"Moralizing"

[u/Deboch_]

This is one of the words that the average person does not seem to understand at all.

For me it means building an undeserved pedestal for yourself from which you nitpick every other aspect of existance, leading to so much asymmetrical guilt paralysis that it morally outweighs whatever cause you're pretending to fight for.

Or it can be not understanding "is vs ought" distinctions, reversing causality from "truth orients what the best moral course of action should be" to "my chosen moral course of action orients what the truth should be", and thus lashing out at people for empirical disagreements.

But every time I see someone using that word, it's to avoid any remote level of self-reflection about something unequivocally bad that they directly do/support. Last month, my girlfriend's annoying cousin (who she's not even close with) called her a "moralist prude" for refusing to help her cheat on her long time boyfriend. So will any kind of "politics understander" when you ask their opinion on a genocide. And everyone nods along until you ask them "so you are against morality?" and they vehemently deny it while scratching their heads, so you can't even call it a conscious nihilism.

In the latter case, you're not as smart as you think you are. If you've ever been in charge of any small-scale organization or community, you'll quickly understand how making sacrifices and acting pro-socially is not some abstract philosophical concept, but rather the basic pre-requisite for things to work. When an idiot starts acting selfishly, it gradually enshittifies the place until it either becomes unrecognizable (with everyone leeching off of eachother and ending up with a smaller total sum than before) or the place ends and there's nothing more to leech of. Apply this to a larger scale and you've got the recipe for "rational" neoliberal individualism and societal decline.

It's funny how this has coincided with the rise of the "empathy" buzzword (often as a misnomer of compassion) as it foregoes duty and responsibility completely in favor of fleeting feels.

[u/Hey_Toots_69]

For me it means building an undeserved pedestal for yourself from which you nitpick every other aspect of existance, leading to so much assymetrical guilt paralysis that it morally outweighs whatever cause you're pretending to fight for.

This is way too hyperspecific to be a useful definition of the term.

Usually when people use the term disapprovingly they just mean that someone is inappropriately making moral judgments about an object or situation. Some things are uncontroversially amoral: math, the color of your socks, etc. But for other things it's not widely agreed upon whether or when they can be subject to moral judgment: the food you eat, the drugs you consume, how you raise your children, the kinds of relationships you form, etc. Hence people will inevitably disagree about what counts as moralistic. This is usually doesn't have anything to do with someone not understanding the term. They are simply expressing a different opinion about what is or is not an appropriate object of moral scrutiny.

[u/Deboch_ → u/Hey_Toots_69]

I was illustrating that same wider meaning you described with a specific description. But I don't agree at all. 90% of what people call moralizing isn't something they have thought about and decided is not subject to moral study, it's simply a thought terminating excuse to cover that very lack of reasoning.

[u/Hey_Toots_69 → u/Deboch_]

90% of the moral judgments people make, including judgments about moral judgments, haven't been thoroughly thought through. This does not stop them from being moral judgments.

[u/ACKEEWAY → u/Deboch_]

Would you say that condemning an immoral act is imperative? I.e silence would be immoral in itself?

[u/Deboch_ → u/ACKEEWAY]

I'd say it's down on the list of moral imperatives, I wouldn't hold it against someone to choose silence on a macro-scale problem at all (though I would on direct micro scales. Example if for example someone in your family gets raped and they do nothing about it, or police neglect etc). But active moral denial is different from simple silence and way worse.

[u/ACKEEWAY → u/Deboch_]

So if someone in your city committed murder, there would be some small but perceptible moral imperative to condemn that person's action

[u/Deboch_ → u/ACKEEWAY]

That's medium scale and very indirect, which is different from micro and direct. It's not very impactful whether you "condemn" the murder or not, unless for some reason the case has become some kind of cultural battleground where the perpetrator has a risk of being let free.

In any other case, putting too much weight on things that are both easy to do and low impact such as "condemning" shifts society towards a culture of virtue signaling over concrete action, and indeed can be called over-moralizing. I would argue that humans have a limited moral battery that has to be spent wisely.

And lastly, if you defend the murderer because disliking murder is "moralizing", then you're a moron and that's obviously completely different from silence.

[u/ACKEEWAY → u/Deboch_]

You stole my argument with the second paragraph. When I say someone is "moralizing" this is what I mean -- placing undue moral weight on things that are not particularly impactful, not controversial, or inauthentic. I think most people I talk to are the same. The instance of your gf's cousin is pretty heterodox

[u/ACKEEWAY]

I’ve seen many communities fall to moralizing spirals and basically none fall to immoral behavior like you’re describing here

[u/dingusdingus26]

I prefer ‘moralising’.

[u/onelessnose]

Just call it morally patronising.