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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,

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so I'd be very interested to hear your take on it.

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So I have two thesis. I have an empirical thesis and a normative thesis.

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The empirical thesis is that most people aim to be morally mediocre.

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They aim to be about as morally good as the people around them.

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Not especially better, not especially worse. This mediocrity has two aspects.

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It's peer relative rather than absolute.

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That is, they're aiming for not to be good or bad by absolute standards, but rather by peer relative standards.

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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.

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We could have had a free tablet computer.

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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.

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We look around us and then calibrate towards so, so.

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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.

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Also, it's a somewhat good way to be, but it's not a wonderfully good way to be.

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It's got good and bad points. It's morally mediocre to aim for moral mediocrity.

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Now, that way of phrasing, it sounds so bland as to be almost a tautology.

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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,

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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.

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So I'll argue that aiming for mediocrity is neither perfectly fine nor inexcusably rotten.

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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.

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All right. So that's the general set of the theses.

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So let's work on the empirical stuff. So following the moral crowd.

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So Robert Cialdini and collaborators went to Sorry My Shoes Untied, went to Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park.

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The park had been losing about a ton of petrified wood per month, mostly stolen by casual visitors, one small piece at a time.

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Chiellini and his collaborators posted four different signs at the head to discourage theft at the heads of different trails.

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And then they rotated the placement of the science. Two of the signs were explicit injunctions.

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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.

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Another one said, Please leave petrified wood in the park.

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There's a picture of a visitor admiring, photographing a piece of wood.

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So those are two normative signs. And then there were two descriptive signs.

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One said Past visitor. Many past visitors have removed petrified wood from the park,

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changing the state of the petrified forest and at a picture of three visitors stealing wood.

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And then the final sign said The vast majority of past visitors have left petrified wood in the park,

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preserving the natural state of the petrified forest.

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So there are these four signs two injunctive one positive one negative, two descriptive one positive or negative.

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What children and collaborators then notice? Is this going to restart on me?

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No. Then noticed how frequently visitors stole wood from these paths with the different signs.

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What they found was that the visitors took the least wood from the path when they were explicitly enjoined not to take wood.

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So the positive of the negative injunction and the rates of test work theft were highest up to 8% of visitors stored when

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visitors were told the many past visitors had removed wood being told that many of that past visitors had removed wood.

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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.

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So might have doubled or tripled the rates of threat theft. They did.

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They didn't find these visitors and ask them to return the wood. All right.

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Here's another one. Also by children, he's got a whole series of these.

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He found that hotel guests were substantially more likely to reuse towels when a message

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to help save the environment was supplemented with the information that 75% of the guests

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who stayed in this room and then listed the actual room number they were in participated

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in our new research savings program by using their towels more than once and quote.

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And that was more effective than a longer message, a longer inductive message or message that included other kinds of descriptive detail.

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Certainly there's evidence that people are more likely to heed injunctions to reduce household energy when they are shown.

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Statistics indicated that they are using more energy than their neighbours and when they

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are shown statistics suggesting that they're using less energy than their neighbours,

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they might tend to increase their energy use even if it's framed in the context of trying to reduce their energy use.

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Littering, lying and suicide all appear to be contagious.

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In dictator games, that is. These are laboratory situations in which randomly chosen participants are given money and then

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told they can either keep it all for themselves or share some with less lucky participants.

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All right. So in dictator games like that, if participants have been led to believe that previous participants were mostly shuffled selfish,

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they tended to share less than if they'd been told that previous participants mostly shared about equally.

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Cialdini concludes that injunctive norms that is social or moral admonitions most

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effectively promote non-compliant behaviour when they align with descriptive norms.

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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.

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Our beach area has a similar view.

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She argues that people normally comply with social norms only if they have the empirical expectation that others are also complying.

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People tend to follow the moral or immoral claim.

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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.

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So all half hearted dieters know about self licensing, right?

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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.

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So tonight you can afford a brownie. So moral self licensing is that style of thinking applied to the moral domain.

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You've been morally good for a while. Or maybe you just done something especially morally admirable.

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So now you can indulge in a little sin or selfishness.

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Conversely, in moral cleansing, you might react to having done something particularly bad by being especially morally good for a little while.

