I want to see if I can unravel a conundrum here. It's a conundrum most people aren't even aware of, and are in fact violently opposed to being aware of.
I'm not a very clear or logical thinker, so bear with me. I'll do my best to lay it out in a nicely linear fashion.
It goes like this:
Most people think they are good people, and they think they are good people primarily because they feel they are pro-social: they do favours for others, they play nicely with others, they play by the rules (at least by the rules they think are important.)
That's one arm of the conundrum.
The other arm is that most people are perfectly happy going out and inflicting harm on others as a matter of ordinary routine.
Here's a scenario: someone goes out and by their actions causes one or more people to spend a week or ten days having trouble breathing, having trouble sleeping, and feeling physically bruised and beaten, full of aches and pains.
And the folks who do that feel like they are doing a good thing.
Right?
It's quite likely that everyone reading this has done it. Even I have, now and then, and when I've avoided doing it--which I have pretty aggressively done for the past couple of decades--I've gotten push-back from the people around me.
It's called "going to work with a cold".
Let's just stop and reflect on that for a minute, without making excuses or engaging in any special pleading. Let's acknowledge what going to work with a cold is: deliberating hurting two other people, as colds have a "basic reproduction number" of a bit more than two, so every person with a cold infects two others, at least if they don’t take precautions. Which hardly anyone does. All those “good people”.
Regardless of the reasons for doing it, that's what "going to work with a cold" is: beating up two other people. No amount of abstract lying can change it. Call it whatever you like. You go to work with a cold, you send your kid school with a cold, and you're just going out and beating a couple of people up. And everyone is OK with that. We have a society designed around that, even though capitalists would make more money if we had basic sick leave requirements. Money isn't what drives this. Pro-sociality is.
People don’t do this because they want to do harm. They want to do what feels good and right. They want to be pro-social. They don't want to let their team down. They don't want to let their boss down. They want to belong, to be an efficient and effective member of their society, even if doing so means doing actual harm to that society and the individuals within it. Pro-social behaviour is driven by feelings, not reasons, so things like "actual harm" or "making less money" don't come into it. Actual harm is irrelevant to pro-sociality.
That's my conundrum: the foundational feeling of human morality, the reason why most people think they are "good people" is precisely what enables people to do the most harm to each other, casually, unthinkingly, and just naturally in the course of an ordinary day.
"I can't be a bad person!" they say to themselves. "I'm always ready to cooperate, to help, to do my bit."
And they are. That's what leads them to do terrible things.
Humans are a pro-social species: they spontaneously cooperate with each other at a scope and scale and with a flexibility unseen elsewhere. They do it not because they've taken classes in moral philosophy or reasoned through any ethical edicts they might have learned as a child. They do it for feelings, not reasons. They do it because it feels good to play well with others.
But the fact of cooperation says nothing about the purpose of that cooperation, the end, the goal it is aimed at.
Humans cooperate--brilliantly, wonderfully, pro-socially--to make war, to kill, to torture.
They do it because it feels good: not the actual killing and so on--at least not to all but an irrelevant few--but the fact that they are doing it together.
Do you have any idea how weird that is?
Or does it just seem natural, obvious?
Not wearing an N95 in a public place is considered pro-social today. If you wear one, you're weird. The majority of people have decided this, so even though those of us who still N95 for our own protection and the protection of others are considered bad people.
Offensive.
Anti-social.
While our friends who go around beating people up, putting people in hospital, giving them long-term disabilities, and actually killing them are being pro-social.
They aren't making waves. They aren't disturbing the delicate equilibrium of the group.
Pro-social, see?
It doesn't matter if their behaviour is good or bad by any objective moral standard--like, say, one that values human life--only that it keeps the wheels of whatever society they are in turning relatively smoothly.
Pro-sociality is not virtue.
But it feels like virtue. Being pro-social--happily playing well with others, not being an awkward bastard, conforming to social norms because it feels good to do so, not because they have to force themselves against their will--is what most people think of as the bedrock of virtue, when in fact it is completely unrelated.
This is particularly clear today when it comes to spreading deadly, disabling, or even just annoying diseases.
