Wednesday, 27 March 2024, 3.30pm–5.30pm (CET)
Daniel Kelly (Purdue)
Why is Moral Progress Annoying? Social Change and Affective Friction [joint work with Evan Westra]
A heuristic people seem to rely on in everyday life embodies the idea that “people who I find moralistic and preachy are probably wrong and can be safely ignored”. While difficult to defend when put so bluntly, this is a recognizable response to, say, the strident vegan, the humorless social justice scold, and the conservative prude. Often deployed with an eyeroll, the underlying intuition seems to be that genuinely important moral arguments will not be annoying, but will ring out with pristine moral clarity; these whiny trifles can be safely dismissed, though.
I will argue that most of the time, the opposite is true, and that we should expect even genuine moral progress to be experienced as annoying. Drawing upon recent insights from the cognitive science and philosophy of norms, I argue that social change generates a misalignment between people’s internalized norms, on the one hand, and the social world they inhabit, on the other. This misalignment is experienced as an unpleasant kind of “affective friction”. Unpleasant as it is, that affective friction is in no way indicative that the social changes that produce it are not important moral improvements. Eyerolls, it turns out, are morally and epistemically unreliable.
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