Chestfeeders, illegal aliens, and announcing your pronouns

Social change and its discontents

Dall-E: A triumphant potato

Why do so many people roll their eyes at changes in social norms like use of the pronouns “they/them” to refer to nonbinary people?¹ Other examples that annoy and outrage include land acknowledgments (bigger in Canada than the US and even bigger in Australia and New Zealand), pronoun sharing in introductions, renaming streets and buildings originally named after now controversial historical figures, and the use of terms like “birthing person,” “chestfeeding,” and “menstruator”. Why do these piss so many people off?²

Daniel Kelly and Evan Westra recently proposed an answer to this question in an Aeon article called Moral Progress is Annoying. In a response called Why is moral progress annoying? I expressed my skepticism about their theory. I invited them to respond in a guest post, and they did so in Potato, Potahto: Why some norm changes are more annoying than others.

Here, I respond to their response to my response to their article. That’s a lot of layers! But the following is self-contained; you don’t need to read any of the earlier pieces to see what’s going on and to participate in the comments section.

Recap

Kelly and Westra’s theory of eye-rolling is that, first, we are bothered by shifting norms. We experience what they call “affective friction”—

a feeling of discomfort that arises when there is a mismatch between the norms a person has internalized and the norms that hold in their current social environment.

And second, this feeling of discomfort are taken

as a sign that the concerns aren’t that big of a deal … Call this the eyeroll heuristic: if it’s preachy and annoying, it’s OK to ignore it.

As they put it, we treat our annoyance as a “bullshit detector”. And so we roll our eyes; we mock; we snort with disapproval; we accuse people of “virtue signalling”. The gist of this theory is captured in this meme:

My main objection to their view was that affective friction alone doesn’t lead to eye-rolling. Here are some of their own examples of norm changes that cause discomfort:

a North American remembering to look right for traffic instead of left while visiting the UK.

the experience of the recent immigrant, yanked from familiar waters and thrust into a strange social environment where the rules are suddenly different.

the experience of a tween staying over at a friend’s house for the first time and discovering that other families have different rules.

If you were a North American, a recent immigrant, or a tween, would you feel uncomfortable in these situations? Sure. Would you eye-roll? I assume no, and this shows that something is missing from their theory.

My proposal is that the missing ingredient is morality—the specific sort of norm violations that give rise to this sort of dismissive or annoyed reaction are those that have moral content. We eye-roll in cases where

The norm changes that bother us are those where (1) people are morally condemned for not following them (or for not having followed them in the past); (2) people condemn themselves as bad people for not following them (or for not having followed them in the past); or (3) people think that they are morally wrong.

When someone uses a phrase like “birthing person”, say, I might feel upset because (1) I think they’re condemning me for not using the phrase or (2) because I feel guilty for not using the phrase myself, or (3) because I disapprove of the phrase (perhaps I see it as demeaning to women). When I go to London and the cars come from the right, none of this applies—there’s affective friction, but no eye rolling.

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Westra and Kelly’s response to my response was gracious, thoughtful, and interesting. I appreciated the reference to the Small Potatoes brand in their title—Potato, Potahto: Why some norm changes are more annoying than others—and in the potato-heavy illustration that they chose to lead their post.

(I did wonder, though: Am I the middle potato??? Are Westra and Kelly the potatoes on either side, aghast at having killed me with their superior arguments?)

In their response, they agree that only some norm violations are likely to cause eye-rolling, and point out, correctly, that they nodded towards such a view in their original article. They write:

We think of affective friction as something that can snowball from mild, passing discomfort into much more intense emotional responses, depending on the context

What sort of context? My proposal is that it’s moral. They disagree. They are skeptical about psychological explanations of the sort I offer.

[We] don’t think human psychology draws a sharp distinction between the moral features and nonmoral features of the world.

This is actually a very thorny issue for empirical moral psychologists. Some think that from a young age, we intuitively distinguish between moral and nonmoral features of the world, of different kinds of rules and actions. Those who hold this view often support it by appeal to evidence from experiments on the so-called moral/conventional distinction. However, others are skeptical about whether there is a sharp psychological boundary around the moral domain, disagree about where such a boundary should be drawn, and doubt whether it should be drawn at all. In different places, both of us have gone on record expressing sympathy with this more skeptical set of views. We’re generally doubtful that moral vs. nonmoral distinctions can or should do much work in psychological explanations of human behavior – including in the cases we discuss in our essay.

Their alternative involves what they call social maintenance. They spell it out here (the emphasis is mine):

The sheer novelty of a new norm produces some basic discomfort … But in other contexts – where you feel like you’re on your home turf and the new norm seems like it’s coming from people you don’t really like anyway (and who are probably just trying to boss you around and impress all their friends, those self-righteous virtue signalers!), it will hit different. Your experience of that discomfort is more likely to present as something more like irritation. It’ll be pretty tempting to respond to it with a dismissive eyeroll or even outright resistance, and so you’ll be less likely to give the new norm a fair hearing, whatever its actual merits.

