A useful thought experiment

From The Bravery of the In Crowd by Scott H. Greenfield. The whole things is worth reading in these fevered times of imagined moral purity. I want to excerpt the interesting thought experiment from the beginning of the piece.

Princeton professor ofF jurisprudence Robert George does a thought experiment with his students. It’s a good one, and he posted it on the twitters.

1/ I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it.

2/ Of course, this is nonsense. Only the tiniest fraction of them, or of any of us, would have spoken up against slavery or lifted a finger to free the slaves. Most of them—and us—would have gone along. Many would have supported the slave system and happily benefited from it.

3/ So I respond by saying that I will credit their claims if they can show evidence of the following: that in leading their lives today they have stood up for the rights of unpopular victims of injustice whose very humanity is denied, and where they have done so knowing:

4/ (1) that it would make them unpopular with their peers, (2) that they would be loathed and ridiculed by powerful, influential individuals and institutions in our society; (3) that they would be abandoned by many of their friends, (4) that they would be called nasty names, and

5/ (5) that they would risk being denied valuable professional opportunities as a result of their moral witness. In short, my challenge is to show where they have at risk to themselves and their futures stood up for a cause that is unpopular in elite sectors of our culture today.

For all the passion on display these days, it enjoys two very obvious things: there’s no risk to students and young people of denigration by their peers, most of whom buy their Che shirts from the same artisanal t-shirt store, and there are few, if any, occupational hazards to suffer for marching in lockstep with their buds.

But what if the overwhelming social norm was very different? As George says, it’s nonsense to claim they would all be true to their deeply impassioned belief in equality, because today, under the current social regime that overwhelmingly supports that belief, they are right in the middle of the crowd. But his challenge to the certitude of righteousness is only theoretical.

What college student would walk about campus with a t-shirt proclaiming “Abortion in Murder,” or even “Cops are people too”? They would never consider such a thing, as it’s clearly wrong in their belief system and they would be branded pariahs right before they were expelled for hate speech. It’s not that they wouldn’t buck the majority, in their brave minds, but that there is nothing they don’t support right now that isn’t the right belief. Of course, they completely miss the point, but that’s the irony of youth, absolutely certain in their being on the right side until the winds shift.

except it is not just callow and ignorant youth who are blindly moralizing without knowledge, experience or awareness.

It is rectors of mainline churches, it is the marketing departments of Fortune 500 companies, it is Head Masters of elite universities and prep schools - people who have the education and cognitive horsepower to know better, but who are passionately eager to jump on a moralizing band wagon championing group identity, racism, collective guilt, heritable guilt and other evil ghosts of our philosophical past.

They would not pass Professor George's test owing to their eagerness for moral preening and social status rather than reasoned thought and respect for others.