidence that people are more likely to heed injunctions to reduce household energy when they are shown.
Statistics indicated that they are using more energy than their neighbours and when they
are shown statistics suggesting that they're using less energy than their neighbours,
they might tend to increase their energy use even if it's framed in the context of trying to reduce their energy use.
Littering, lying and suicide all appear to be contagious.
In dictator games, that is. These are laboratory situations in which randomly chosen participants are given money and then
told they can either keep it all for themselves or share some with less lucky participants.
All right. So in dictator games like that, if participants have been led to believe that previous participants were mostly shuffled selfish,
they tended to share less than if they'd been told that previous participants mostly shared about equally.
Cialdini concludes that injunctive norms that is social or moral admonitions most
effectively promote non-compliant behaviour when they align with descriptive norms.
That is facts about how people actually behave. People are more likely to abide by moral rules if they see that others are already doing so.
Our beach area has a similar view.
She argues that people normally comply with social norms only if they have the empirical expectation that others are also complying.
People tend to follow the moral or immoral claim.
So I'm going to add some caveats to this in a minute. But first, let me talk a little about a moral self licensing.
So all half hearted dieters know about self licensing, right?
You've been good all day. The salad with only a forkful addressing the orange, the cup of plain yoghurt, the turkey sandwich, no mayo.
So tonight you can afford a brownie. So moral self licensing is that style of thinking applied to the moral domain.
You've been morally good for a while. Or maybe you just done something especially morally admirable.
So now you can indulge in a little sin or selfishness.
Conversely, in moral cleansing, you might react to having done something particularly bad by being especially morally good for a little while.
Kind of. Even things out. So in a well known series of experiments,
Nina Mazar and Jimbo Jong showed participants an online store with mostly environmentally green friendly products.
Participants then made hypothetical purchases of up to $25 with a chance they'd actually receive these products to take home.
Mazar and Zhong hypothesised that participants who'd been randomly assigned to select products from the Green Store
would experience a boost of their moral self and be subsequently left less motivated to avoid moral transgression.
Then participants would only been assigned to a non-green more standard store and as predicted.
Participants who had been selected to who had selected products from the Green Store offered less money in dictator games,
or more likely subsequently, and were more likely to lie to an experimenter for money.
Other researchers have found that merely expressing moral intentions or imagining positive moral traits attributable to yourself or positive
actions you will do in the future will tend to produce more selfish choices in dictator games and more lying or cheating in laboratory conditions.
In another influential series of studies, Benoit MOYEN,
Monaghan and Dale Miller presented some Princeton undergraduates with an opportunity to display anti-racist or anti sexist credentials,
either by affirming an egalitarian position in a questionnaire or by selecting an obviously best qualified candidate
and obviously best of all qualified black or woman candidate over four white men in a hypothetical hiring decision.
When later presented with a hypothetical hiring position for a stereotypical male job or
for hiring a black versus a white police officer into a racially charged police force,
participants would earlier displayed anti sexist or anti-racist credentials,
expressed more preference for the white men in the hypothetical hiring decision.
Then when compared with participants who had been who had just previously done a hypothetical
hiring decision among only white men or had done a questionnaire on a different topic.
Morning and Miller interpret these results of showing that after displaying egalitarianism,
participants feel freer to express honest responses that might be partly based on sexism and racism.
All right. So now these studies about moral self licensing and following the moral crowd,
they broadly support my empirical thesis that most people aim for mediocrity, but they are also consistent with the falsity of my thesis.
And let me tell you why.
So first, in almost all of these studies, only a minority of participants change their behaviour as a result of the experimental interventions.
So for example,
although posting a sign saying that many visitors have stolen word from the Petrified Forest might have doubled or tripled the rates of theft,
the observed rate with the sign was still only 8%.
So that's consistent with 92% of park visitors abiding by an absolute rather than a relative norm of not stealing would be.
Gary and Cheryl found a variation from about 50% to about 70% selfish choices in the dictator game,
depending on what participants in the Met told about previous participants behaviour.
It's a substantial change, but again it's one consistent with a majority adhering to absolute norms.