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Kind of. Even things out. So in a well known series of experiments,

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Nina Mazar and Jimbo Jong showed participants an online store with mostly environmentally green friendly products.

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Participants then made hypothetical purchases of up to $25 with a chance they'd actually receive these products to take home.

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Mazar and Zhong hypothesised that participants who'd been randomly assigned to select products from the Green Store

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would experience a boost of their moral self and be subsequently left less motivated to avoid moral transgression.

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Then participants would only been assigned to a non-green more standard store and as predicted.

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Participants who had been selected to who had selected products from the Green Store offered less money in dictator games,

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or more likely subsequently, and were more likely to lie to an experimenter for money.

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Other researchers have found that merely expressing moral intentions or imagining positive moral traits attributable to yourself or positive

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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.

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In another influential series of studies, Benoit MOYEN,

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Monaghan and Dale Miller presented some Princeton undergraduates with an opportunity to display anti-racist or anti sexist credentials,

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either by affirming an egalitarian position in a questionnaire or by selecting an obviously best qualified candidate

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and obviously best of all qualified black or woman candidate over four white men in a hypothetical hiring decision.

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When later presented with a hypothetical hiring position for a stereotypical male job or

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for hiring a black versus a white police officer into a racially charged police force,

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participants would earlier displayed anti sexist or anti-racist credentials,

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expressed more preference for the white men in the hypothetical hiring decision.

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Then when compared with participants who had been who had just previously done a hypothetical

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hiring decision among only white men or had done a questionnaire on a different topic.

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Morning and Miller interpret these results of showing that after displaying egalitarianism,

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participants feel freer to express honest responses that might be partly based on sexism and racism.

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All right. So now these studies about moral self licensing and following the moral crowd,

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they broadly support my empirical thesis that most people aim for mediocrity, but they are also consistent with the falsity of my thesis.

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And let me tell you why.

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So first, in almost all of these studies, only a minority of participants change their behaviour as a result of the experimental interventions.

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So for example,

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although posting a sign saying that many visitors have stolen word from the Petrified Forest might have doubled or tripled the rates of theft,

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the observed rate with the sign was still only 8%.

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So that's consistent with 92% of park visitors abiding by an absolute rather than a relative norm of not stealing would be.

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Gary and Cheryl found a variation from about 50% to about 70% selfish choices in the dictator game,

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depending on what participants in the Met told about previous participants behaviour.

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It's a substantial change, but again it's one consistent with a majority adhering to absolute norms.

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Although most participants might follow the crowd, given the right conditions,

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for example, if they actually saw almost all visitors stealing wood from the park,

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or if they witnessed directly witnessed person after push person keeping the money in dictator games, although that might be the case.

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Existing experimental research doesn't show that to be so.

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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.

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Another caveat here is that people might interpret the normative situation differently

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in light of evidence about peers behaviour or in light of their own past behaviour.

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So for example, if they believe that lots of other people take word from the park,

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they might think it's only fair that I should be able to do the same.

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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.

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Switching example, participants might decide that if most lucky participants in dictator games just keep the money.

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Well, I guess that's the social norm for how you're supposed to play these games.

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Furthermore, as Mullen and Moanin emphasised with respect to the licensing experiments,

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some of them might be better understood as moral credentialing rather than as compensating.

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And credentialing is different from compensating. They're not quite the same.

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Credentialing is more epistemic. Right.

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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,

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for example, as not sexist after all.

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And that's different from a calibration reaction in which you accept that an action is bad and then you do it anyway.

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And then final caveat here. The literatures on moral licensing and following the moral crowd are relatively new.

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The results come from mostly from the same few labs.

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Now, although a recent meta analysis finds of the licensing literature does seem to confirm an effect, caution is warranted.

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I think because the lower bounds of the 95% confidence intervals of most of the positive studies are quite close to zero.

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That's consistent with the possibility of underpowered research and a publication bias favouring positive results.

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So this fits a lot with replication crisis kind of stuff.

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One systematic replication, attempted attempt that I'm aware of of some of this literature does confirm a positive result.

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This is of the classic Montana Miller 2001 study write participants were in fact in this systematic replication,

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more likely to choose a man for a hypothetical higher after having previously expressed egalitarian opinions.

