1 Introduction

One of the more unsettling findings from psychology is that people are terrifyingly evil in all sorts of circumstances. And not “a bit rude to their neighbor,” level evil. No, I’m talking “hacking their neighbors to death with machetes,” or “electrocuting people to death,” level evil.

In general, people are nice and helpful. But that is because social norms direct people to be nice and helpful. You feel bad being rude. You feel the reproachful eyes of the people around you, boring into your back. People hate that feeling. So most of the time, they behave pretty well. Social norms constrain our most vicious impulses.

But what happens when bad behavior and social norms come apart? The answer, for which there is abundant empirical evidence, is that people start behaving very badly. If doing the right thing is a bit costly and socially disapproved of, most people just won’t do it. The empirical evidence is overwhelming—we are just a few social norms away from barbarism.

Note: many of the points I make here are similar to the ones makes in this piece.

2 Doing what is predictably wrong

One bit of evidence for this thesis is that humans do things all the time that they believe to be wrong. If what people believe to be wrong carries no social stigma, and is a bit costly to avoid, people generally do the thing they think is wrong.

I’ve had a lot of discussions about veganism with people over the years. Oftentimes, people grow convinced that eating meat is egregiously evil. Even that factory farming is the worst thing we do as a society. Nonetheless, they mostly keep eating meat. And not for sophisticated consequentialist offsetting reasons—most of them don’t offset. They just don’t care enough about avoiding evil to stop eating meat.

Similarly, of the people who are convinced that failing to give to effective charities is like walking past drowning children, almost none of them give all their excess wealth to effective charities. Most of them give basically none of their excess wealth to effective charities. A non-trivial number of people who think abortion is murder nonetheless get one—ideally secretly—if the alternative would be costly and embarrassing. It’s hard to know exact numbers, but a non-trivial share of the population seems willing to carry out an action that they believe to be murdering the innocent, ...