Look at me, I am so moral
If
there is one thing that all people and groups of people can be relied
on to have an infinite capacity of, it is their ability to turn
necessity into virtue. If anybody invented a machine that converts this
to energy, humanity would be set for eternity without an energy crisis.
When
you look at how people of all stripes try to prove that they are
morally superior, it's fascinating how often they use an argument of
the form "I am moral, because I don't do X" without understanding that for this argument to apply, two premises first have to be established:
- It is feasible for the speaker to do X.
- The speaker would gain a net benefit from doing X.
Without
these two premises, the argument is nothing but empty rhetoric and
flapping of gums. And if you simply take a look at people and groups
who use the erroneous version of this argument, you can usually
immediately see why they need to use it, as they have few other claims
to moral superiority.
A similar, somewhat related rhetorical trick is often used with the threat of the form "Unless you do Y, I will do X". For this to be an actual threat, two premises first have to be established:
- It is feasible for the speaker to do X.
- The speaker would not gain a net benefit from doing X.
As a special case of these premises, if the speaker has already committed to doing X for some other reasons, especially if doing X
would be beneficial to the speaker, the threat is meaningless and it
doesn't pay to the listener to obey it, since the speaker will do X anyways.
The
previous threat can also be modified to establish the moral superiority
of the speaker, when used in the negated form "Because it would cause
harm to Z, I will not do X". Of course, the speaker has already committed to not doing X for some completely different reasons, which perhaps would not sound quite as noble as avoiding harming Z.
This way, the speaker gets to revel in his moral superiority that
doesn't really cost him anything. (I believe that the word of the day
is "moral freeloading".) The only way to reveal the true nature of the
speaker would be to somehow take away the real reasons why he doesn't
do X, and then see if he is still interested in not doing X so that Z
would not get hurt. But this is usually difficult to do, so the speaker
gets to pretend that his real motives are something else than what they
really are.
I don't think that the reader will need even one
minute to come up with people and groups who routinely use the
techniques listed above. Especially all kinds of victim groups so
beloved by leftists can use them as naturally as a fish swims. For
example, I understood the way these techniques work the first time many
years ago when a bunch of young leftist women threatened to go on a
"baby-making strike" if more nuclear power is built in Finland, since
it was blatantly obvious to anybody that none of these women had any
intention whatsoever to have babies anyway in the near future. A threat
this inane is at par with some guy trying to rob a bank by pointing a
banana at the teller, or perhaps claiming that he chooses not to become
an international rock star because he is opposed to the way music
industry fights music downloading. Sure thing, buddy. You sure are
moral to make such a huge sacrifice for others.
In a similar vein, as I explained in my earlier post "Look at me, I'm so edgy",
many voluntarily childfree people pretend that the reason why they will
not have children is because the "world is so bad", without bothering
to explain how exactly the world would have to be better so that they
would have children. This way, they get both the comforts of being
childfree and moral superiority as somebody who is concerned about the
world, instead of only the comforts of being childfree.
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