Although most participants might follow the crowd, given the right conditions,
for example, if they actually saw almost all visitors stealing wood from the park,
or if they witnessed directly witnessed person after push person keeping the money in dictator games, although that might be the case.
Existing experimental research doesn't show that to be so.
So even if the experiments I've cited are taken at face value, it doesn't follow straight away that most people aim for Moral Majority.
Another caveat here is that people might interpret the normative situation differently
in light of evidence about peers behaviour or in light of their own past behaviour.
So for example, if they believe that lots of other people take word from the park,
they might think it's only fair that I should be able to do the same.
Right. That's a changing opinion about fairness. Or they might think if everyone does it, then maybe it's not so bad after all.
Switching example, participants might decide that if most lucky participants in dictator games just keep the money.
Well, I guess that's the social norm for how you're supposed to play these games.
Furthermore, as Mullen and Moanin emphasised with respect to the licensing experiments,
some of them might be better understood as moral credentialing rather than as compensating.
And credentialing is different from compensating. They're not quite the same.
Credentialing is more epistemic. Right.
So if you have positive anti sexist, say credentials that might lead you to interpret a bit an ambiguous action or behaviour as not bad,
for example, as not sexist after all.
And that's different from a calibration reaction in which you accept that an action is bad and then you do it anyway.
And then final caveat here. The literatures on moral licensing and following the moral crowd are relatively new.
The results come from mostly from the same few labs.
Now, although a recent meta analysis finds of the licensing literature does seem to confirm an effect, caution is warranted.
I think because the lower bounds of the 95% confidence intervals of most of the positive studies are quite close to zero.
That's consistent with the possibility of underpowered research and a publication bias favouring positive results.
So this fits a lot with replication crisis kind of stuff.
One systematic replication, attempted attempt that I'm aware of of some of this literature does confirm a positive result.
This is of the classic Montana Miller 2001 study write participants were in fact in this systematic replication,
more likely to choose a man for a hypothetical higher after having previously expressed egalitarian opinions.
But the effect size was very small is only 0.1 points on a seven point scale.
So the empirical evidence, I think, including effect sizes and replicability, remains uncertain.
So I'm asking offering the moral mediocrity hypothesis as a conjecture and empirical conjecture.
It has some empirical support. It also, I think, hopefully has some appeal on common sense grounds or based in life experience.
People seem to collaborate more or less, most of us, toward the moral middle.
People don't typically choose to follow a moral rule if they see many others gathering the benefits of vice.
Nor typically do people want to be worse violators than their peers.
If we sense that others are honourable and true, we tend to admire that and follow along.
In exceptional cases, we might take a lone stand for morality, but then afterwards, it's hard to resist the thought that the world owes you something.
Conversely, we might soon of sex exceptionally.
But then we often feel we should compensate someone.
So as I was mentioning, I've done a lot of work on the moral behaviour of ethics professors.
Professional ethicists appear to behave no differently on average than do professors who don't specialise in ethics.
They behave no differently, despite on some issues, at least like charity and vegetarianism,
endorsing, tending to endorse much more stringent or demanding moral views.
And the moral mediocrity hypothesis is one way to make sense of these findings.
Starting in 2007, Josh Rust and I began looking for empirical evidence that professional associates behave differently than to other people of similar
social background and across several published articles encompassing 19 different main measures of arguably moral behaviour.
Our evidence, which we reviewed in the 2015 paper, suggests that ethics professors basically behave the same as do other socially comparable people,
like philosophers not specialising in ethics and like professors from departments other than philosophy.
Some of our measures are peer rated. Overall moral behaviour, theft of library books, voting participation in public elections.
Membership in the Nazi Party in 1930s. Germany littering.
Failing to pay required conference registration fees.
Staying in regular contact with one's mother if one's mother is still alive.
Charitable giving. Vegetarianism. Replying to emails from students paying membership dues to support one's main disciplinary academic society.
Being an organ donor, being a blood donor,
responding dishonestly to survey questions and letting the door slam when leaving or entering in the middle of a talk.
