Why is moral progress annoying?

A discussion of an article by Daniel Kelly and Evan Westra

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Last week, I was at my favorite conference—the Society for Philosophy and Psychology—and heard a talk by Daniel Kelly and Evan Westra about why people get pissed off at moral progress. The talk was based on their just-published Aeon article called Moral Progress is Annoying.

I have long admired the work of Kelly and Westra. And their article doesn’t disappoint—it is sharp, thoughtful, and well-written.

But I don’t think their core argument is right. Here’s why.

They start with a cool observation: We often get annoyed at moral progress. They lead with an example that will be familiar to many of us.

Ugh. Here you are, just trying to eat your BLT in peace, and someone at your table starts going on about being a vegan. Your eyes roll as your blood pressure rises. You wish they would just shut up.

It’s not that you don’t care about animal suffering. In other contexts, you actually care quite a bit – you would definitely do something if you thought a neighbour was mistreating their dog. You’re a good person – an animal lover even! But it’s hard to care that much about the ethics of meat-eating when these vegan types are just so preachy and annoying.

Another example (and the one they based their talk on) involves pronouns. Why would people get so upset over such a small change that does so much good?

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.

Their explanation for many people's annoyance with such practices has to do with the psychology of norms. Here is their definition of norms:

Think about all the things we could do on a daily basis, but don’t. We don’t wear our underwear outside our pants, we don’t hold hands with strangers on the bus, we don’t write work emails in iambic pentameter. Most likely, these actions would never even occur to us. … We mostly stay within the bounds of the local norms – the intricate fabric of social rules that structure human cultural environments, dictating which behaviours are permissible, impermissible or obligatory.

Shifts in norms make us uncomfortable—they lead to what Kelly and Westra call “affective friction.” They suggest that this explains why we are uneasy with moral progress. Back to pronouns:

The norms that have historically governed pronoun use are learned incredibly early, and so they are often deeply internalised in individual norm psychologies. For those who have not yet adjusted to new pronoun norms, trying to follow them can feel a bit like a North American remembering to look right for traffic instead of left while visiting the UK. A behaviour that was once ordinary, fluent and automatic is suddenly effortful and fraught – and prone to error. Even seemingly trivial changes in norms can be a source of minor bursts of affective friction.

Summing up, affective friction pisses us off and leads to a dismissive response. We are all Principal Skinner.

Kelly and Westra end with some advice for the eye-rollers:

As tempting as it can be to interpret the unpleasant feelings as your moral compass ringing alarm bells, your annoyance is just a feature of your norm psychology becoming misaligned and reacting to the unfamiliar. A better response would be to treat your feelings of irritation as a cue for further reflection. 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?’

You should think: Maybe it’s not the children who are wrong. Maybe it’s me!

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I agree with a lot of this. There is a robust moral realism throughout, a clear acknowledgment that some (not all) changes are, in a very real sense, for the better. And I dig the skepticism regarding using gut feelings to tell right from wrong. The wisdom of distrusting our emotional responses was a theme of my book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion and Kelly’s book Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust.

I think they’re wrong, though, in thinking that affective friction is really what’s going on in the cases they are interested in.

To see the concern, consider some of the other examples Kelly and Westra give of affective friction:

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.

Now, I haven’t done any research on why people get upset at pronoun declarations, land acknowledgments, and the like (and neither have Kelly and Westra). But my own sense is that this upsetness isn’t the same feeling that arises when dealing with novel foreign customs.

Rather, my proposal is that the negative reactions to the cases that Kelly and Westra view as moral progress are responses to their moral features. It is these that give rise to certain specific reactions of scorn, disdain, anger, resentment, and, in some cases, guilt and shame. This is different from how we react to non-moral cases of affective friction, such as dealing with the traffic rules of another country.

To see the difference between moral and non-moral cases, consider a couple of examples.¹

Imagine that research psychologists have adopted a new practice of how they end their emails. It’s not mandated, but most younger people are now doing it.

CASE 1: They put in their lab manager's name and contact information.

CASE 2: They put in a land acknowledgment.

These are both shifts in local norms—new ways of doing things. But I don’t think certain older research psychologists would react to them the same. The second would get a sort of annoyance and eye-rolling (by at least some people) that the first wouldn’t.

Or try this. You go to a conference to give a talk on your research, and you arrive late, so you don’t see the talks that preceded yours. After your presentation, nobody says “good talk” or says anything about it at all, and it becomes clear that you bombed. You ask a friend what happened, and she says:

CASE 1: Everyone before you had clear and easy-to-read slides. Your font was too small.

CASE 2: Everyone before you preceded their talk by calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. You didn’t.

In both cases, you’ve violated a norm, but, again, I bet that these feel very different.

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What does it mean to say that the pronoun cases have moral properties that distinguish them from more mundane instances of affective friction? At least three things:

1. Failure to follow a pronoun-like norm will lead to people thinking you are a worse person. If Mary violates a norm by (to use Kelly and Westra’s example) writing work emails in iambic pentameter, she’s seen as a goofball. If she refuses to refer to nonbinary people with they/them pronouns, she’s seen as an asshole.

2. Failure to follow certain norms might lead people to think of themselves as worse people. I suspect that one reason why so many people get pissed off at vegetarians is that they know meat-eating is an awful thing but have no intention to stop—and they don’t like being made to feel bad about themselves. (At least this is why I get pissed off at vegetarians.)

3. Many norm shifts are morally neutral—I have an older friend who is perpetually shocked at how many tattoos all the young people have, but he doesn’t think they’re doing anything immoral. But some of them are seen as morally wrong. Consider the practice in some circles of using phrases like “pregnant people” and “menstruators” to replace “women”—something that some people view as highly offensive because they see it as anti-women.²

   Maybe you can’t get this intuition, so try this: If many white members of your community started to adopt the practice (perhaps ironically) of greeting each other with a white-power salute and other white people were thought of as humorless and out-of-touch for not participating, you’d probably be upset—not because the practice is new, but because it’s wrong.

The norm changes that bother us, then, 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.

To sum up: Kelly and Westra suggest that the eye-rolling reaction to certain changing moral norms is the product of affective friction, not moral at all. But this fails to account for the differences between the eye-rolling cases and the more mundane situations where we are out of sync, such as when traveling to a new country. These differences suggest that—regardless of whether or not you agree with the eye-rollers—you should see their annoyance as something more than affective friction.

1. If someone wants to test these intuitions in a controlled experiment, be my guest—and please let me know how it goes.

2. In all of Kelly and Westra’s examples, it’s the more conservative people who are bothered by norm shifts, but there are instances where politics are flipped. One example from a couple of years ago is the 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. I don't think the people who were upset would agree that they were struggling with affective friction.