The scourge of moralism

The smug self-righteousness of sanctimonious pontificators

The greatest atrocities in history were committed by people so convinced in their moral correctness - so entrenched in their deludedly narcissistic sense of absolute correctness - that they felt compelled and justified in impenitently exercising violence to force their will on the unwilling. Their arbitrary sense of morality - or more accurately, moralism - absolves them of accountability for the undeniable pain they cause. Their smug piety spares them the guilt and remorse that could have otherwise prevented them from committing monstrous acts in the name of morality.

Definitions

moralism (noun)

1. A conventional moral maxim or attitude.

2. The act or practice of moralising.

3. Often undue concern for morality

moralise (intransitive verb)

1. To think about or express moral judgments or reflections.

2. To reflect on or express opinions about something in terms of right and wrong, especially in a self-righteous or tiresome way.

Inquisition

Beware of the busybodies, those who make your business their business, those who whine when the arbitrary moralities of others are pushed on them, yet feel more than inclined to violently enforce their own. They want to know what you do in your bedroom; they imagine themselves important enough to be affected by your most private acts.

Be careful of those who imagine slippery-slope apocalypses and butterfly-effect cataclysms kickstarted by your alternative values or your failure to be convinced by theirs. The moralists will burn witches for questioning the perceived “authority” of self-appointed representatives of God, a role which they so conveniently appoint to themselves. They will sacrifice children to appease the weather gods; just not their children. They will scapegoat you for all the ills of humanity just because they choose to be offended by your personal beliefs.

Be mindful of those who would presume to regulate the manner in which you conduct yourself, ESPECIALLY when it does not affect them in any way (other than imagined slippery slopes or schizophrenic fantasies of divine offense).

The moralists are the Spanish Inquisition lurking in your bedsheets, your inner thoughts. They are the gremlins in your closet watching closely through the keyhole; not to make sure you’re as purist as they pretend to be, but because they get a sick twisted pleasure out of making other people’s business their own.

Exposing the moralists

Imagine having a problem with this sentence:

“Do whatever you want, just don’t hurt people.”

Those who have a problem with this principle will usually say that people shouldn’t be able to do whatever they want, even if they technically don’t hurt people. This is because they imagine their cherished beliefs threatened; a confession of insecurity and of lack of conviction in one’s own contention. So hopeless and demoralised are they that they cannot validate their belief system unless it is universally upheld - violently if need be.

Others will be more diplomatic about it and appeal to their subjectivism: that what constitutes “hurting people” is subjective and not universally defined. I tend to agree. For example, I believe that shaming an individual is psychological violence and a type of aggression. Shaming is abusive. Others are of the opinion that shaming is just words, so it can’t harm anyone. Yet they understand it has a severe psychological effect on people, enough to pressure them to submit to shaming. The shamers pretend shaming isn’t hurting anyone, yet they use it just like any punishment. They promote shaming to coerce and regulate society according to their desires. The irony is that the same people complain when they are cancelled, mocked, censored, and shamed in return for not complying with other groups’ desired behaviours.

Even if what “hurting people” means is not objective or universally defined, we still must consider intent here. The sentence “Do whatever you want, just don’t hurt people” should still be respected. Why? Because if someone intends to not hurt you, but his behaviour does end up hurting you according to your standard of hurt, then all you have to do is let him know so he can amend his behaviour. If he doesn’t want to hurt anyone, but you prove to him that you can be hurt by his behaviour, then by this axiom of not hurting people, he will stop. In most cases, that should be enough, as long as he also sees how his behaviour is hurting you. There is no shortage of pretend victims looking for victimhood privilege from pity.

In case he doesn’t see how his behaviour hurts you as you claim it does, then all you have to do is disassociate. Nobody’s forcing you to be exposed to his behaviour unless his behaviour is forced on you by the monopoly of violence of the state… the same monopoly of violence you dream of hijacking to enforce your ideals on others. And then you have the gall to play the victim? Don’t you see that you are exactly the same as the people you oppose?

The hypocrisy is evident here: we don’t have a problem with a tyranny imposing behaviours via force. We are fine with tyranny as long as it imposes our personal brand of “morality” onto others.

Morality is not the same as moralism; quite the opposite. Moralism is evil in the name of good.