So these measures vary from the trivial,
like door slamming and littering to substantial life decisions that some people would regard as highly morally important,
like joining the Nazi Party or donating a large sum of money to charity.
They vary from behaviour towards strangers like blood and organ donation to behaviour toward family members,
like calling mom or two students replying to emails. They also very on issues on which moral opinion is divided like vegetarianism,
or whether there's a duty to support one's main disciplinary society by paying dues to opinions tissues on which there's high consensus.
I like the badness of joining the Nazi Party by consensus now and also issues of monsters.
They're consensus even during the the act of voting like we have evidence that over
80% of professors think that you should respond to emails from undergraduates.
Over 80% of professors think that there is a moral duty, or at least it's morally good to vote in public elections.
So in one case, we found evidence that ethicists behave a little worse.
Library ethics books were more likely missing from academic libraries and were other comparable books in philosophy,
similar in age and check out rate. But mostly we just found no detectable differences in behaviour.
Now in some cases we also had measures of expressed moral opinion about those same issues which
we could compare with either or both self-reported behaviour and directly observed behaviour.
So we could compare expressed opinion about responding to student emails with self-reported behaviour.
How often do you respond to student emails? What percentage of emails do you neglect?
And then we actually sent them emails that look designed to look as though they were
from students and saw whether they replied and talked more about that if you want.
We emphasise, I would emphasise that these data are always de-identified.
Transformed into numerical codes. We didn't couldn't reach any inferences about particular individuals.
We found several issues on which professional ethicists tended to endorse more stringent norms,
but we didn't detect any corresponding differences in behaviour on those issues.
We also do not find that ethicists expressed moral opinions were either more or less consistent with
their either self-reported or their directly measured behaviour than were not ethicists opinions.
So attitude behaviour correlations were similar across the board.
So there are various possible interpretations of these results.
Let me just throw out a few. One is that philosophical, moral reflection is behaviourally inert?
John Hyde, of course, is famously argues for that, and he's used our research as part of his support for that thesis.
Another interpretation is that ethics would not be inert if it were applied to cases that arise in ethicist daily lives.
But instead, ethics is focussed mainly on the abstract, the obscure or general public policy.
So another interpretation is that people who are drawn to ethics are disproportionately those who need to reason their way to behaving morally well,
not ethicists kind of just do it intuitively or automatically.
And so ethical reflection is effective in getting hyper intellectual people to improve their behaviour up to average.
So it's an open empirical question, which is true. I don't think we have enough evidence to even really have a firm conjecture about that.
But recently I've been attracted to the consistency of these results with the moral mediocrity hypothesis.
So if the Moral Majority hypothesis is correct, we can explain my results.
So consider the issue on which we have the most, I think, striking results, which is the vegetarianism vegetarianism issue.
In 2009, draft person, I sent a questionnaire to professional philosophers, including ethicists, anonymous philosophers,
and then also a comparison group of other professors in other departments at the same universities.
In the first part of questionnaire, we asked the respondents their normative opinions about a variety of moral issues.
And the second part of the questionnaire, we asked them to self-report their behaviour on those same issues for some of those issues,
but not for the vegetarian vegetarian vegetarianism issue.
We also had some direct measures of behaviour. So on the vegetarianism vegetarianism issue, in the first part of the questionnaire,
we asked respondents to rate various behaviours like regularly eating the meat of mammals such as beef, pork.
We asked them to rate that on a 1 to 9 scale for very morally bad, very morally good.
The five point was morally neutral. And what we found was 60% of the ethicists rated it somewhere on the bad side of the scale.
45% of the non ethicists philosophers did, but only 19% of the professors in departments other than philosophy did.
So a pretty big difference in moral opinion.
Then we asked them later in the survey, Did you eat the meat of a mammal such as beef or pork during your last evening meal, not including snacks?
And there we found no statistically significant difference among the groups.
Overall, 38% of the respondents answered yes, including 37% of the ethicists.
And we found a similar pattern by age and gender, women were more likely to say it was bad.
We're not more likely to report or did not report less meat.