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But the effect size was very small is only 0.1 points on a seven point scale.

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So the empirical evidence, I think, including effect sizes and replicability, remains uncertain.

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So I'm asking offering the moral mediocrity hypothesis as a conjecture and empirical conjecture.

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It has some empirical support. It also, I think, hopefully has some appeal on common sense grounds or based in life experience.

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People seem to collaborate more or less, most of us, toward the moral middle.

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People don't typically choose to follow a moral rule if they see many others gathering the benefits of vice.

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Nor typically do people want to be worse violators than their peers.

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If we sense that others are honourable and true, we tend to admire that and follow along.

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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.

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Conversely, we might soon of sex exceptionally.

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But then we often feel we should compensate someone.

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So as I was mentioning, I've done a lot of work on the moral behaviour of ethics professors.

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Professional ethicists appear to behave no differently on average than do professors who don't specialise in ethics.

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They behave no differently, despite on some issues, at least like charity and vegetarianism,

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endorsing, tending to endorse much more stringent or demanding moral views.

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And the moral mediocrity hypothesis is one way to make sense of these findings.

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Starting in 2007, Josh Rust and I began looking for empirical evidence that professional associates behave differently than to other people of similar

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social background and across several published articles encompassing 19 different main measures of arguably moral behaviour.

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Our evidence, which we reviewed in the 2015 paper, suggests that ethics professors basically behave the same as do other socially comparable people,

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like philosophers not specialising in ethics and like professors from departments other than philosophy.

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Some of our measures are peer rated. Overall moral behaviour, theft of library books, voting participation in public elections.

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Membership in the Nazi Party in 1930s. Germany littering.

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Failing to pay required conference registration fees.

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Staying in regular contact with one's mother if one's mother is still alive.

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Charitable giving. Vegetarianism. Replying to emails from students paying membership dues to support one's main disciplinary academic society.

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Being an organ donor, being a blood donor,

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responding dishonestly to survey questions and letting the door slam when leaving or entering in the middle of a talk.

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So these measures vary from the trivial,

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like door slamming and littering to substantial life decisions that some people would regard as highly morally important,

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like joining the Nazi Party or donating a large sum of money to charity.

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They vary from behaviour towards strangers like blood and organ donation to behaviour toward family members,

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like calling mom or two students replying to emails. They also very on issues on which moral opinion is divided like vegetarianism,

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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.

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I like the badness of joining the Nazi Party by consensus now and also issues of monsters.

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They're consensus even during the the act of voting like we have evidence that over

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80% of professors think that you should respond to emails from undergraduates.

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Over 80% of professors think that there is a moral duty, or at least it's morally good to vote in public elections.

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So in one case, we found evidence that ethicists behave a little worse.

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Library ethics books were more likely missing from academic libraries and were other comparable books in philosophy,

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similar in age and check out rate. But mostly we just found no detectable differences in behaviour.

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Now in some cases we also had measures of expressed moral opinion about those same issues which

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we could compare with either or both self-reported behaviour and directly observed behaviour.

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So we could compare expressed opinion about responding to student emails with self-reported behaviour.

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How often do you respond to student emails? What percentage of emails do you neglect?

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And then we actually sent them emails that look designed to look as though they were

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from students and saw whether they replied and talked more about that if you want.

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We emphasise, I would emphasise that these data are always de-identified.

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Transformed into numerical codes. We didn't couldn't reach any inferences about particular individuals.

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We found several issues on which professional ethicists tended to endorse more stringent norms,

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but we didn't detect any corresponding differences in behaviour on those issues.

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We also do not find that ethicists expressed moral opinions were either more or less consistent with

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their either self-reported or their directly measured behaviour than were not ethicists opinions.

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So attitude behaviour correlations were similar across the board.

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So there are various possible interpretations of these results.

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Let me just throw out a few. One is that philosophical, moral reflection is behaviourally inert?

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John Hyde, of course, is famously argues for that, and he's used our research as part of his support for that thesis.

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Another interpretation is that ethics would not be inert if it were applied to cases that arise in ethicist daily lives.

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But instead, ethics is focussed mainly on the abstract, the obscure or general public policy.

