The Ethical Jerk

Josh Landy
Can studying moral philosophy make you more moral?

Ray Briggs
Are there other ways to become a better person?

Josh Landy
Or should we all just settle for moral mediocrity?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from our respective shelters in place via the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy and I direct the Philosophy and Literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today, we’re thinking about the Rthical Jerk.

Josh Landy
The ethical jerk? That’s like saying the round square—it’s a contradiction in terms.

Ray Briggs
Well, you obviously haven’t spent enough time in philosophy department meetings dealing with quote unquote ethicist to actually act like jerks.

Hamilton
Fair enough, but I feel like we have enough jerks of our own and literary studies. I’m not sure that’s gonna be unique to philosophy.

Ray Briggs
Right, but you don’t have that special kind of jerk. I’m talking about, like, the kind who devotes their entire life to thinking and writing about morality and ethics. And that is just rude or selfish or inconsiderate, or worse, worse. Yeah. You know, like, they become famous for writing about racism and misogyny and justice. And then it turns out that they have this long history of harassing female students of color.

Josh Landy
Yikes. Yeah. Okay, that is bad and deeply hypocritical. But isn’t that kind of behavior to be found everywhere? I’m not sure why you’re focusing specifically on badly behaved moral philosophers.

Ray Briggs
But you said it, it’s hypocritical. Hey, take the badly behaved moral philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who is famous for the categorical imperative.

Josh Landy
Wait, don’t tell me it turns out the philosopher who said it’s always wrong to lie was like a pathological liar.

Ray Briggs
Well, I don’t know if he was a liar. But I do know, he was a racist, sexist jerk. who defended slavery and treated women horribly.

Josh Landy
Yeah, well, look, I’m not gonna defend anyone’s outdated views or bad behavior. My thought there would just be that, you know, maybe Kant was a productive this time. I mean, even David Hume, who was pretty good on many subjects, wrote that he suspected white people were a superior race. I mean, that’s a horrifying view, but it clearly it was pretty common back then.

Ray Briggs
So what doesn’t make it morally acceptable? Besides content, Hume invented new philosophical foundations for so many of our basic concepts. So how come they never even questioned their belief in the natural superiority of white men?

Josh Landy
Okay, so they definitely weren’t moral saints? They sure weren’t. But isn’t it unfair to hold people who are live centuries ago to today’s moral standards?

Ray Briggs
Okay, okay. Forget about Kant, and Hume, and Aristotle, and Nietzsche, and Locke and Heidegger.

Josh Landy
Okay, I get it—fair enough, touché.

Ray Briggs
Okay seriously, forget about the dead white guys. Let’s talk about living ethical jerks. Isn’t it fair to judge them by today’s moral standards?

Josh Landy
Yeah, absolutely. That’s totally fair. I mean, look, people who hold themselves up as moral authorities, and then go around doing exactly the thing they’re telling other people not to do. Yeah, they’re definitely jokes. Still, does that mean that moral philosophy as a whole is like a bankrupt enterprise?

Ray Briggs
Oh, not necessarily. Moral philosophy could at least help you understand why those people are jerks.

Josh Landy
Look at us conceding each other’s points!

Ray Briggs
Yeah, not all philosophers are jerks. #notallphilosophers

Josh Landy
And hopefully, we’re also not totally hypocritical unlike certain long cherished historical figures. The recent wave of Black Lives Matter protests have forced many of us to grapple with the racist past of some icons.

Ray Briggs
So we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, to investigate the recent calls for removing statues of some famous hypocrites from history. She files this report.

Holly McDede
On the eve of Independence Day 2020, the hit musical Hamilton began streaming on Disney+.

Hamilton
I am not throwing away my shot. Just like my country, I’m young, scrappy, and hungry and I’m not throwing away my shot.

Holly McDede
And there was a lot of criticism about how the musical deals with slavery. Hamilton leaves out that George Washington was a slave owner. Only Thomas Jefferson is criticized for owning slaves.

Hamilton
A civics lesson from a slaver, hey neighbor / Your debts are paid ’cause you don’t pay for labor / We plant seeds in the South. We create / Yeah, keep ranting—qe know who’s really doing the planting.

Holly McDede
Brock Obama has described Hamilton as a story for all of us and about all of us. But Hannah Robbins, an expert in musical theatre with the University of Nottingham in England says while the musical is exceptional, it also omits history.

Hannah Robbins
There is a problem with making all of these characters neutral when they weren’t. Even though we have people of color and many black actors on stage, there are no black people in this story.

Holly McDede
Robins notes the antagonist in Hamilton, Aaron Burr, was played by a dark-skinned actor, while the heroic Hamilton had lighter skins. And the female characters were little more than love interests.

Hannah Robbins
And the role that the white characters these often black actors are playing in the slave trade is never addressed. And I think that that is a tension and a limitation of the vision of America that is painful. Removing the history of the people you are promoting is limited and also incredibly painful.

Holly McDede
This debate spans beyond musicals. If you look at the history of the founding fathers, you’ll find complex contradictory people, says Manisha Sinha, author of “The Slaves Cause: A History of Abolition.”