Younger participants were more likely to say it's bad. We're not more likely to report having eaten less meat.
So. So here's a thought experiment. Max.
Oh, let me tell you how I choose my names in my thought experiments. Now, I commend this for your consideration.
I have now to avoid implicit bias or and to increase cultural cultural representativeness.
I now write my examples with bias.
And then I have this Excel document with the names of all the undergraduates who've taken laudatory classes with me since 2014.
And I just randomly choose a name from that. So Max is an ethics professor teaching and applied moral issues class.
He introduces his students to the philosophical arguments for and against vegetarianism.
He admits to his students that he personally is convinced that the arguments for vegetarianism are sound and that vegetarianism is morally required.
He considers various objections, including objections raised in class discussion, and he rebuts each one.
And after class, he goes to the school cafeteria and has a cheeseburger.
Now, students might be surprised seeing him do this, might say, Hey, what are you doing?
I thought you just said it was bad to eat meat. Here you are, eating meat.
Now, if the moral mediocrity hypothesis is correct, we can explain Max's behaviour.
Max believes, through philosophical reasoning, that he has discovered something about morality is morally bad meat.
Now, having discovered this, what's he going to do?
Well, according to the moral mediocrity hypothesis, he doesn't aim to be morally good by absolute standards.
Instead, he aims to be about as morally good as the people around him, the people he regards as his peers.
What is it? What are his peers doing? What are other professors doing? His family, his friends, people around him in the cafeteria?
Well, they're mostly eating meat. So if he's aiming for mediocrity, he's going to do the same.
Instead of leading to a change in behaviour.
Max's moral discovery has led him only to have a lower moral opinion of almost everyone's moral behaviour,
including his own, while he keeps on doing what he's always done.
Now, it does seem likely that some people are convinced by philosophical arguments,
arguments not only to endorse vegetarianism, but also to practice vegetarianism.
In fact, I'm doing a study on this right now. Peter Singer,
Brad KUKLA and I are collaborating on a study where we're taking undergraduates and exposing half of them to arguments for vegetarianism.
Half of them are arguments for charitable giving, giving. And then they're going to get cafeteria vouchers.
They want to see what food choices they actually make. I can talk about that more if you want during question period.
Now, if some people are convinced by philosophical arguments for vegetarianism and then change their behaviour,
that can be made consistent with a moral mediocrity hypothesis if the result is a licensing of worse behaviour in other areas.
So for example, if you put in the work and the self-deprecation or perceived self-deprecation to become a vegetarian,
then maybe you have an excuse to ignore student emails more than you otherwise would have,
or to pollute more, or to be ruder to your neighbours, or to to shirk departmental duties or to give less to charity.
So on this view, and I don't think this is the only thing going on and I'm absolutely committed to this, but.
The simple version of moral mediocrity.
Is this the main practical effect of moral discovery on your personal day to day behaviour is that it helps you
more accurately calibrate your mediocrity with a clearer understanding of how morally good or bad we all are.
I'm going to skip this part of the talk about whether people will mostly believe they're morally above average.
I do think they tend to believe that, but kind of in a self deceptive way.
All right. So let's get on to the normative thesis. Right.
So this is the minority thesis, is that it's morally mediocre to aim to be morally mediocre or to phrase it in a less totally biased sounding way,
somewhat bad,
but also somewhat good to try to calibrate yourself so that you behave in ways that are overall similar to the moral behaviour of your peers.
So mediocre has a negative connotation in ordinary English.
It means partly it means somewhere in the ballpark of average or ordinary.
But in contrast to the less loaded term like average, it also implies that the thing in question is somewhat bad and yet the mediocre isn't horrible,
and being mediocre is compatible with having some redeeming features with being in some respects good.
So mediocre coffee is good enough for me.
Most of the time. Mediocre students mostly pass their classes and get their degrees.
So aiming for moral mediocrity is like aiming to be a B-minus student or to be a kind of cheap doughnut shop grip blend.
So the simplest opposing views to this are that it's perfectly fine to R&B are about as morally good as your peers,
and that it's horrible to aim to be about as morally good, or maybe I should say morally bad as your peers.