And we see that this knows no party: left or right, religious or non, whatever or whichever, the vast majority of every group and subgroup of humans everywhere under all circumstances is the same in this regard. It is built in to their basic biology. Humans survive, and have "subdued the Earth and everything that's in it" by virtue of their spontaneous, pro-social, feelings-driven proclivity for self-organization and cooperation.
Most people loathe N95 masks and refuse to wear them unless they are required. If they are required, people wear them, because "following requirements" is pro-social, regardless of the nature of those requirements. People won't wear them for the sake of saving lives because they don't care about lives. If they did, and they were aware of how effective N95s are, they would wear them. They don't. But they will N95 to be pro-social, to get the positive emotional kick that comes with visibly following the rules. It makes each one feel like a good person, when in fact they're just a good primate.
They behave in conformance to social norms because it feels good. Part of that feeling is literally feeling "good": it feels like virtue. They feel like they're a good person when they conform to social norms, and they feel like they're a bad person when they don't. Again: regardless of what those norms are.
Being me, I've often been the odd duck out when it comes to conforming to norms, and I've often been told that the fact of my existence is wrong because of that. On the other hand, after the fact, I've sometimes and somewhat guiltily been told by the properly pro-social people that they're really on the same side as me, in their hearts.
They are not. They're just trying to save the last shred of what remains of their tattered dignity. Which is better than nothing, I guess.
This is the neurotypical human's superpower. The good feeling they get from cooperating with others allows them to more-or-less effortlessly organize themselves into large-scale groups, quite spontaneously.
It's also their greatest weakness, because there is no certainty that the social norms those groups adopt--often led by the most sociopathic among them--are anything like objectively good.
A few years ago nobody but a small number of very frustrated aerosol scientists realized what a huge role aerosols played in the spread of disease. We lived with and accepted the reality of going out and beating a couple of people up every year or so because we didn't know there was any alternative. We didn't know that routinely wearing an N95 when indoors in public could interrupt the cycle, and avoid our uncontrollable impulse to beat the living shit out of two random people now and then. Even wearing an N95 only when symptomatic would show basic morality: avoiding doing known and easily preventable harm, hopefully while our leaders get their act together and implement ASHRAE 241 as a universal standard for indoor air.
People don't do that because they are not virtuous: they are pro-social, and wearing an N95 is anti-social, unless there are rules that demand it. Then, conformance to the rules is pro-social, so people do it. N95 compliance changes from a few percent when it's "recommended" to just a few percentage points shy of 100 when it's "required."
Most people are not competent to make decisions about aerosol disease spread and avoidance themselves, and most people are rightly suspicious of leaders who impose new requirements on the people they lead, especially when those requirements are visible and interrupt something as basic as being able to see each other's faces. Lacking the ability to judge based on an independent analysis of the data, they fall back on feelings, which lead them astray. Again.
This is not an indictment of humanity.
For it to be an indictment people would have to have a choice about it, and for the most part, they don't.
Consider: it's true that some people are over six feet tall, and some people can lift two hundred pounds, and some people can ignore their pro-social impulses and do something closer to what might be called objectively right, but so what?
Most people are not over six feet tall. Most people can't lift two hundred pounds. And most people aren't able to ignore their pro-social impulses.
The fact that human capacities span a wide range does not change reality for the majority who do not lie at the extremes. The fact that some people can do something, maybe even without a lot of effort, is irrelevant to what other people can do. "I did this and it was easy" tells us nothing about how difficult the average person would find the task, and everything about the person making the statement: they are arrogant and self-centered, and think their personal experience naturally generalizes. It doesn't.
And let me be very clear about this: human society could not function if most people lay at the low end of pro-sociality, where I am. If most people were like me it would be a bad thing. The world would come apart at the seams. Things would fall apart. The center would not hold. Mere anarchy would be loosed upon the world. And the rough beast that slouched toward Bethlehem would not be human [as Yeats might say].
But...
The average human can stand up straighter, can practice lifting to get stronger, and can expand the range over which they can assert some kind of objective morality against their pro-social tendencies.
I'm never going to be an Olympic anything, but starting to lift in my late 30's has put me in a position in my early 60's where I'm stronger and more capable than the average. I don't have to be great to be better. I just have to practice.
And when it comes to not beating up two random people every time there's a cold going around, I think it's reasonable to ask that we aspire to better, and practice accordingly.