On Moral Sensitivity and Youth Rights
Here is an excellent piece of writing. It’s an analogy for an experience I’ve never had independently, and now I feel like I’ve had it.
There’s a thing people say when I tell them I think teenagers should have the full suite of rights society affords other adults (and that preteens should have the same or something close to it). “But I don’t think kids are usually bothered by not having adult rights. Sure, you were, and that’s a legitimate pain we should take into account, but you have to admit that experience seems rare. What matters is that people are happy and healthy and fulfilled, and it doesn’t seem worth it to make all these costly changes when so few people are bothered by the way things are right now.”
This is a good argument. The serious and correct response is for me to write up a detailed list of empirical facts and claims from history and developmental psychology and be like, “Look—all these empirical things make me believe that the world would be a better place if we gave people rights at an earlier age, and it would be a better place in lots of ways which are independent of how young people currently feel about their situation. You’re right, alleviating the suffering of young adults who feel oppressed by ageism isn’t enough to justify the cost of such a major change; there aren’t enough of them and they aren’t suffering enough to make the upheaval worth it. It’s just that there are more than enough other reasons to believe that passing the proposition would be net positive.”
I think this is right. (80–95% credence that passing the proposition would be net positive.) I’m probably going to hurt my case by going on.
The thing is, I kind of hate the correct answer, and I feel annoyed at everyone and no one in particular when I’m forced to give it. It feels like I shouldn’t have to. When someone says “But kids aren’t bothered by not having adult rights,” what I want to say is “Well, they should be. Many women were okay with not having the right to vote in the year 1850, but that’s not a good argument against suffrage. If I’m fighting for women’s suffrage in the late 1800’s and you tell me ‘Most women aren’t upset that they can’t vote’ (totally plausible), my response isn’t ‘That eases my mind,’ it’s ‘How disgusting and sad—they should be upset by injustice.’”
I can take your claim as a given and it has negligible impact on my determination to make a big deal out of suffrage, because part of the point is to convince women that there is no empirical grounding for the different treatment they’re receiving, and to convince them that they shouldn’t quietly acquiesce to people who abridge their freedoms with no legitimate authority to do so. I don’t want people to suffer, but it’s cold comfort to find out that people aren’t suffering because they are so thoroughly defeated that they don’t mind or notice being trodden over.
What I’m saying is beginning to sound suspiciously like my priest’s objections to female immodesty and the way young women today seem not to mind degrading themselves by wearing crop tops. When I stopped believing in God and his mysterious but intentional design for women, the immodesty arguments immediately appeared absurd—how could wearing a crop top be degrading if it has no negative effect on anyone’s happiness, fulfillment, value to others, or etc.? Why would we care about whether something is presumed to be objectively degrading—and what would that even mean—if the supposed degradation has no negative consequences for literally anything else we care about?
I don’t know if I have a solid response to this, other than to say that decisions you make for yourself feel like a different moral category from decisions which are imposed upon you. You can be *treated as if you don’t have agency* by others quite easily, and have your agency taken, and I want to fight that every time, because that’s something I consider a fundamental wrong along the lines of “objectively degrading.” It’s much harder and weirder to imagine treating yourself as if you don’t have agency—even if someone wants to pretend that they don’t have agency (BDSM or something?) they’re still *making that decision as an agent* so it doesn’t really bother me. And as for crop tops, well, not only are they self-imposed, they just don’t seem to have anything to do with agency or the lack thereof.
Re: the difference between decisions you make for yourself and decisions which are imposed upon you. If someone wants to live their entire life playing video games and they have the resources to do it, I’m fine with that. I mean, I might harbor personal opinions about their lifestyle, but whatever, live and let live. I probably wouldn’t say anything about it to them unless they were a really close friend. I have a much different reaction to a person living under a totalitarian dictatorship in which they aren’t allowed to leave the house or access any books, and yet are 100% content and happy staying home and playing video games, no complaints. My visceral reaction to that person is “Jesus Christ dude, you should at least be able to recognize that if you DID want to read a book, you would be prevented from doing so, and that is not only a moral travesty but a personal affront. You don’t have to read books, but you should at least be a little hurt by the idea that if you did, you would be stopped. You deserve the right to read books, and your dignity should be offended by the idea that you don’t, even if you wouldn’t end up exercising the right.”