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So another interpretation is that people who are drawn to ethics are disproportionately those who need to reason their way to behaving morally well,

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not ethicists kind of just do it intuitively or automatically.

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And so ethical reflection is effective in getting hyper intellectual people to improve their behaviour up to average.

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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.

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But recently I've been attracted to the consistency of these results with the moral mediocrity hypothesis.

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So if the Moral Majority hypothesis is correct, we can explain my results.

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So consider the issue on which we have the most, I think, striking results, which is the vegetarianism vegetarianism issue.

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In 2009, draft person, I sent a questionnaire to professional philosophers, including ethicists, anonymous philosophers,

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and then also a comparison group of other professors in other departments at the same universities.

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In the first part of questionnaire, we asked the respondents their normative opinions about a variety of moral issues.

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And the second part of the questionnaire, we asked them to self-report their behaviour on those same issues for some of those issues,

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but not for the vegetarian vegetarian vegetarianism issue.

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We also had some direct measures of behaviour. So on the vegetarianism vegetarianism issue, in the first part of the questionnaire,

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we asked respondents to rate various behaviours like regularly eating the meat of mammals such as beef, pork.

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We asked them to rate that on a 1 to 9 scale for very morally bad, very morally good.

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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.

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45% of the non ethicists philosophers did, but only 19% of the professors in departments other than philosophy did.

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So a pretty big difference in moral opinion.

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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?

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And there we found no statistically significant difference among the groups.

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Overall, 38% of the respondents answered yes, including 37% of the ethicists.

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And we found a similar pattern by age and gender, women were more likely to say it was bad.

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We're not more likely to report or did not report less meat.

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Younger participants were more likely to say it's bad. We're not more likely to report having eaten less meat.

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So. So here's a thought experiment. Max.

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Oh, let me tell you how I choose my names in my thought experiments. Now, I commend this for your consideration.

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I have now to avoid implicit bias or and to increase cultural cultural representativeness.

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I now write my examples with bias.

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And then I have this Excel document with the names of all the undergraduates who've taken laudatory classes with me since 2014.

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And I just randomly choose a name from that. So Max is an ethics professor teaching and applied moral issues class.

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He introduces his students to the philosophical arguments for and against vegetarianism.

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He admits to his students that he personally is convinced that the arguments for vegetarianism are sound and that vegetarianism is morally required.

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He considers various objections, including objections raised in class discussion, and he rebuts each one.

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And after class, he goes to the school cafeteria and has a cheeseburger.

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Now, students might be surprised seeing him do this, might say, Hey, what are you doing?

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I thought you just said it was bad to eat meat. Here you are, eating meat.

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Now, if the moral mediocrity hypothesis is correct, we can explain Max's behaviour.

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Max believes, through philosophical reasoning, that he has discovered something about morality is morally bad meat.

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Now, having discovered this, what's he going to do?

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Well, according to the moral mediocrity hypothesis, he doesn't aim to be morally good by absolute standards.

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Instead, he aims to be about as morally good as the people around him, the people he regards as his peers.

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What is it? What are his peers doing? What are other professors doing? His family, his friends, people around him in the cafeteria?

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Well, they're mostly eating meat. So if he's aiming for mediocrity, he's going to do the same.

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Instead of leading to a change in behaviour.

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Max's moral discovery has led him only to have a lower moral opinion of almost everyone's moral behaviour,

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including his own, while he keeps on doing what he's always done.

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Now, it does seem likely that some people are convinced by philosophical arguments,

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arguments not only to endorse vegetarianism, but also to practice vegetarianism.

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In fact, I'm doing a study on this right now. Peter Singer,

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Brad KUKLA and I are collaborating on a study where we're taking undergraduates and exposing half of them to arguments for vegetarianism.

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Half of them are arguments for charitable giving, giving. And then they're going to get cafeteria vouchers.

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They want to see what food choices they actually make. I can talk about that more if you want during question period.

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Now, if some people are convinced by philosophical arguments for vegetarianism and then change their behaviour,

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that can be made consistent with a moral mediocrity hypothesis if the result is a licensing of worse behaviour in other areas.