Cat O’ Nine Tales on Xitter offered her spot-on take on this:

“The root of all evil? People who can’t mind their own business.”

Moralisers are a self-righteous lot. So convinced are they of their deluded moral “superiority” that they are willing to use violence to impose it. The irony. The hypocrisy.

I too have one fundamental morality: voluntaryism, in that you should do nothing unless all people involved offer their explicit consent. But I cannot force it on anyone, otherwise it would be a self-defeating principle.

Do what you want, just don’t hurt people.

This message is about humility and intent. Yes, you can object and point out that what it means to “harm” someone is subjective. What one considers harmless or even good might be considered evil and harmful by others. But some things are universally harmful: murder, theft, rape, abuse, constriction, abduction. These are objectively defined because they involve involuntary coercion and a threat to someone’s property and bodily integrity. The rest are what is considered proper to do, show, or say in certain public spaces. But that is up to each individual space to regulate. Every gym has its own rules. Every highway has its own speed limits. Every country, region, county, and city has local laws and regulations that more-or-less reflect the preferences of their residents as a whole (supposedly). A woman can’t take her top off in a school but she can in a strip club. If you like seeing topless strange women, then you should avoid schools. But to want to universalise behaviours everywhere for everyone all the time is a deluded god complex.

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I kept posting this message… “do whatever you want, just don’t hurt people,” and you couldn’t believe some of the vitriolic objections I got.

This message that triggers so many defines a simple first cause: if you have the mindset of not harming people according to your definition of harm, then this is a great start for morals that I wish everyone had, even if we couldn’t agree on what constituted “harming.”

It’s better to agree not to harm each other but not agree on definitions of harm than to agree on definitions of harm but be willing to harm each other. And those who object to “do whatever you want, just don’t hurt people” do so because they need their prerogative to hurt people. They just need a good justification for it, to convince their victims that they deserved the hurt.

Not harming according to our definition at least shows humility and consideration for others, which is more than I can say about the moralists. That’s how we can begin to build true morals with meaning.

There is no meaning in enforced morality; morality seizes to be morality the second it is enforced. If you are to follow a moral framework without the need for coercion, then there is no need for coercion. If you can’t follow a moral framework unless it is enforced, then you are just reluctantly complying with threats of violence, and so your appearance of honouring this moral framework is void. If anything, your coercion fosters underlying resentment for that moral framework, which you could have otherwise grown to honour voluntarily.

Moralists betray a lack of conviction in their morals. They only seem to consider threats and peer pressure as the means to apply their morality. Their morality might even be pure and true, but their conviction in it isn’t.

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Subjectivity

“But what harms others is subjective.”

So, you admit you’re a Karen, constantly pretending to be bothered by things she has no right to be bothered by… like your Home Owners Association presumes to be victimized by your choice of house decoration. Yes, some “harm” is subjective. For example, when you smoke next to someone who is also a smoker, you could ask them if it bothers them. They could say ‘no,’ even if it technically does harm them. Who’s to say what’s harming whom?

And what if we can objectify what constitutes harming others? Yes, you might find it psychologically harmful to be exposed to indecent behaviours, and I can understand how that can be harmful to you. It can be psychologically harmful for a leftist to view a national flag; as much as it is for a right-winger to view preachy wokeness everywhere he goes. Yes, these things are harmful, but it depends on where. Are you in a public-use establishment, or are you in the privacy of your own home? If something bothers you, but you can escape from it in the privacy of your own property, then it is not aggression against you. If you don’t like topless women working out in a gym, then don’t go to that specific gym that allows it. Free-market competition will dictate how businesses respond.

But if you willingly choose to be exposed to the things you find harmful (like Republical Xitter can’t go without posting images of transexuals every minute, then you are a masochist, which means you’re not really harmed: you love being harmed.

You can make a case for being harmed when something offensive to you is displayed in a locale where the implied assumption is that you wouldn’t have to see it, for example, an exhibitionist at a church, or a provocative transvestite in a kindergarten. Indeed, any deviant is free to indulge in lewd behaviours in his own privacy, or in establishments where there the implied expectation is one accommodating such behaviours. But to deliberately provoke and incite disgust in establishments where such exhibitions are not anticipated is not dissimilar to flat-out deliberate aggression, since, on top of that, the intent is to offend, to upset, and to harm.

