simonlife

The dorm I live in, Cascadilla Hall, has been vandalized incessantly since the beginning of the semester. The vandals (assuming there are more than one) had at one point contained their activities to the elevators, writing nonsensical and antagonizing phrases on the doors, but when the dorm staff decided to shut down the elevators as punishment, they continued their graffiti on the walls of the stairwells. I use the term “graffiti” here loosely, as their work lacks the artistic brand of typical, street graffiti.

My day hasn’t really been affected by the suspension of our elevator use; I take the stairs four out of five times when ascending the building, and I always take the stairs when descending. Likewise, the messages written on the walls (some of them, anti-religious; others, directed at specific individuals) haven’t bothered me a whole lot. Unless they eventually decide to target me specifically or demonstrate more criminal, injurious intent, I will continue to observe the affair from afar, as a third party, with minimal alarm.

My Home, As It Were

Even though I’m not indifferent, my retracted outlook on the matter would likely attract some admonishment from the residence hall staff. They seem to think that I, like the rest of my dorm mates, am responsible for allowing unwelcome guests into our home (if the perpetrators are not already Cascadilla residents), and as this dorm is essentially my “home” for the current semester, they believe that I should be expected to care for it in the same way that I would care for my own house.

As it turns out, I’m having trouble making that connection when I do not actually consider the elevator and stairs in this building to be part of my home. To be sure, I genuinely care about the condition of the property near to my living space, and I also care about the property of this school. It’s just that there are socio-environmental factors at work here (e.g. proximity and the diffusion of responsibility in communal living arrangements) that make it difficult to bring the recent vandalism—how shall we say—close to home.

Ironically, these are probably the same factors that have allowed the vandals to behave so maliciously without being deterred by the moral emotions: namely, guilt and shame. Assuming that they are well-adjusted members of society (for the most part) who are indeed capable of the moral emotions, the facility with which their criminal intent has escaped moral restraint implies a deficit in the circumstances that normally bar deviant behavior.

The Nature of Harm

The same is expectedly true of any crime involving defacement of property. In general, the harm that an action is likely to inflict tends to be a pretty good estimate of its morality, but even though property defacement is harmful, I would argue that the notion of harm is obscured.

There is, for example, no clear victim. When we usually cause direct harm to other people, either physically or verbally, with or without intent, we receive a clear and immediate response; our victims, present in flesh and blood, react to the pain and may retaliate. They manifest an emotional response by crying or getting angry and yelling. These tangible manifestations are cues that appeal to a mechanism built into our minds over thousands of years of having evolved as social, altruistic beings. This is a mechanism that kicks in at the sight of another’s misfortune and triggers the moral emotions. We empathize well and are made conscious of that uneasy feeling of guilt or shame, leading us to avoid performing the same action in the future.

Vandalizing the walls of Cascadilla, however, affords no such sensory input. Whoever has been writing things on the walls in this building has obviously been doing so in the absence of other people, and so there have been no peers or authority figures to express immediate, in-the-moment disapproval. Without a grimace or frown in sight, the vandals have been operating with very little activity in the region of their brains that regulates guilt. Nobody around to empathize with; no third-party affective responses to be bothered by; no physical embodiment of any of the moral judgments that society holds in unanimity.

At the very most, there is an implicit sense that somebody somewhere at sometime will take offense, but even then, the personally-directed attacks have gone unfettered. In this case at least, anonymity across time and space seems to be an efficacious buffer against moral restraint.

And why shouldn’t it? Evolution never intended for us to empathize and reason across considerable gaps in time and space. Take charity, for instance. It isn’t evolutionarily adaptive to donate our resources halfway around the world to people we’ll never meet. Also, any of us who have ever found ourselves acting out in atypically aggressive ways in an online game or on an Internet forum shouldn’t be all that appalled by our actions: evolution never taught us to care about people whose physical presence isn’t apparent to us.

Nurture Over Nature

In a way, what I’ve just said can be construed to mean that the vandals in this dorm can be pardoned. This is, of course, not what I intended to illustrate, nor do I think that a case can be made in their defense. That we as human beings appear to adopt different sets of moral standards in different situations shouldn’t liberate us from certain, basic moral obligations.

Indeed, we award those who are able to identify and break free of the conditions that make moral transgressions only seem less severe. We award the ability to discount things like proximity that can induce unfounded apathy and hostility. Even though a lot of our behavior can be explained by our evolutionary roots, morality in human society has, in some ways, started to depart from nature’s bidding. Being the highly complex organisms that we are, we’re able to accurately imagine and predict what can come of our actions. Our ability to extrapolate to the guilt or shame that might follow an act is certainly well developed; it’s just that people seem to have some difficulty calling these faculties into action, consciously or unconsciously, when it isn’t obvious that they really would make a difference.

So the folks who have been writing things on our walls: they made it this far in life. Presumably, they’re students, got into Cornell, and go to class everyday. Presumably, if you hit them, they will feel pain and react aversely. If you gave them an axe and told them they could strike down the targets of their written attacks without legal repercussions, presumably, they would still have some difficulty bringing themselves to do it. So what, then, makes them so different from you and me?

Intuition Says…

I’ve tried to reason about this problem from the viewpoint of social and evolutionary psychology, but I’m clearly no authority in the field, and it ought to be apparent that I’m trying to work with a very bare set of facts. All we know is that there’s crap written on our walls and that it seems natural to assume the culprit is more immoral, in a normative sense, than the rest of us. As objective as we may try to be, we get a sense that the crimes in Cascadilla necessarily reflect moral impairment in other personality traits. We don’t want this person handling our finances or babysitting our kids or preparing our food. We have a feeling that this person is bad.

Without a doubt, there are factors here that have been overlooked. Maybe someone has beef with the residence hall staff, or maybe someone suffered some sort of tragic injustice and didn’t know whom else to take it out on. Maybe some strongly anti-religious zealot got fed up with all the fellowship flyers and was looking for a decidedly impertinent way to vent. Whatever the case, I think we would find it comforting to know that the culprits in this case, wherever they are, are starting to feel guilty for their actions. As little as we know about what makes people do the things they do, we’d like to be assured that they aren’t totally unlike us and that they too yield to the moral emotions.

Moral Progress

The example extends ubiquitously. We can’t offend people by writing four-letter words all over a few walls just because anonymity makes it easier on ourselves. We can’t coast through red lights at 3 AM just because no one else is out on the street at that hour of the night. We can’t verbally slam and flame strangers we meet online just because we don’t feel as bad hiding behind a computer screen. As tempting as it may be, we can’t make excuses out of exceptional circumstances.

Otherwise, moral progress—such a fine concept as it is—is just child’s play.