Manisha Sinha
Even some of the slaveholding founding fathers are a lot more complicated than the Confederate generals and politicians who openly proclaimed the righteousness of slavery.

Holly McDede
Thomas Jefferson writes in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, but he also enslaved roughly 600 people, including Sally Hemings, who birthed six of his children.

Manisha Sinha
The more you get to know Jefferson the person, the more unlikable he seems to me as a person—as somebody who wanted to put up this public face of anti-slavery and moral virtue but who never really did anything to free his slaves.

Holly McDede
Because of this, activists have pushed ro remive his statue along with the statues of other slave owners, like George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant. Isaac Bailey, author of the forthcoming book, “Why Didn’t We Riot: A Black Man in Trumpland,” says these conversations about statues usually miss the bigger picture.

Isaac Bailey
First I should just deal with our really painful history.

Holly McDede
Bailey says we don’t need to cancel George Washington. We just need to understand who he was.

Isaac Bailey
We have not declared in one really, really unified voice that slavery like is an unequivocal evil. In the same way that we view the Holocaust.

Holly McDede
For instance, Bailey knows about grappling with complicated public figures. In 1995, he attended the Million Man March—a call for unity among African American men. He says he needed that day like he needed oxygen.

Louis Farrakhan
As of 10 o’clock this morning, we reached 1 million black men.

Holly McDede
That march was organized by Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam and a man known for blatant antisemitism.

Isaac Bailey
That event was so powerful and so beautiful that I actually think of it anytime I get down. And yet I actually struggle with that tension.

Holly McDede
Most people would not tolerate a statue dedicated to Farrakhan, Bailey says, because of his antisemitism. But slavery is not treated in history books with the same disdain. He says telling accurate truthful history about America’s so called Heroes is necessary.

Isaac Bailey
Our willingness in order to really really grapple with all of this anew is sort of, like much more important to me than sort of like which statue sort of stays or goes.

Holly McDede
Hanna Robins, the expert in musicals from the University of Nottingham, says popular culture has a role to play here.

Hannah Robbins
It’s not a piece of textbook that’s being disseminated to every student in the world. But at the same time, it has a massive reach. And outside of America, there is a lot less familiarity with the history of the period.

Hamilton
Who lives, who dies, who tells your story / Every other founding father’s story gets told.

Holly McDede
Helton ends with a song about who gets to be remembered. His wife Eliza becomes the gatekeeper of her husband’s legacy. And she sings about where he fell short.

Hamilton
I speak out against slavery / You could have done so much more if you only had time.

Holly McDede
But up until the very end, her character is kind of bland, so it’s not clear if she ‘s up for the task of telling the real messy history we need right now. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks so much for that great report and a really timely topic, Holly. I’m Josh Landy. With me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about ethical jerks.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Eric Schwitzgebel, professor of philosophy at UC Riverside, and author of “A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures.” Eric, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Thanks for having me on.

Josh Landy
So Eric, you think a lot about psychology and philosophy of mind. So how’d you get interested in jerks and what you call jerk attitude? I hope it isn’t from personal experience.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Well, the first thing that got me started on it was a experience on the freeways in Southern California. Whereas getting frustrated with what I think of as the game of jerk and sucker. So let’s say that there’s a long line of cars that are waiting to exit the freeway, right, you can either politely wait your turn in the back, and then watch all the jerks kind of cut in at the last minute in front of you. Or you can be one of the jerk yourself. And I like either option. I kind of wish it wasn’t the case that you had kind of had to play this game of being the jerk or the sucker in the freeways of LA. So actually, I started thinking about jerks thinking about that kind of issue and, and the way that the game of jerkin sucker plays, in our in other ways in our lives, too.

Ray Briggs
So earlier, I was thinking about moral philosophers and pretending that they’re the worst people in the world. But you’ve actually done some research on that. So tell me, how bad exactly are my colleagues?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Yeah, I’ve done a lot of research on it. And what I found is that moral philosophers, professors who teach ethics, they behave about the same as other people have similar social background.

Ray Briggs
Ah, so we’re not worse!

Eric Schwitzgebel
You’re not worse, you’re not worse!

Josh Landy
Are they worse than literature professors, at least?

Eric Schwitzgebel
No. Comparisons I’ve done has been with professors from other departments, because those are the most socially similar people to ethics professors.

Josh Landy
So what are a few examples of that?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Well, here’s some of the stuff that I’ve looked at voting and public elections, calling your mother eating the meat of mammals donating to charity, littering, disruptive chatting and door slamming during philosophy presentations, responding to student emails, attending conferences without paying registration fees, organ donation, blood donation, theft of library books, overall moral evaluation by one’s departmental peers, honesty and responding to survey questions and joining the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1930s.