To put differently:

some new norms will be especially exasperating when - on top of their unfamiliarity - there are high, or just perhaps growing, social costs for violating them.

To sum up: What gives rise to eye-rolling?

Me, in my response:
Morally-laden cases—where you feel guilty for violating the norm, or ashamed and angry that others are morally condemning you, or believe that the norm itself is immoral.

Westra and Kelly, in their response to my response:
Cases where the norm violation imposes social costs, often from people who you don’t like and who don’t like you.

In what follows, I will (1) express some concerns about the sorts of examples Westra and Kelly use; (2) make some general points about where I think we stand; and (3) present a theory of what’s really going on when we are bothered by norm changes.

A digression about the right sorts of examples to use

Kelly and Westra focus on what they see as irrational resistance to moral progress. It’s not hard to see why people are opposed to bad norm changes, after all—they’re bad! But why are people so upset by good norm changes, like changes in pronoun use?

It is now standard practice in some circles for people to share their preferred pronouns, and for people who identify as nonbinary to use they/them. The cost of abiding by this relatively new norm and adopting the use of people’s pronouns is small – though, of course not negligible, as it can take time to break a long-entrenched pattern in one’s own behaviour. But (we would argue) the benefits are of considerable moral significance. Making this minor change in how we address people is a relatively easy way of showing respect and promoting inclusivity.

Pronoun sharing—so much benefit; so little cost. If you see things this way—and I would guess that most of Kelly and Westra’s readers do—then it’s natural to conclude that a negative reaction to pronoun sharing is motivated by confusion. They are mistakenly treating their irritation as a sign that this practice just can’t be moral progress; it has to be bullshit. More specifically, according to Kelly and Westra, the eye-rollers feel affective friction, and then, in some circumstances at least, they mistake this discomfort for bullshit-detection, and conclude that those who favor this new practice are virtue signallers, snowflakes, bullies, and the like.

When we stick to examples like these, though, it makes this theory a bit too easy to like. Since I’m going to defend an alternative theory, I want to help myself out by pointing out that the confused-by-affective-friction theory also applies to negative reaction to norm change that Kelly and Westra—and most of their readers—are probably more sympathetic to. Take this one, from my earlier response:

A couple of years ago there was a rise of the word “woke” in a derisive and mocking context. Many people on the left were furious at this, in part because it was seen as an offensive case of cultural appropriation from the Black community, and there were several articles with titles like Why White People Should Stop Using The Term ‘Woke’…Immediately.

The people on the left, including many in the Black community, would tell you that their objections are grounded in legitimate concerns. But what was really going on? Well, according to Westra and Kelly: Confusion. What about liberals’ distaste for expressions like “illegal immigrant” and “unborn child”? Confusion.

You might bristle at this analysis.—and that’s my point. We tend to be a bit too credulous about theories that say that our ideological opponents are being dopey. When we consider that these theories say the same thing about us and our friends, it inspires more of a healthy skepticism. To put it bluntly, if you liked the Kelly and Westra theory when they were telling you that the conservatives are confused, you have to like it when they tell you that the liberals are confused—and, of course, vice-versa.³

There’s a meme for this too.

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A few arguments

1. It’s ok to use morality in psychological explanation

Westra and Kelly write,

We don’t think human psychology draws a sharp distinction between the moral features and nonmoral features of the world …

I agree.⁴ There is a lot of fuzziness here, and a lot of borderline cases. It might be that just about any aspect of the world can, under the right circumstances, be thought of in moral terms.

But if you take away the word “sharp” from their sentence, then I think they’re mistaken. After all, we think differently about a country where they drive on a different side of the street (not a moral issue) versus one where women are not allowed to vote (a moral issue). Our feelings about Hitler and Stalin (or toning it down quite a bit, our feelings about Bernie Madoff and Harvey Weinstein) is that they are bad people who have done bad things. Our thoughts about our own regrettable acts in the past distinguish between honest mistakes and purposeful bad acts—and we feel worse about the latter. Morality is associated with specific desires, such as an appetite for punishment, and specific emotions, such as anger, guilt, and shame.

There’s nothing wrong, then, about appealing to moral reactions when explaining how we respond to norm changes.

2. Morality explains our responses to at least some norm changes

Kelly and Westra never claim that all cases of outrage have to do with affective friction. After all, there are many cases where we get upset at norm changes that don’t involve us at all.

Just as one example, many people care a lot about trans people in women’s sports. Some are upset by what they see as the unfairness of including them; others are upset at what they see as the unfairness of excluding them. There is eye-rolling, finger-wagging, and accusations of indifference and bigotry, virtue-signalling and bad faith.

This can’t be explained by affective friction. Few of these upset people have any involvement with women’s sports. They don’t have to change their lives in any way because of changes in policy; they might not know any trans athletes or any athletes at all. There’s no friction to be had.