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So for example, if you put in the work and the self-deprecation or perceived self-deprecation to become a vegetarian,

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then maybe you have an excuse to ignore student emails more than you otherwise would have,

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or to pollute more, or to be ruder to your neighbours, or to to shirk departmental duties or to give less to charity.

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So on this view, and I don't think this is the only thing going on and I'm absolutely committed to this, but.

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The simple version of moral mediocrity.

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Is this the main practical effect of moral discovery on your personal day to day behaviour is that it helps you

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more accurately calibrate your mediocrity with a clearer understanding of how morally good or bad we all are.

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I'm going to skip this part of the talk about whether people will mostly believe they're morally above average.

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I do think they tend to believe that, but kind of in a self deceptive way.

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All right. So let's get on to the normative thesis. Right.

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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,

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somewhat bad,

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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.

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So mediocre has a negative connotation in ordinary English.

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It means partly it means somewhere in the ballpark of average or ordinary.

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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,

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and being mediocre is compatible with having some redeeming features with being in some respects good.

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So mediocre coffee is good enough for me.

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Most of the time. Mediocre students mostly pass their classes and get their degrees.

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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.

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So the simplest opposing views to this are that it's perfectly fine to R&B are about as morally good as your peers,

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and that it's horrible to aim to be about as morally good, or maybe I should say morally bad as your peers.

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So I'm not going to criticise them.

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It's horrible view at length. I don't think many of us regard our peers as morally horrible.

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Some people might think that most of humanity is morally horrible, apart from their valued in-group of friends or co-religionists.

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But then they probably treat that in-group as their peers toward whom they morally calibrate.

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Others might think that their peers, maybe even especially their peers,

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are morally horrible on grounds that there's something morally horrible about our shared lifestyle,

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such as its luxurious ness in the face of global poverty.

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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.

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Again, that's a kind of hard view to rebut in a brief space.

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But let me know that people do often lend a helping hand to strangers for no obvious benefit.

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They treat their fellows kindly. They share. They laugh. They maintain friendships.

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They take principled stands against injustice. So following the moral crowd can be good when others act with kindness and integrity.

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It inspires us to do the same. Attempting to compensate for having acted badly can also be good.

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The memory of guilt can motivate improvement. We're not horrible, only mediocre.

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Now against the view that it's perfectly fine to aim to behave in a morally mediocre way.

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I offer three arguments. First, your peers, they fail to reply to your important emails.

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They shirk their duties and neglect their promises. They're rude.

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They're grumpy for no good reason. They have annoying dogs, loud parties, bad driving habits, and unjustified sense of entitlement.

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They make you wait and then concoct some glib excuse. They form obnoxious opinions on too little information and then vote for horrible things.

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In all these little ways, they behave badly, and we ought to try to be better than that.

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Second, our treatment of others is pervaded with unjustified bias, unjustifiable bias,

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biased based on race, sex, age, beauty, disability, class, cultural background.

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It's not the worst of all things to be biased, but bias is pervasive and we're rightly criticised all for being biased.

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The range of biases based on disability in particular is huge and unavoidable since disability is so various.

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Biased toward conventionally beautiful people also is pervasive and substantial across across a wide range of social measures.

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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.

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Third. Even if we aren't morally horrible for leaving middle living, middle class,

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European or North American lifestyles or British lifestyles, as I assume most of you do.

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History might not judge us so kindly.

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Our typical lifestyles harm the environment by which we collectively contribute to the death and immiseration of many millions of future people.

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Arguably also, most of us ought to give more to charitable causes, local or global,

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in time or in money than we do, given our relative privilege and luxury.

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Most of us eat meat, which most of us ethicists think is morally bad.

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We purchase consumer goods from companies we know or ought to know, engage in bad practices.

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Now, it's contentious how bad all of this is, and my argument doesn't hinge upon this third bullet point.

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But if even something like this is even approximately correct,

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then every normal middle class person in our society is morally criticised for a wide range of actions every day.

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So it's not perfectly fine to aim to be morally mediocre.

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But. Probably that's about where you're in.

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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.

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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.

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Right. And and another one is one that draws on work, on sainthood and why it might be good to avoid being a saint.

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If you want to raise either of those questions later, we can.

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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.

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Sweet Spot. So on the happy coincidence defence, here are four things that I care intensely about.