Josh Landy
I mean, obviously, the Nazi Party is the most striking, but I think my favorite is the stolen ethics because you find that ethics books are more likely to be stolen than non ethics books.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Yes, I did find that that’s the one result that is tending toward the negative for ethicists, mostly other results, the ethicist and other groups behave about the same. But the ethics book was it was the first study I did and it’s it was kind of striking, we looked at books, that in philosophical ethics, and then other books of comparable popularity, and check out rates in other areas of philosophy, and yeah, the ethics books were more likely to be stolen or missing from the academic libraries. The most stolen book that we found was Mills utilitarianism.

Ray Briggs
So this is a really like, interesting mix of measures of morality, like they seem very different from each other stealing library books versus joining the Nazi party. Why did you choose those measures?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Right? Well, we wanted a wide variety of measures, because I didn’t want the results to hang on, you know, choosing the one right measure, right. So we looked at big things, small things, things that have to do with what ones public face things in one’s personal life, things that we think of as bad that you want to avoid or alternatively good things that are optional to do, we want to look at a wide range of things. And of course, we also want to look at things where we could get data. We couldn’t look at like murder rates, because fortunately, there are not a lot of Ephesus, murderers to sample from. So so it was a mix of considerations. But overall, we wanted to have this wide diversity. So So you know, if I’m wrong about some of these issues, it doesn’t really matter if I’m wrong, and one of the studies it doesn’t really matter.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about the ethical jerk with Eric Schwitzgebel from UC Riverside.

Ray Briggs
Does thinking about morality make you a better person? Could there be other benefits to ethical reflection? Or could it make you worse?

Josh Landy
Moral philosophy, moral improvement and moral degeneration—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Warren Zevon
I’m Mr. Bad Example, take a look at me / I’ll live to be a hundred and go down in infamy.

Josh Landy
Does preaching what’s right while doing what’s wrong make you a bad example—an ethical jerk? I’m Josh Landy, ad this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about ethical jerks with Eric Schwitzgebel from UC Riverside, author of “A Theory of Jerks.”

Josh Landy
We’re still pre recording episodes from our respective homes, so we aren’t able to take your phone calls these days. But you can always email us comments@philosophytalk.org, or join us on our blog by becoming a subscriber at philosophytalk.org

Ray Briggs
So Eric, one of the results of your research is that ethicists have more demanding moral opinions than other people, but they actually don’t behave any more ethically. I bet you have a theory about why that is?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Yeah, well, I have a few theories. I think we don’t really know we should do more empirical research. But my current favorite theory is that’s what’s happening is that ethicists like most people, aim for moral mediocrity. On my view, people don’t aim to be morally good or bad, for the most part, by absolute moral standards, what they do is they look around, see how their peers are behaving and then aim to behave about the same as their peers. Everybody aims to kind of be morally so so.

Ray Briggs
And do you think that that’s a reasonable thing to do? Like, should I? Is it reasonable for him to aim for mediocrity and anything? Why do people do that?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Well, I think life has a lot of trade offs, right? So you could actually think it’d be really not that hard to be a saint. And people pretend it would be hard, it wouldn’t be that hard. You know what you could do? You could stop what you’re doing, and really give yourself over to doing awesome moral things. Right? You could go drop your job and go help the most vulnerable people in the world or something like that, right. But we don’t want to, because we’ve got other things we care about. We care about our families, we care about career success. We care about all kinds of things. So So I think people choose, they don’t often admit it to themselves. But I think people choose mediocrity, and they do it rationally or semi rationally, because they don’t want to pay the price that’s involved in doing what’s morally best.

Josh Landy
What about the alternative theory, we sometimes hear that, you know, the the reason you get hypocritical cases like these is that ultimately, people are driven by their irrational emotions, and then they just come up with rationalizations later. And so thinking doesn’t really make any major debt in the way that they they behave.

Eric Schwitzgebel
I think there’s a lot of truth in the idea that a lot of what we do when we engage in moral reflection is rationalization. We are drawn toward a theory or a view and then we kind of concoct some sort of excuse, right? So if we go back to the library books example, right, you’re tempted to steal a library book. You’re a professional ethicist, you’ve got all kinds of moral theories you could draw on about how to maximize good consequences.

Josh Landy
Utilitarian arguments!

Eric Schwitzgebel
Right, or whatever your favorite moral theory is, you could concoct a rationalization justify it. But I don’t think that could be the only thing that’s going on. Because sometimes, people and especially ethicists come to theories that are different from what they thought before, and that are contrary, at least seemingly to their interest. Like one of the things that’s really striking to me is how many ethicists think that it’s wrong to eat meat? If you enjoy steaks, and you’re just rationalizing, you think the conclusion would be no, no, it’s good to eat meat.

Josh Landy
And they don’t just rewrite their theories, they write they, they their head, instead of like, all they have to do is write a new theory according to which it’s great to eat meat. And then they would be licensing their meeting, but they don’t do that. Instead, they they stick with their stated principles and just don’t follow through on them.