Circling back to 1850. How much women suffered due to their unfairly low status certainly matters in the sense that it is an input you need to consider when determining exactly how big of a moral travesty women’s disenfranchisement was. It’s just that it’s not necessarily going to be a significant factor in determining whether women’s disenfranchisement is worth fixing. For one thing, if you have any non-utilitarian intuitions (e.g. if you place any inherent value on justice or freedom), the floor on its badness could be very high, just because of the injustice (or etc.) involved. What’s more, as I’ve been saying less explicitly this whole time, suffering is a function of moral sensitivity (plus other inputs of course) and you might actually place inherent value on moral sensitivity. You might value higher moral sensitivity and lower suffering, but having more moral sensitivity in a population might cause them to suffer more. So while suffering would still be important to your evaluation, it could be commonly “counteracted” by moral sensitivity considerations. Said another way, if you value moral sensitivity, then a more suffering-filled world might be acceptable to you, if the reason for the increased suffering is that people are proportionately more aware of injustice (more morally sensitive). I’m not sympathetic to this at intense levels of suffering (which causes a lot of consistency problems for me, but that’s a different story for a different time), but I might choose a world where someone cries over the unfair treatment of people in foreign countries over a world where no one does, even if the first world has more suffering.
Telling 1850’s suffragist-me that women don’t care about having the right to vote doesn’t do anything to temper my moral outrage and my determination to fix the problem, because while adding moral blindness to the equation might decrease the suffering (a good thing), it also heaps more moral failure onto the already-reeking pile.
It’s good when people aren’t suffering, all else equal, but all else isn’t equal. The reason people aren’t suffering is because they are so desensitized to injustice that it doesn’t bother them when it occurs in front of their eyes.
When I was seventeen I ran away from home, got caught and brought back, and then was put into a tiny Catholic private school for my last semester. Prior to that I had been homeschooled my whole life under tight information control, so I had a bizarrely warped set of beliefs about the normal world. The idea of private Catholic school didn’t exist in my head as anything close to the brutally anarchic specter of public school, but I still arrived on my first day expecting an onslaught of psychological bullying, moral degeneracy, and eight hours of homework per night from teachers who didn’t care about the family unit.
None of those dramatic, dazzling evils really existed, at least not in a form which was anything similar to what I had been led to expect. (I mean, out of a class of eight, how many full-time bullying masterminds could you really expect to find? Anyway, there were none.) The type of evil which did exist there took me by surprise—horrible to me, but bland to everyone around me, devoid of any malicious glee. And also just… weird? Like, why would someone even want to commit injustice in this way?
As soon as I had a friend at the school I confided to him that I was struggling to witness the violation of people having to ask permission to use the bathroom. I was sort of couching my words, because I didn’t want to seem like I was making it all about myself when everyone else was suffering too, but I said something like, “I feel like it might be especially difficult for me because I had no idea that this happened in schools, so it took me by surprise and I’m having to try to get used to it all at once.”
He looked at me kind of weird and said he didn’t actually mind it. I don’t remember what my response was, just that I was disbelieving and then disgusted. What do you mean, you don’t mind that a fellow human being has tied your hands and leveraged your every option so meticulously that you are powerless to urinate unless it suits him? What have they done? They’ve broken something about you.
After the first day I always used the bathroom between classes and paid attention to my water intake so I would never have to stomach asking another human whether they would deign allow me to urinate or not. As I got more comfortable at the school I started to get annoyed at people who didn’t do this (which was everyone). To submit to someone who has the gall to say that they have legitimate authority over the semi-voluntary waste processes of other people’s bodies, to play along with that, to uphold this collective delusion where we all pretend that some individuals are so superior they deserve the chance to prevent you from urinating if it’s inconvenient to them, felt like defecting from a very basic bond of respect and solidarity we owed one another.
Some part of me is glad that my friends didn’t suffer due to the injustice they experienced. But the world is a colder and baser place because they couldn’t be bothered.
I feel like I’ve been saying the effect of “I know you’re not, but you should be upset by how you’re being treated,” for ages in so many different contexts, and it’s rare I find myself standing on the other side of someone saying it convincingly to me. I don’t think that’s what Duncan intended to do with this piece, but that’s what it does to me. (Follow Duncan Sabien on Medium and Facebook for more.)
I’m definitely not going to start making a big deal about the injustice he’s pointing at. I’m not emotionally torn up about it, or at least I was only torn up about it for a short time while I was reading the piece, and I’m not planning to deliberately cultivate outrage about it. I already have issues I’m naturally outraged about that I think are actually much more harmful to people’s wellbeing and which I’m better-suited to advancing, and it would be super non-utilitarian for me to spend time or lose happiness feeling bad about the injustice he’s pointing at, so I’m going to mostly ignore it, and I’m utilitarian enough that I’m almost entirely content with that decision. But there’s now one small part of the back of my brain which will occasionally object and let out a peep, “You should be upset!” And I think the world is a slightly more bright and honorable place because I was made to feel that way.