So I'm not going to criticise them.
It's horrible view at length. I don't think many of us regard our peers as morally horrible.
Some people might think that most of humanity is morally horrible, apart from their valued in-group of friends or co-religionists.
But then they probably treat that in-group as their peers toward whom they morally calibrate.
Others might think that their peers, maybe even especially their peers,
are morally horrible on grounds that there's something morally horrible about our shared lifestyle,
such as its luxurious ness in the face of global poverty.
So I'm not going to try to address that view. Still, others might be just ordinary curmudgeons who just see the worst in people in general.
Again, that's a kind of hard view to rebut in a brief space.
But let me know that people do often lend a helping hand to strangers for no obvious benefit.
They treat their fellows kindly. They share. They laugh. They maintain friendships.
They take principled stands against injustice. So following the moral crowd can be good when others act with kindness and integrity.
It inspires us to do the same. Attempting to compensate for having acted badly can also be good.
The memory of guilt can motivate improvement. We're not horrible, only mediocre.
Now against the view that it's perfectly fine to aim to behave in a morally mediocre way.
I offer three arguments. First, your peers, they fail to reply to your important emails.
They shirk their duties and neglect their promises. They're rude.
They're grumpy for no good reason. They have annoying dogs, loud parties, bad driving habits, and unjustified sense of entitlement.
They make you wait and then concoct some glib excuse. They form obnoxious opinions on too little information and then vote for horrible things.
In all these little ways, they behave badly, and we ought to try to be better than that.
Second, our treatment of others is pervaded with unjustified bias, unjustifiable bias,
biased based on race, sex, age, beauty, disability, class, cultural background.
It's not the worst of all things to be biased, but bias is pervasive and we're rightly criticised all for being biased.
The range of biases based on disability in particular is huge and unavoidable since disability is so various.
Biased toward conventionally beautiful people also is pervasive and substantial across across a wide range of social measures.
So unjustified bias of the sort is a moral failing, for which we are rightly pretty sizeable, and we ought to aim to do better.
Third. Even if we aren't morally horrible for leaving middle living, middle class,
European or North American lifestyles or British lifestyles, as I assume most of you do.
History might not judge us so kindly.
Our typical lifestyles harm the environment by which we collectively contribute to the death and immiseration of many millions of future people.
Arguably also, most of us ought to give more to charitable causes, local or global,
in time or in money than we do, given our relative privilege and luxury.
Most of us eat meat, which most of us ethicists think is morally bad.
We purchase consumer goods from companies we know or ought to know, engage in bad practices.
Now, it's contentious how bad all of this is, and my argument doesn't hinge upon this third bullet point.
But if even something like this is even approximately correct,
then every normal middle class person in our society is morally criticised for a wide range of actions every day.
So it's not perfectly fine to aim to be morally mediocre.
But. Probably that's about where you're in.
So I'm now going to consider and conclude with two lines of reasoning by which we might hope to wiggle out of this somewhat depressing conclusion.
Two arguments they're going to skip. One is a batch, what I call a batch argument where you say, Oh, no, just evaluate me as a batch as a whole.
Right. And and another one is one that draws on work, on sainthood and why it might be good to avoid being a saint.
If you want to raise either of those questions later, we can.
First, I'm going to give well, the two that I'm going to focus on are what I call the happy coincidence defence and the most I can do.
Sweet Spot. So on the happy coincidence defence, here are four things that I care intensely about.
Being a good father. Being a good philosopher, being a good teacher, being a morally good person.
It would be lovely if there were never any conflicts among these four things.
Explicitly, explicitly acknowledging these trade offs is unpleasant, sufficiently unpleasant, and it's tempting to try to rationalise them away.
It is distinctly uncomfortable to me, for example, to acknowledge that I would probably be a better father if I did less travel for work.
But here I am. Similarly uncomfortable for me is the thought that the money I'll be spending on a family vacation to
Iceland later this month could probably save a few people from death due to poverty related causes.
If I gave it to the right charity. So here's a tempting way of rationalising that happy coincidence defence.