Ray Briggs
This is a little bit puzzling to me. Because if—why spend so much time studying something that you don’t want to be good at, it would be like studying how to become a star athlete and then just aiming for athletic mediocrity. So what’s what’s the point of studying moral philosophy if you don’t want to then be good at being moral?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Well, there are a variety of things you could want from it besides self improvement. And I think a lot of philosophers are aiming for those things. Then there’s this interesting question of whether we also want to aim for self improvement. But you can study it because it’s beautiful, right? I mean, why do people study metaphysics? Why do people study cosmology? Right? It’s intellectually interesting. It’s fascinating. You might even think ethicists are the type of people who find this morality thing that’s so important in our culture to be this fascinating puzzle. Like why do people do that stuff?

Ray Briggs
I suppose I could want to study cosmology but not want to be a star. That’s that’s fair.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Right, well put.

Josh Landy
Okay, but but let me I want to push back a little bit on the idea, I think Obviously, you know, you’ve done the research, and I completely, you know, this is well conducted research. But even if on average, we can’t say that more philosophy has the impact we might hope we’re expected to, aren’t there cases where it does I mean, I have a friend, for example, who is in the process of trying to donate a kidney and not to a family member, just donate a kidney, so we’ll go to whoever needs it the most. It’s quite an elaborate procedure and painful because of Peter singers work. So there’s a case where, you know, reading something, and thinking about something from the world of moral philosophy is had a real world positive moral impact.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Yeah, I think that must happen. There are so many cases that seem to be like that seem to be like what’s going on with your friend. And then this, The striking thing is that for the most part, at least in the research I’ve done, and I’ve done a lot of it, it doesn’t appear to be statistically detectable, at least among ethics professors. So So one possible explanation is that studying ethics has multiple different kinds of effects. Sometimes it can make you ethically better, like maybe your friends case, sometimes it can make you ethically worse, right? So think about what I call toxic rationalization. So the library bookcase could be an example of that, right? So you’re tempted to steal this book, but you wouldn’t steal it. But then you think, Hey, wait, and you apply your moral theory, and then the moral theory licenses you to do something that’s morally worse than you would have done. Right. So if moral thinking moral philosophy can have both positive and negative effects that approximately cancel out, that could also explain the fact that moral philosophers on average, our moral, consistently with ethics actually having an effect?

Ray Briggs
I see. So So here’s another kind of slightly different framing. So we’ve been talking about, if I have somebody I know they’ve studied ethics, how moral should I expect them to be? But what if I instead ask, suppose I want to become more moral? Like suppose I take it as one of my projects to become a moral saint? How much ethics do I need to do that? Like, is seeing ethics in that, in that case, a way to help myself?

Eric Schwitzgebel
I think it’s really easy to become morally better. Look, you and me, and probably most of your listeners are relatively affluent by global standards. Right? You could, we’re drawing again, on Peter Singer, you could sacrifice some of your luxuries, to have a positive impact, a potentially big positive impact and other people if you choose not to. Or if you don’t have money, you could give time. Of course, there are people in your family, there are people in your community who could use your help, but instead, you you know, you’ll want to watch Mandalorian or whatever, right? So I don’t think it’s actually that hard to think of ways in which you could be morally better, we just we don’t acknowledge this. Right. So I don’t think you need to study ethics. To improve morally, you just need to choose to do it.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about ethical jerks with Eric Schwitzgebel from UC Riverside. And Eric, we have an email from Louise in Amherst, Massachusetts, I think it’s maybe pushes back a little bit on that, and Louise is talking about the desirability of taking ethics ethics classes. Here’s what she says. relativism struck me as deeply wrong. But it wasn’t until I studied philosophy that I felt equipped to respond to the arguments from disagreement that many of my friends and political allies would make. So what do you think about that?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Right? I wonder how many people who say gives voice to relativist ideas when you ask them philosophically behave in relativist ways in their real life? Right. So if it were the case, that thinking about relativism, and then embracing it intellectually led you to think oh, well, some people kill babies, other people don’t kill babies, it’s all the same, right? And then, like, really make your live your life that way. You know, then it would be really important to have an intellectual response to relativism, so they don’t go down that path.

Josh Landy
Okay, but But I wonder if we can generalize out from Louise’s point, maybe maybe it wouldn’t apply always to relativism. But I’m wondering whether, you know, maybe we could say, look, these studies show that on average, people who take ethics classes don’t behave more morally than other people. But what if they do other things that contribute to a better world for example, saying things that would lead other people to behave better, right. So I think of a case like Simone de Beauvoir, many people think that in her personal life, she could have lived up to a higher feminist standard, but as a thinker and writer Surely she had an enormous positive impact on the way that other people behaved. So, you know, are we are you being too harsh towards the hypocrites? Isn’t there Right? I mean, the rush buco said hypocrisy is the homage vise pays to virtue. Maybe they even maybe hypocrisy is better than nothing.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Oh, actually I have a quite a soft spot for hypocrites. I think hypocrisy is great because I like the honesty of say, of having very high moral standards, and then just owning up to the fact that you don’t live up to them. Right? So we can imagine a Nazi Eichmann? Who is a hypocrite. Right? Who really thinks that what he’s doing is wrong, right? Or who could think and then does it anyway. Or you can think of a Nazi who rationalizes himself into thinking it’s right to kill the Jews, right? I actually kind of like the the Nazi who knows that is wrong, and at least has that feeling of guilt about it, and that kind of moral self knowledge. So I’d rather have a hypocrite than a rationalizer.

