Makes more sense than you realize. I went to a very liberal college (Berkeley) and sometimes it was hard to believe the sense of entitlement among the students.
This was most pronounced in pedestrians: they ignore traffic lights and j-walk at will. If you ever spoke to them about it, they would give you something along the lines of "I am an earth-saving pedestrian, you are an environment-killing driver of a gas guzzler- ergo I always have the right of way.
Not everyone was like that, but a good percentage of people were.
You should have pointed out to them that fuel efficiency and pollution from automobile engines are worsened by having to decelerate/accelerate. In other words, if you force someone in a car to slow down (or, heaven forbid, stop) you're tangibly increasing the amount of damage being done to the environment.
To which the pedestrian may counter, That is true but I am also disincentivizing drivers from driving in the future. My walking inconveniences their driving. Over time, my community of insubordinate pedestrians may significantly reduce the incentive to drive. It's uncool to drive in Portland Oregon because pedestrians and bicyclists have challenged and won over motorists.
A thought, perhaps this like exercise? If you workout for an hour, you'll generally get tired and need to rest. However, if you work out everyday for a week, you'll get stronger and be able to workout longer and harder.
Suppose moral fiber works this way? At first, as you work on your behavior, you can only do so much and simple sacrifices seem like a huge burden. As you continue, you conscience becomes stronger and doing 'the right thing' becomes more the norm and former behavior seems more extreme.
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Also possible, that 'virtuous consumption' is pursued for social status and not virtue, and so people who engage in it for this reason are entitled jerks as a matter of course.
It's worth noting that studies have shown that applying "willpower" works exactly that way. Specifically, making conscious decisions to override subconscious impulses depletes cognitive resources in a measurable way, with some evidence that doing so repeatedly increases the amount of willpower reserves in the long-term.
As an aside, I wouldn't assume that people are "entitled jerks" as such--even if it's all just social status signalling, they're almost certainly not consciously aware of it.
I think we might have different understandings of what makes one an 'entitled jerk.' Aristotle believed that people who did wrong but believed that what they were doing was right, were ethically worse than those that knew what they were doing was wrong. He argued that to confuse vice for virtue signaled more fundamental problems than simply the inclination to give into temptation. With this understanding, not being aware that you are an 'entitled jerk' simply makes you more of a jerk.
Note that I'm not implying that every who buys organic produce is an 'entitled jerk.' People and their motives have to be judged on an individual basis.
I think you, like Aristotle, wildly overestimate conscious awareness.
I'm not talking about doing wrong and believing it to be right, or even doing something without realizing it was wrong. I'm talking about just doing something without consciously knowing why you did it at all. The primary role of the conscious mind is not to make choices, but to rationalize after the fact the actions undertaken at the (largely amoral) subconscious's command. Expecting someone to always know why they made a decision is an impossibly high standard.
More directly relevant to this article, skim some of the posts on social signalling at http://www.overcomingbias.com/tag/signaling and realize that, while the author uses intentional language of decisions and preferences, most of what he's talking about are the sort of choices heavily subject to conscious delusion.
To summarize, accurate knowledge of one's own decision-making process is the exception, not the rule, and if questioned people are more likely to provide an ad-hoc rationalization based on inaccurate self-perception than anything resembling the actual reasons, and believe whole-heartedly that the rationalization is correct. To summarize the summary, nobody's generally aware of why they're doing whatever it is they're doing. To summarize the summary of the summary, being a person is a problem. [0]
I have no idea what the any of that has to do with the discussion at hand. My point is that it's what you do and how you behave that makes you an entitled jerk or not, not whether you have introspection or not.
My point is that you're calling people jerks for something they probably have very little control over and are helplessly unaware of. If you're walking behind someone with a broken leg, do you complain that they should be walking faster?
Perhaps you don't intend the term "jerk" to carry overtones of moral responsibility or social judgement, but that's a fairly common connotation.
You're implying nobody has any real control over what their actions and thereby assigning killers and rocks about the same level moral culpability. This may be rational if you accept a mechanist understanding of human behavior (as you explicated in your previous post) but if that's the case, it becomes ridiculous to argue about 'morality' in general. Moral judgment becomes just a tool to modify undesirable behavior and indignation in this case is perfectly 'justified.'
Put another way, yelling at a cripple is not likely to give them their health back, but guilting an insensitive 'jerk' will (likely) cause them to change their behavior to something more socially acceptable.
You're implying nobody has any real control over what their actions and thereby assigning killers and rocks about the same level moral culpability.
No, I'm just saying that the default state is to have neither control nor awareness of decision-making. Actual conscious decision-making is possible with effort and, to the extent that morality is a well-defined concept, it applies only to conscious minds.
guilting an insensitive 'jerk' will (likely) cause them to change their behavior to something more socially acceptable.
Not necessarily, if their reasons for behaving that way are unknown to them. More likely their mind will confabulate something sensible-sounding that fits their pre-existing world-view and (unless they already hold a positive disposition toward you) they'll just write you off as being a jerk, after all, you're attacking them for something they had a perfectly valid reason to do... they think.
No, I'm just saying that the default state is to have neither control nor awareness of decision-making. Actual conscious decision-making is possible with effort and, to the extent that morality is a well-defined concept, it applies only to conscious minds.
In which case they are culpable for not forming good habits (and we are back at Aristotle.) You're not going to get very far telling me that people are not responsible for acting like jerks because either you deny human moral choice altogether, or at some level they are.
But new research by Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong at the
University of Toronto levels an even graver charge: that
virtuous shopping can actually lead to immoral behavior.
In their study (described in a paper now in press at
Psychological Science), subjects who made simulated
eco-friendly purchases ended up less likely to exhibit
altruism in a laboratory game and more likely to cheat
and steal.
The conclusion the story draws from the study is really more of a correlation than a causation. It's just as possible that the people who buy virtuously are the type of people who cheat and are stingy rather than buying virtuously causing the "evil" behaviour. The linked study actually doesn't seem to imply causation so Slate is obviously spicing up the story a little.
> In an experiment, participants were randomly assigned to select items they wanted to buy in one of two online stores. One store sold predominantly green products, the other mostly conventional items.
That said, interesting point by you. I'd guess the causation can run both ways - doing superficial good gives you the moral license they were talking about, but also maybe bad people want to compensate and wash their sins away with some public good behavior.
I tend to think that a lot of human activity comes down to seeking status and exercising status. "Buy local" is seeking status and "act evil" is exercising status. I'm sure it's more complicated that than, but I think this is a good framework for getting a rough draft of understanding the behavior.
This was most pronounced in pedestrians: they ignore traffic lights and j-walk at will. If you ever spoke to them about it, they would give you something along the lines of "I am an earth-saving pedestrian, you are an environment-killing driver of a gas guzzler- ergo I always have the right of way.
Not everyone was like that, but a good percentage of people were.