Consider travel for work. Now I don't have to travel around the world giving talks and meeting people.
It's not part of my job description. Normal fire me if I don't do it and some of my colleagues do it a lot less than I do.
So it seems like I'm pirating, prioritising my research career at the cost of being somewhat less a good father, teacher and global moral citizen.
The latter given the luxurious use of resources and the pollution of air travel.
So happy coincidence, Defence says. No, I'm not sacrificing any of these other goals at all.
Although I'm away from my children. I'm a better father for it.
I've enriched my life. And now I can mingle that richness into theirs.
I'm a more globally aware, wiser father. Similarly, although I might cancel a class or two and deprioritized lecture preparation,
research travel improves my teaching in the long run, since it makes me a better philosopher and my philosophical work.
Isn't that an important contribution to society? Maybe it's important enough to justify the expense, pollution and waste.
I do more good for the world travelling around discussing philosophy than I could do do,
leading a more modest lifestyle at home, donating more to charities and being more fully involved in my local community.
So after enough reflection of the sort,
it can come to seem that I'm not making any trade-offs at all among these four things that I care so intensely about,
instead of maximising them all I am.
This trip I'm on now is the best thing I can do as a father and as a teacher and as a researcher and as a global moral citizen.
Yeah. Now.
It might be true. It might look just like it might be true that the morally best action is always the one in one's enlightened self-interest.
If so, it would be a happy coincidence. And sometimes they really are happy coincidences.
It would be wonderful if we could structure our societies and our lives to increase the frequency of these kinds of happy coincidences.
But I think I hope you'll agree that this pattern of thinking is suspicious.
Life is full of trade offs among important things.
The happy coincidence reasoning seems likely to often be epistemic.
Dubious post-hoc rationalisation. It seems likely then illegitimately convincing myself.
That's something that I want to be true. Really is true.
Here's another way of it to accept your moral near average ness while rejecting the idea that you're criticised for being mediocre.
It's to insist that you are doing the best you can do.
Now it's true that trying too hard or something can sometimes backfire, right?
If you try too hard to be funny, you could end up being less funny.
If you tried too hard to win the race, you might exhaust yourself at the beginning and then collapse midway through.
You need to pace yourself. Maybe morality is like that.
Maybe moral idealists sometimes push themselves so hard that they would have been better pursuing a more moderate, sustainable course.
Right? So for example, someone moved by the arguments for vegetarianism who decided instantly to become the strictest possible vegan might be
more likely to revert to cheeseburger eating than someone who had chosen a more moderate vegetarian course to begin with.
Somewhat differently. Someone who was passionately committed to those believing high moral standards
might become prone to self-deception or might become unbearably sanctimonious,
or might become insensitive to nuances and others legitimate excuses.
So it's possible that you are currently in the sweet spot such that if you were to try to be any morally better,
then you in fact are you would actually become morally worse.
You might be doing the best you can do since you couldn't be morally better than you actually are.
You're not pretty sizeable. You were rude to the cashier.
You were biased in viewing the handsome student more favourably.
You're thoughtless of your spouse,
negligent in your months due overdue comments to the Ph.D. student who can advance until she receives your comments.
But if you tried to be any morally better, you would. Well, something.
So this may be true of some people, right?
If you're a homeless mother of three who's managed to keep it together through a cold winter and physical abuse,
I'm totally ready to believe you have no more resources to do any better than you doing.
But most of us, it's probably good policy to be sceptical of any tendency.
You have to think you are already in the most you can do. Sweet spot.
All right. So. Most of us do not aim to be morally excellent by absolute standards.
Instead, we aim to be about as morally good as our peers. Our peers are somewhat morally criticised, but not morally horrible.
Morally mediocre. If we succeed in approximately matching their mediocrity,
we too are mediocre and we're somewhat criticised more for having such low personal moral ambitions.
It's tempting to try to rationalise one's mediocrity away by employing the happy coincidence defence or the most you can do sweet spot.
But those defences don't stand up to critical examination. Own your mediocrity minute, except the reasonableness of the moral criticism you deserve.
Yes.