Ray Briggs
I can see the value in saying that if you’re going to do wrong things, you should at least admit that they’re wrong. But I’m a little bit frustrated, because in one sense, you’re right, that it’s easy to be a moral saint. But on the other hand, if it were so easy, why wouldn’t more people do it? So it’s easy in the sense that you know which things to do. But it’s not easy to motivate yourself or more people would be motivated. So how do you make it easier? Or like, how do we sort of live with just accepting mediocrity?

Eric Schwitzgebel
I think people just don’t want to do it. Right? It’s easy to walk 10 miles down to downtown. I mean, for most people who are capable of walking, right, you just, you don’t want to do it. You got other things, you got things you’d rather do with your time. So it’s easy if you want it, right. This is something that actually I take from ancient Chinese philosopher matches, right? It’s not we all know, basically, I mean, they’re disputable cases, of course, but we all know basically what’s right and what’s wrong. And if you want to do it, you can do it. You could choose it. It’s just that people don’t, they don’t choose it. They don’t seem to want to do it.

Ray Briggs
So there, I know there is a strand of philosophical thought I’m sort of defended by people like Susan Wolfe, who think it’s actually not really worth being a moral saint. Because if you were a moral saint, you couldn’t sort of have your own special projects. So you couldn’t be excellent at other things like playing the violin, because all that time you spent playing the violin should really be going toward charity work if you wanted to be a moral saint, like his moral sainthood. Are we wrong to not wanting to is an ideal or is sort of mediocrity, a better ideal than sainthood?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Well, this is verging on what I sometimes think of as the so what if I’m not a saint excuse? I think it’s a little bit of a false dichotomy. sainthood, I mean, I’ve been inviting us to think this way too, right? But sainthood versus mediocrity? Because I think you could be better without going all the way to St. Right? So you could set up this false dichotomy and say, Oh, well, look, if I really want to be better than I have to become some sort of completely self safarik sacrificial saint who has no personal life and no private projects, and, and all that. But you could be better without going all that way. And most of us choose not to we choose mediocrity instead of a slight or somewhat improvement we aim for, in our personal lives. If you think about this, kind of think about it in terms of a grading curve, right? Most people aim I think for B, maybe B plus. Not any they don’t. People don’t aim to be morally best. They don’t aim for it. But set aside this the a plus ST. Most people don’t even aim for a minus. Right? And if they think they’re aiming for B plus, they’re probably really aiming lower. Right? Right. So you can improve somewhat without having to go all the way to the kind of Saint that wolf criticizes.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I think that this brings me to kind of another big question in the vicinity. Lots of things are optional. So I can I can be excellent at baking bread, or I can let other people bake bread. And that’s kind of optional, I can I can be like an excellent family person, or I can decide raising a family is not for me. And that’s optional. And is like so one view of morality you could take is that it’s just another of these projects, you could like decide to care about it, you could not decide to care about it. Another view of morality you could take is no it’s structures like all your other values, like whatever else you do, you have to do live an ethical life and do the morally right thing. So is and maybe there’s something in between and if we’re not using moral standards to figure out what is the best kind of life to live like is there some other things standard that’s bigger than morality that we should use.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Yeah, I don’t think there’s a bigger standard. I do think that everybody who doesn’t behave morally well is morally criticized. You can’t escape moral criticism by saying, Oh, that’s not I’m not playing the moral game. Right. But is there some overarching standard of universal rationality? Or something like that, that encompasses morality within it necessarily? I’m not sure about that.

Josh Landy
I’m not sure either. But I’m still I’m still fascinated by the question of how we motivate ourselves that Ray was bringing up earlier. And I wonder, you know, this is partly inspired also by Chinese philosophy, also by Aristotle, what if we get better friends? Right? So moral mediocrity means I kind of pitch myself to the average or what I see the people around me doing? Well, how about I try to mingle in a slightly more morally advanced group?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Yeah, I think that’s an interesting kind of approach, right? So if you aim for moral mediocrity, then you aim to be about as good as your peers. So like, hey, I want to improve maybe I’ll I’ll surround myself with morally good peers. Yeah. I think there are two kind of problems with that, right? One is just empirically, if you look at the history of people who Surat who’ve tried to create societies of like minded peers and virtue, you know, those societies have turned out not so well, typically. And the other problem is, there’s something that’s kind of jerkish about saying, I’m only going to hang around with morally good people, I’m going to like, you know, surround myself only with with people who are are morally excellent and anybody who’s not as morally good as, as me or as I aspire to be. I’m going to cut them out of my life. Something kind of, I don’t like about that.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about the ethical jerk with Eric Schwitzgebel from UC Riverside.

Ray Briggs
How do we become more virtuous people? Are there specific habits we should try to cultivate? Or are we just all doomed to moral mediocrity?