So what’s going on here? There is probably some role of political affiliation when determining which side people fall on. The good people on my side believe this; the assholes on the other side believe that—so I know what to do. But the views themselves are grounded in our feelings that certain policies are cruel and unfair and unjust. These are moral judgments if anything is.

3. Social forces play a powerful role

I agree with Westra and Kelly that the norm changes that most upset us are when other people try to punish and coerce us into following them—”new norms will be especially exasperating when … there are high, or just perhaps growing, social costs for violating them.” I frame this in moral terms; they call it “harsh negative social maintenance”, but, like they say, potato, pohtato.

4. Maybe affective friction doesn’t matter after all

In their Potato, Potahto: Why some norm changes are more annoying than others, Westra and Kelly agree with me that not all instances of affective friction leads to eye-rolling. For this, you need social costs, negative social maintenance, and so on. I found their examples of how these social forces influence us to be quite compelling … so much so that I wondered: Is there any role left for affective friction? We agree that affective friction alone doesn’t lead to eye-rolling; it seems to me that the feelings about social disapproval and bullying that Westra and Kelly describe are powerful enough that they would work in the absence of any other source of discomfort. Perhaps affective friction falls by the wayside.

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A revised theory of eye-rolling and annoyance

Why do people eye-roll at changes in social norms like using the pronouns “they/them” to refer to nonbinary people, giving land acknowledgments, and renaming buildings originally named after now controversial figures?⁵

Why are some people annoyed when they hear terms like “birthing person,” “chestfeeding,” and “menstruator” (which tend to bother conservatives) and others annoyed when they hear “illegal alien”, “unborn child”, “thug”, and “anchor baby” (which tend to bother liberals)?

Well, if you were to ask these upset people, they would probably give you one or both of the following explanations.

1. The norm change is wrong.

   Some will tell you that “Illegal alien” reflects a cruel and dehumanizing attitude toward (to use a term they like more) undocumented immigrants. Others will explain that “menstruators” reflects a cruel and dehumanizing attitude toward (to use a term they like more) women. Some will say that renaming buildings shows a lack of respect for the past; others will say that white people using “woke” is an ugly act of cultural appropriation. And so on.

2. The enforcement of the new practice is wrong.

   Many people who object to changes in the use of pronouns, say, are upset because they see themselves as being derided and mocked for their current practice, or, worse, coerced and bullied into followed the new norm. People get particularly outraged at attempts to get these norm changes enforced by law.

   Nobody likes being treated this way, and it’s natural to accuse those who push this norm of being bullies and virtue signallers, and as harbouring authoritarian and fascist impulses. (This is all entirely consistent with the “social maintenance” account provided by Westra and Kelly.)

I think these common-sense explanations are correct. Affective friction plays no role. People are upset at norm changes for exactly the reasons they think they are—because they think the changes are morally wrong and/or because they are responding to being mocked and bullied by people who don’t respect them.

Is there anything that this alternative account fails to explain? Please let me know in the comments section.

1. Big thanks to Evan Westra for helpful comments on an earlier version of this.

2. In what follows, I’m blurring together eye-rolling, annoyance, irritation, and rejection. Kelly and Westra do the same. Maybe this is a mistake, though, and a better analysis would be more fine-grained. Some norm changes really upset us, while eye-rolling seems reserved for changes that seem more benign. A complete theory should capture this difference.

3. Does this mean that all negative responses to norm changes are irrational? Not at all. Even if Kelly and Westra are right, they’re just saying that our initial eye-rolling and annoyance is rooted in confusion. But then reflective process can then kick in, and people can say: “yeah, I disapproved of such-and-so initially due to stupid reasons but now that I think about it …”, and can either change their minds or give legitimate reasons for why a given norm change really is wrong. As they put it (addressing this comment to eye-rollers):

Instead of simply going along with your immediate gut reaction, step back and take those feelings under advisement, along with any other relevant factors, and then consider whether your response is reasonable: ‘Is this new thing actually bad, or does it just feel that way because it’s unfamiliar?’

4. In a response to this article (scroll to the end), I summed up the state-of-the-art in moral psychology:

Morality is ultimately about fairness and justice. Or it is about maximizing the welfare of sentient beings. Or intertemporal choice, giving up immediate satisfaction for long-term gain. Or maybe it is really all about altruism. Morality has one foundation—harm. Or it has three foundations: autonomy (which includes harm), but also divinity and community. Or five foundations: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity. Or perhaps six—do not forget about liberty. Morality is innate and universal, a modular system of the sort proposed by Chomsky and Fodor for language. Or it is innate and universal, but nothing like a modular system. Or it is partially innate and partially learned. Or entirely learned. At least we know that morality is a distinct domain, a cognitive natural kind. Unless it is not.

5. My views here have been influenced by my back and forth with Kelly and Westra, and this theory differs from what I proposed in Why is moral progress annoying?