Moral Hubris Masked as Wisdom

'Be on the right side of history' masquerades as moral wisdom, but is too shallow to fit the bill.

The phrase ‘be on the right side of history’ is a ubiquitous phrase in contemporary culture that pretends to be a moral prescription: something that morally constraints our actions. The thought, I take it, is that many of our beliefs and actions, in the present moment, will be judged harshly by the improved moral standards of the future, much as we at the present moment, look down on people from the past as morally backward. And there is no doubt a possibility that some of what we do as standard practice will be judged harshly by those who come after us, e.g., many vegetarians and vegans claim that history will judge the widespread practice of meat eating as incredibly immoral and barbaric.

Although this popular slogan is presented as a moral prescription—something wise that should guide our moral lives—it is too shallow to do the trick.

Why?

There are a few reasons.

First, just because people in the future judge our actions to be morally impermissible, or worse still morally barbaric, it doesn’t show that they actually are. In order for that to make sense, we must assume that people’s moral knowledge and actions continue to improve over time, and that this will continue into the future. Perhaps this idea that our moral knowledge and behavior improves over time comes, in part, from the fact that we can often look back on events in the past with moral disgust and horror. How could people ever believe it was morally permitted to own another human being? Why would anyone think that it was morally acceptable to treat women as second-class human beings, at best? We rightly point to these behaviors as morally wrong, and wonder how people could have thought otherwise. And perhaps this instills a sense that, over time, people gain better moral knowledge, and their actions are morally better as a result, with many exceptions of course.

Perhaps that picture of moral progress is right, but perhaps not. It may be that we are morally better in some areas, compared to the past, and morally wrong in others. The idea that people in the future will be a better at morally evaluating our actions than we are is a controversial assumption at best. Please bear in mind, my point isn’t to reject this idea out of hand, but simply to highlight that it could be mistaken—there is nothing intrinsically morally better about the future.

Second, people in the past had many moral beliefs that they were certain were correct, but we firmly believe to be false. Perhaps they thought that their moral beliefs would be viewed, through the lens of history, as correct and wise. And yet, we think they were completely wrong. And that thought, naturally, leads to this question of how we would know where folks in the future, ‘on the right side of history’, will ultimately land on various ethical and moral issues. If we want to be judged morally sound by our moral betters in the future, this is presumably because we think they will be in a better moral position than we are currently. This would appear to put us at a serious moral disadvantage with respect to believing and acting in a manner that would be judged morally permissible, if not morally praiseworthy, by those in the future with superior moral knowledge and actions.

Here people often object that they are morally special: had they lived in the past, they wouldn’t have had slaves, treated women like second class citizens, or persecuted people with different religious beliefs—they are more enlightened than that! And perhaps is correct, but we should be skeptical.

Indeed, this objection dovetails with the third reason: people have the tendency to be morally mediocre, not too much worse or too much better than their peers. The empirical evidence from psychology strongly suggests we modulate our behavior based on what others do. To give a few examples: people are more likely to reduce household energy use if shown statistics that they use more than their neighbors. We are subject to peer pressure on a host of practices like littering, lying, tax compliance, and suicide. Moral mediocrity shouldn’t surprise us: as a social species, it not only matters what we do, but how we look to others. We rely on others to cooperate with us for our survival, and so it matters what others think of us if we want them to cooperate with us.

The evidence for moral mediocrity suggests that, even if one knew how to be on the right side of history—somehow they have excellent moral knowledge, like the people in the future—they still would be strongly motivated to act on it only in so far as their peers acted on it too. Perhaps this is because acting morally better than ones’ peers can create resentment, hurt ones’ reputation, and incentivize retaliation—especially when we consider that humans are a social species, highly dependent on cooperation from others to survive and thrive. And given the pressure to act as morally good or as morally bad as ones’ peers, there would be a strong temptation to reject any superior moral knowledge we may have by rationalizing our mediocre behavior. So even if one knew how history would morally judge their actions, there is serious reason to doubt that most people would change their behavior, in light of such knowledge, or even acknowledge they knew better to others, and even themselves.

Let’s switch gears at bit. Perhaps the phrase ‘be on the right side of history’ isn’t a prescription—something one ought to do—but rather an aspiration. It’s not that we think we know the ‘right side of history’ but instead that we aspire to be morally better than we currently are. We want to be better people. One would think, though, that everyone should want to be morally better than they are. On the aspirational reading, then, the phrase ‘be on the right side of history’ looks accurate, but banal.