Josh Landy
Settling for mediocrity or striving for excellence—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Bob Dylan
I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes / You’d know what a drag it is to see you

Josh Landy
You gotta have a lot of nerve to preach morality but act like a jerk. I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program the questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Eric Schwitzgebel from UC Riverside, author of “A Theory of Jerks.”

Josh Landy
So Eric, we’ve been talking quite a bit about the dangers of hypocrisy, and how we can make sure we’re living up to our own ethical standards. Do you have any tips for us particularly about how to avoid being a jerk?

Eric Schwitzgebel
And I think moral Self knowledge is so hard. I think there’s probably about a zero correlation between what your moral self opinion is, how morally good you think you are, and how morally good you actually are. I mean, some people, why is that? Well, people, people are not very good at attributing to themselves negative traits that are not obvious on the face that you have them. But there’s a lot of work in social psychology that suggests this, right? People, correlations between people’s self ratings of things like how creative they are, how fair they are. These correlate almost zero with behavioral measures, and with peer ratings, right? And morality, I suspect is like that. Furthermore, if I can add a Furthermore, I think jerk attitude in particular, moral turpitude in particular is especially hard. Because a jerk, as I think of a jerk, is someone who culpably fails to appreciate the perspectives of other people around them. And one of the best ways to get moral Self knowledge is to hear criticism, hear moral criticism from the people around you, right? But if you if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t appreciate the perspectives of people around you, then you’re not going to be able to take up criticism.

Ray Briggs
But at least the non jerks can know that they’re not jerks, right? Even if the jerks are kind of in trouble. Is that. Is that true?

Eric Schwitzgebel
No, I don’t think that I don’t think that if that were true, then there probably wouldn’t be a zero correlation. In my mind, the opposite of a jerk is a sweetheart, a sweetheart is somebody who’s kind of filled acutely with the knowledge of how good and interesting and valuable that people are around them. And they want to help the people and they’re always worried about they might have accidentally unintentionally insulted somebody and oh, I shouldn’t have done that. Right. So a lot of times the people who are hardest themselves on themselves morally, are actually the people who are the sweethearts who are the best are some jerks who know they’re jerks? There’s some sweethearts who kind of like in their hearts realize that they’re sweet. But but a lot of times it goes the opposite direction. That’s what I think there’s there’s almost no relationship. Is it?

Ray Briggs
Do you think it’s it’s valuable to have some jerks around in addition to the sweetheart? So I know at the beginning, we were talking about traffic and how they’re jerks and sweethearts and LA traffic. If everybody was a sweetheart, maybe just like nobody would ever sort of turn first. Nobody would ever go through the four way intersection.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Yeah, you know, one thing I’m particularly interested in, I’ve been thinking about recently is the potential value of having jerks as leaders, and especially as moral leaders. I think that’s really, there’s a really interesting type of phenomenon, which I’d like to study more, which I think of as the moralizing jerk. So this is someone who would be a jerk in their personal lives, the people around them would also have a moral vision, and maybe be more effective in pushing that moral vision, if they’re willing to step on people’s toes and be a jerk about it and be really assertive and think everybody else is an idiot. Right? And do all that jerkish stuff, but like maybe in a morally good cause.

Josh Landy
So for the rest of us Americans, maybe we need jerkish leaders, but we don’t need we don’t need to be jerks ourselves, right? I mean, so how on earth how do we break out of our self ignorance, I think there’s a great line if you if you run into an a hole in the morning, you ran into an eight hole. If you ran into a holes all day, you’re the a hole. So you know if there’s some kind of yardstick that we can use on ourselves, because we’re so self blind? Can we get least wake ourselves up? If you know if you’re caught you constantly think everyone around you is a fool or a tool as you put it in your book? Does that mean you are the a-hole?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Yes, I like that quote. And I do think there’s a lot of truth in that. The way I think of it is, being a jerk is kind of like wearing jerk goggles. Right? So if you’re, I think all of us wear jerk goggles, sometimes you there’s a characteristic way of seeing the world. That’s, that’s the jerk goggle way of seeing the world. If you look around, and people you see around you are, right, they’re idiots. They’re fools. They’re faceless non entities, they belong into various negatively valence social categories. That you know that person’s, you just you’re kind of seeing everybody negatively. Then you’re wearing drip goggles, this, this idea came to me first when I was in the post office. Kind of fun to think about the days when we used to stand in post office lines. You remember that?

Ray Briggs
Going Places, goodness.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Right. So so the idea of your coggles came to me and I was sitting standing in this post office line, and looking at I had been thinking about jerks in general. And I was looking at all the people in front of me there in the line, and I just everybody seemed like a fool. It seemed like why do I have to waste my time in this long line while these idiots Bumble with their stupid requests? Right, and I thought, I’m seeing the world through jerk goggles. I’ve seen the world just the way the jerk sees the world. So I think one thing you can do is like notice when you’re wearing these t shirt goggles, and and once you notice that you can try to take them off.

