Hypermoralism – Morality causes ordinary people to do immoral things.

30Jan/10

Hypermoralism – Morality causes ordinary people to do immoral things.

Some people believe that immoral acts are caused by amoral individuals. However, very few people are truly immoral (~1% of individuals are psychopaths). The idea of the term, hypermoralism, is to popularize the idea that morality can actually cause people to be immoral, rather than prevent them from being immoral (e.g. see this post). It's very close to the idea of idealistic evil, except that I think the use of 'evil' makes it harder for people to see it in themselves. It's easier to accept that one might engage in hypermoralism from time to time rather than idealistic evil. But it's basically the same concept, couched in non-judgmental terms.

I hope to explore the idea of hypermoralism in a series of blog posts.

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66Scorpio
February 20th, 2011 - 14:28

Wouldn’t this suggest that all political and religious stripes (liberals, conservatives, libertarians, Christians, Muslims, atheists, etc) are susceptible to hypermoralism, whereas agnostics, moderates and independents would be less so?
Ravi
February 21st, 2011 - 12:44

yes, that would be a true interpretation. One can come up with historical examples of extremists of all persuasions causing terrible harm due to moral concerns, whereas I can’t think of any moderates or agnostics who cause such issues.
Benjamin David Steele
April 9th, 2012 - 22:06

It seems highly probable that hypermoralism correlates with psychological predispositions/traits such as authoritarianism and need for closure. If that is the case, some research might imply a different conclusion about hypermoralism.

There was an assumption by many that authoritarianism would be found equally on the left and the right, but all the research done on this hasn’t supported this. In liberal democracies such as the US, liberals and left-wingers are less authoritarian than conservatives and right-wingers. There isn’t even a strong tendency of authoritarianism that can be found when comparing the left with moderates and centrists.

Other research has found different results in communist countries, but even here a point must be clarified. In a country that has been strongly communist for generations, defenders of communism inevitably are defenders of the status quo and so they measure high on traits related to social conservatism. This is where it is necessary to differentiate ideologies from traits. Even in Western history, it is obvious that social conservatives haven’t always defended capitalism and have often been its greatest critics.

Unrelated to authoritarianism, I would add that some data I’ve seen shows that independents are some of the most extremist. This makes sense when you realize that most independents probably see themselves as outside of the party system, rather than in between the parties. Moderates, on the other hand, are different than independents in that they tend to favor one party which they also tend to vote for and so they aren’t really in the hypothetical center. The mystical beast called a centrist is very rare in reality.