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Being a good father. Being a good philosopher, being a good teacher, being a morally good person.

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It would be lovely if there were never any conflicts among these four things.

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Explicitly, explicitly acknowledging these trade offs is unpleasant, sufficiently unpleasant, and it's tempting to try to rationalise them away.

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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.

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But here I am. Similarly uncomfortable for me is the thought that the money I'll be spending on a family vacation to

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Iceland later this month could probably save a few people from death due to poverty related causes.

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If I gave it to the right charity. So here's a tempting way of rationalising that happy coincidence defence.

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Consider travel for work. Now I don't have to travel around the world giving talks and meeting people.

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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.

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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.

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The latter given the luxurious use of resources and the pollution of air travel.

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So happy coincidence, Defence says. No, I'm not sacrificing any of these other goals at all.

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Although I'm away from my children. I'm a better father for it.

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I've enriched my life. And now I can mingle that richness into theirs.

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I'm a more globally aware, wiser father. Similarly, although I might cancel a class or two and deprioritized lecture preparation,

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research travel improves my teaching in the long run, since it makes me a better philosopher and my philosophical work.

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Isn't that an important contribution to society? Maybe it's important enough to justify the expense, pollution and waste.

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I do more good for the world travelling around discussing philosophy than I could do do,

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leading a more modest lifestyle at home, donating more to charities and being more fully involved in my local community.

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So after enough reflection of the sort,

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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,

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instead of maximising them all I am.

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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.

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Yeah. Now.

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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.

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If so, it would be a happy coincidence. And sometimes they really are happy coincidences.

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It would be wonderful if we could structure our societies and our lives to increase the frequency of these kinds of happy coincidences.

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But I think I hope you'll agree that this pattern of thinking is suspicious.

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Life is full of trade offs among important things.

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The happy coincidence reasoning seems likely to often be epistemic.

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Dubious post-hoc rationalisation. It seems likely then illegitimately convincing myself.

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That's something that I want to be true. Really is true.

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Here's another way of it to accept your moral near average ness while rejecting the idea that you're criticised for being mediocre.

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It's to insist that you are doing the best you can do.

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Now it's true that trying too hard or something can sometimes backfire, right?

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If you try too hard to be funny, you could end up being less funny.

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If you tried too hard to win the race, you might exhaust yourself at the beginning and then collapse midway through.

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You need to pace yourself. Maybe morality is like that.

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Maybe moral idealists sometimes push themselves so hard that they would have been better pursuing a more moderate, sustainable course.

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Right? So for example, someone moved by the arguments for vegetarianism who decided instantly to become the strictest possible vegan might be

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more likely to revert to cheeseburger eating than someone who had chosen a more moderate vegetarian course to begin with.

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Somewhat differently. Someone who was passionately committed to those believing high moral standards

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might become prone to self-deception or might become unbearably sanctimonious,

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or might become insensitive to nuances and others legitimate excuses.

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So it's possible that you are currently in the sweet spot such that if you were to try to be any morally better,

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then you in fact are you would actually become morally worse.

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You might be doing the best you can do since you couldn't be morally better than you actually are.

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You're not pretty sizeable. You were rude to the cashier.

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You were biased in viewing the handsome student more favourably.

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You're thoughtless of your spouse,

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negligent in your months due overdue comments to the Ph.D. student who can advance until she receives your comments.

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But if you tried to be any morally better, you would. Well, something.

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So this may be true of some people, right?

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If you're a homeless mother of three who's managed to keep it together through a cold winter and physical abuse,

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I'm totally ready to believe you have no more resources to do any better than you doing.

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But most of us, it's probably good policy to be sceptical of any tendency.

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You have to think you are already in the most you can do. Sweet spot.

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All right. So. Most of us do not aim to be morally excellent by absolute standards.

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Instead, we aim to be about as morally good as our peers. Our peers are somewhat morally criticised, but not morally horrible.

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Morally mediocre. If we succeed in approximately matching their mediocrity,

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we too are mediocre and we're somewhat criticised more for having such low personal moral ambitions.

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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.

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But those defences don't stand up to critical examination. Own your mediocrity minute, except the reasonableness of the moral criticism you deserve.

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Yes.