Ray Briggs
This actually makes me curious about how it’s possible to know when other people are being jerks and whether there are moral costs. So I think one of the demands of morality is that you not just make sure that you’re doing the right thing, but you kind of keep other people in line. But does does all keeping other people in Lyon require you to be some degree of jerk?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Oh, I don’t think so. I think there are lots of ways to well keeping people in line as a certain way of phrasing it, but the sweetheart has a certain kind of power. So I’ve just been reading a biography of Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson. And they’re such an interesting pair because Lady Bird is such a sweetheart, and Linden is such a jerk. And I do think couples often have sweet sweetheart jerk pairs, right? And it’s often gendered in that way, although not always and right. But they both have a certain kind of power. So I don’t think the only way to be effective and to keep people I wouldn’t say morally aligned, but maybe you can inspire people, you can use a soft touch, you could be a ladybird instead of an LBJ.

Josh Landy
So I want to go back to conversation we’re having earlier about moral instruction. You know, based on your research seems like moral instruction isn’t doing everything we want it to do. And might be for the reasons we mentioned earlier, it helps people to taking a philosophy class helps people to rationalize their bad behavior. It could be because of moral self licensing, right? Well, I took a I took a moral philosophy class. Now I can go litter the street, right. I gave it the office you could be because of moral dumbfounding. There are so many different moral positions. Maybe I should just, you know, keep eating meat or whatever it is. Or people could come across cynical philosophers like iron Rand or you know, Rene Girard, or Peter Thiel is a great fan of JIRA. Okay, so, but what if we’re thinking about the way we do moral instruction wrong? Right? What if we could change the manner of education and build in a practical component? You know, like the, like, the old days, right when philosophy wasn’t just a set of ideas, but was a way of life what? So what, you know, there’s an ethics professor in Canada, Katherine Norwalk who does this in her classes, and she has the students, you do, do live the philosophy as part of the class, right? For a week, you’re going to be a stoic or you’re going to be a Confucian or you’re going to be a devotee of Dzongkha. What do you think about that? Could that make a difference? Is it the way we’re teaching this stuff?

Eric Schwitzgebel
I think it could be. And I kind of maybe ruin my own story just a little bit. So Peter Singer, and I and Brad coklat, just co authored a paper, it’s just been accepted for publication and cognition, which is a top psychology journal. We taught vegetarianism, to undergraduates at UC Riverside in various ways. And we found that certain ways of teaching did in fact, have an effect. Student We measured students behavior by anonymously, tracking what they purchased on campus for their student ID cards. So we have some students got got vegetarianism instruction, and some people got a control group got instruction on charitable giving. And we looked at what they actually bought with their student ID cards, and the ones in the vegetarianism sections bought less meat. So at the student level, this surprised me. But at the student level, it seemed like the instruction was having that effect, at least one of us taught done in certain ways.

Ray Briggs
Do you think that that philosophy is the best discipline to help people learn to live ethical lives? So I mean, I asked before about how to make yourself better. But there’s also this like, how do you kind of persuade other people to be better? And I guess we have we have some Ranger tools? Like, are they? Are they good tools compared to what else is out there?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Yeah, I don’t think they’re particularly good. Um, you know, but it’s not like religious people behave particularly better than others. I mean, there’s a lot of research on it. And some people do think that religious instruction and religiosity is correlated with moral behavior, but I’m actually pretty skeptical of the positive findings in that literature. So I don’t think we really have figured it out very well. And one of the things about philosophy that I kind of like, is that it’s not kind of prefab moral instruction. So this is pushing back just a little bit on what we were saying before, but, um, you know, the aim of philosophy isn’t, I know what’s right. And now I’m going to make you a morally better person. Right. That’s the kind of unethical training program, right? I think philosophy is really, if it’s really going to be authentic inquiry. You don’t know which way it’s gonna go. It might make you morally better. It might make you morally worse. You don’t know. It’s an open question. I mean, in philosophy, you question everything except for the intelligence? Well, one of the things that you’re going to question is whether it’s good to be morally good person, and you don’t know the answer that right. And maybe you’ll decide half morality is for suckers. Maybe that’s gonna be the end of your philosophical inquiry. If that’s not open to you as an end at the beginning, then you’re not really questioning everything from the start. Right?

Josh Landy
You’re demoralizing me, Eric. Oh, good. But let’s my here’s my last thought for you. We aim for tomorrow, mediocrity. So the better the group we’re in, the better we’re likely to be. So what if, instead of or in addition to teaching people more philosophy, we just put them in a bunch of classes with students who don’t care about money? How about that? Yeah, we put a little occasionally minded See, this is obviously very self serving. We want to live occasionally vices in classes with people who, who want to just paint pretty pictures and, and make compositions and make the world a better place in the end. Right, then your point about Mr. Modi opportunity to gain some traction, just an idea.

Eric Schwitzgebel
But then, are you putting the students who really prioritize money all together to so you make those students more money oriented by by by changing their peer group?