If you can escape and walk away from something unpleasant without any punishment incurred upon you, then it cannot be harmful or aggressive to you. You can walk out of a cinema when the film begins preaching to you or showing narratives you find distasteful. Post a bad review and boycott the studio.

Agreement

Maybe, if we listen to each other instead of abusing each other… if we tried to communicate which behaviours bother each other, then perhaps we could agree not to expose each other to them. For example, if the left doesn’t like the right’s X behaviour and the right doesn’t like the left’s Y behaviour, then perhaps they can agree to not provoke each other in public with such behaviours, and then they are both winners. It doesn’t matter if we don’t consider our behaviour harmful. It is harmful to them, so maybe we can stop doing it in front of them as long as they agree to stop doing their behaviours in front of us… they don’t see their behaviours as harmful either.

We can do whatever we want as long as we don’t invade people’s homes and spaces. Yes, some things we allow to enter our spaces. For example, we allow radio waves to invade our homes, since we also find them useful. But we would consider it aggression to be exposed to nuclear radiation in our household. The same goes for sound pollution and vehicle emissions; we tolerate some because we understand their utility. But no civilized society tolerates deliberate noise production or unnecessary toxic emissions.

The key here is compassion and consideration, even if we don’t find the same things harmful.

Let’s say your neighbour doesn’t consider loud music harmful but he has a distaste for the smell of house animals. You don’t find the the smell of house animals a problem, but you hate loud music. You don’t have to agree on what objective harm is. Agree to consider each other and you both come out winners. If you try to use coercion instead of negotiation, then either you lose, he loses, or you both lose more likely.

Self-interest is a much better predictor of peace and prosperity than arbitrary subjective morality imposed violently.

The moralist’s profile

There’s a clear distinction between morality and moralism. There are moral principles, and then there’s endless moralism: the judgement, the hypocrisy, the creation of arbitrary “moralities” that are to be arbitrarily enforced. We are up to our necks with moralists and their holier-than-thou preachy self-righteousness. They support enforcing their idea of morality, yet they complain when someone else’s morality is enforced on them. This applies to both the left and right false political dichotomy.

Moralism is immoral because it is utilitarian: it justifies any immorality in the name of alleged immorality. Moralists pass judgment, which they violently enforce. They are the hypocrites, the Pharisees, the busybodies, those who will not tolerate others, even if these others aren’t technically harming anyone.

Moralists are triggered by “live and let live” because it implies you can be a degenerate, even if you don’t impose your degeneracy on others. I’m no fan of degeneracy, but there is no gravest degeneracy other than violent enforcement by people who just won’t leave you alone even if they know you’re not harming them. They presume to have the right to deny you your liberty because they imagine your business is their business. This is Marxist mentality.

Moralists… utilitarians promoting the cardinal evil that somehow “the means justify arbitrary ends.” They forget that the road to hell is paved with professed good intentions.

Their presumed “greater good” is the greatest evil: the notion that any immorality is “excused” as long as it’s performed in the name of “morality.” Yet the people whom the moralists oppose believe the same thing. And what worth does a moral have if it has to be enforced, if it cannot be adopted without coercion? And if it has to be coerced, is it truly embodied or just hypocritically performed?

Moralists are concerned not with principle but rather with principality; their power lust to pontificate.

The bottom line

Ultimately, moralists are utilitarian socialists (even if they don’t want to admit it). Consider: only a utilitarian would do evil in the name of some arbitrarily measured “greater” good. The irony is that moralists, for all their talk about ethos, fail at deontology; the opposite of utilitarianism.

Deontology takes a first-principles approach, so it understands that doing evil for good is defeating the purpose. For example, a utilitarian or socialist will support the banning of free speech, if that would mean hindering fascism (an imagined outcome). But the banning of free speech IS fascism. So, what the utilitarian accomplishes here is to try to avoid one brand of fascism by imposing another. It is fighting fire with fire to the point where the whole forest burns.

The deontologist understands that the moment you do evil for good, you do evil, and that’s that.

In the end, the ultimate moral, the first cause / first principle of morality cannot be anything else other than non-coercion. Why? Because if any other moral is to be imposed, then it ceases to be a moral. It simply becomes reluctant indignant compliance, only when its enforcers are watching.

The posts I refer to:

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