Josh Landy
You’re right. We’re doomed. No, no, Eric, I have to thank you a million for joining us today. It’s been it’s been definitely an improving and certainly illuminating conversation.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Oh, thanks for having me on. It’s been fun to chat.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Eric Schwitzgebel, professor of philosophy at UC Riverside, and author of “A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
Well, I still really want people to be better than they are. And I’m just despairing of the possibility of arguing them into it. And sort of looking for other ways to persuade them and maybe persuade myself like I’d like I’d like to be better than I am to maybe I’d like to be better than morally mediocre.

Josh Landy
Here’s my way of saying chipper even though obviously the world’s crumbling around us. I’ve seen things change for the better in my lifetime, as well as things changing for the worse. Maybe you get a good moral idea it percolates out into the culture. And it’s the culture that raises all boats. But this conversation continues at philosophers corner at our online community of thinkers, where our motto with apologies to Descartes is Cogito ergo Blago. I think therefore, I blog, and you can become a partner in the community by visiting our website, philosophytalk.org

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org and we might feature it on the blog. Now… he’s 50% ethical, 50% jerk, 100% speed—it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… There’s the jerk as in soda jerk, or jerkwater town, or the Steve Martin Jerk. She treated me like a jerk, I feel like such a jerk, you’re jerking me around. We don’t want to be that jerk but fear we are. The other jerk blows smoke in your face, jumps the line, spoils the ending. That jerk used to be a mainstay in situation comedies, but we’ve amped things up. Now the jerk lights a CIGAR in the no smoking zone and when you complain his LAWYER blows smoke in your face. The guy gets the theater shut down on a noise complaint, then buys the building and turns it into a Halloween Superstore. He’s the guy who sued the author so now you can’t even buy the book. Oh, it’s gonna be a movie, but it won’t be in the theaters, they’re all Halloween Superstores, it’ll be on NETFLIX, where Hollywood went to die. That is the world we live in now. Take politics! The left jerk encourages you to follow him, lags behind, then blames you for insufficient fervor when you lose. The right jerk pushes you off the cliff and then blames the left for inventing gravity. Has there been a spike in jerkiness? Perhaps. But where’s the proof. Cats, for example, are jerks. Can’t blame Trump for that! Yet we love them, even as they yowl for no reason and knock our forks to the floor. Mask free people roam the streets, wailing when the doors of Costco are closed to them, and yet we love them, even as we sneer, which makes us jerks as well. Virtue signaling jerks, with signals that change all the time. HAMILTON was progressive because people of color were playing our founding fathers. Now it’s not progressive because the founding fathers were racist and what were you thinking, people of color? Will we condemn all movies because the first talkie was in blackface? Just asking! Parading around city hall protesting Covid lockdowns with a semi-automatic weapon. Noble or jerky? What if I went there to pay a fine? I’d see the loud militia and go back home. That’s one way to defund the police, but aren’t conservatives against that? True, police are often jerks, but that’s their job. To make you feel worried about being where they’re looking. Other civil servants, like bus drivers, are seldom jerks, unless it’s lurching forward suddenly when you’re trying to sit down. Most jerks are passengers. Why can’t I smoke and drink and play music loudly and ride for free? Many jerks don’t ride but hate mass transit because it means poor people without cars can move around. Maybe to where they’re looking! The jerks called neo liberals even want us ALL to have cars. Two cars! Keep driving until the gas is all gone, and then put us in jail for complaining. All the jails will be private, all the schools, and if you can’t afford it, that’s on you, because that’s the free market. So we can kick gay couples out of the store. Yet if a black atheist decides not to sell to a racist bishop, he can get all huffy and sue. Who’s the jerk? Remember when you’d call the pizza place and they’d send some kid to deliver it. Not today! Everything is mediated. You TEXT a delivery service. THEY order the pizza and then go get it and then deliver it. They underpay the drivers, so they have to deal in volume, which means they’re always behind, so the pizza gets to you cold, and you decide not to use that pizza place again. But you’ll use the delivery service again. Cause you’re a jerk! Still, the Internet in general is the biggest jerk in the room. Twitter is ephemeral jerkiness etched in stone. Oh wait, that’s Yelp. Putting businesses out of business on a whim. What’s real and what’s not. Calling something a false flag makes you a jerk unless it is a false flag, then they’re the jerk. Here’s the bottom line. Some activities are demonized in our culture. Other activities are normalized. And yet society in general frowns upon both demonizing and normalizing. Maybe we are working our way to a tarnished yet golden mean of stupid. We will all emit a dull glow only visible with special lenses, only available through special offers. And they’ll break after two weeks with no money back guarantee. Just to make you feel like a jerk. Bunch of jerks. Don’t get me started. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University. Copyright 2020.

Ray Briggs
Our Executive Producer is Tina Pamintuan.

Josh Landy
The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research. Cindy Prince Baum is our Director of Marketing.

Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston and Lauren Schecter.

Josh Landy
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the partners at our online Community of Thinkers.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program did not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or other funders.

Josh Landy
Bot even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too, can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs, thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

The Jerk
What’re you looking at? What do you think I am, some kind of jerk or something?