Oedipus Wrecks Havoc With Moral Judgment

Why are people guilty until proven innocent in the court of public opinion? Also, Dumbo.

When I was working as an operator on Dumbo L’Elephant Volant in Fantasyland at EuroDisney (now Disneyland Paris), the policy was that guests who were handicapped—we were allowed to use that word, back then—were admitted through the exit, without having to wait in the queue before getting on the attraction. This way, people in wheelchairs, or with injured legs, and so forth, wouldn’t have to navigate the queue, which could be an ordeal.

One especially busy day—the wait time could be in excess of an hour for the three-and-a-half minute flight—a French guest¹ challenged me when I admitted another party through the exit gate. He said to me—in French—something like, “What, is she your mom?” He was, in a word, fâché (i.e., vexed). The crowd around him rose in an angry chorus of “oui, qu’est que c’est que ca?!”² and the like, and matters were getting ugly when I explained in my just-good-enough-French that this party included a person with a hidden disability that prevented her from waiting in the regular queue.

The Frenchman excused himself—excusez-moi monsieur—and the temperature of the crowd cooled. (Here is another, more modern, example, of the same sort of thing.)

From this little story, we gain several insights.

1. Acts that appear to be moral violations might not be. Morality is complicated.

2. It can be pretty easy to stir a crowd when it appears a moral rule has been violated.

3. Rob used to work at EuroDisney.

The inverse of the first point is true as well: acts that appear to be perfectly fine might be immoral. For instance, in the above example, if it turned out that the person with the alleged hidden disability didn’t actually have the condition, then they would be morally culpable.

Coordinating on Actions

At the core of these points—well, the first two—is the fact that moral judgment is a coordination game. Humans use visible behavior—actions—in the world to evaluate wrongness and recruit others to condemnation. This feature of morality leads to a special role for stuff that’s hard or impossible to see. In the Dumbo case, there’s an invisible fact that is exculpatory, changing an apparent violation into innocence.

A classic example of the importance of visibility is the family of moral dilemmas known as Trolley Problems. Letting the runaway trolley kill five people by declining to push the person with the backpack off the footbridge—an omission, or failure to act—is by and large, considered permissible: not wrong. The thing about omissions is that the person hasn’t done anything. It’s hard to point your finger and tell everyone around you, “hey, look, that person just… well, didn’t do anything.”

In contrast, taking an action—pulling a lever or pushing the hapless person on the footbridge—is considered to be wrong. Using clever hypotheticals such as the trolley problem, it has been shown that people consider acting to be more wrong than not acting in the context of harm.

This pattern holds even when the results are exactly the same. It’s worse to stand by as someone plunges to their death than to help them along to their death by pushing them. Same result in both cases. Much worse when one acts to bring the death about.

So, it’s known that actions are worse than omissions in the context of harming others. If the coordination view of morality is correct, then there’s nothing morally special about harm. Instead, this account predicts that across domains—food taboos, sex, drugs, etc.—actions will be judged worse than omissions because coordination is much easier when someone actually does something compared to the case when they do nothing. That’s not to say that doing nothing is never condemned, as fans of the final episode of Seinfeld know.

My former student Peter DeScioli and I were curious about this. (It would be bad for our view of morality-as-coordination if omissions were judged less bad only for harm.) So, we developed a bunch of little vignettes in which the outcome was the same but in one case the outcome came about due to an action and in one case it came about as a result of an omission. Here, for instance, were our vignettes for the case of EUTHANASIA:

1. Commission – Dr. SMITH is standing next to his patient, who has expressed a wish to die. Dr. Smith turns off the respirator, which is keeping the patient alive. The patient dies.

2. Omission – Dr. SCOTT is standing next to his patient, who has expressed a wish to die. The patient becomes unable to breathe on his own. Dr. Scott does not turn on the respirator, which would keep the patient alive. The patient dies.

Here is the CANNIBALISM case:

1. Commission – JOHN is at a restaurant in Fiji. He is given a small piece of meat. The moment before he takes a bite, he is told that the dish is made of human flesh. He takes a bite and swallows it.

2. Omission – JEREMY is at a restaurant in Fiji. He is given a small piece of meat. The moment after he takes a bite, he is told that the dish is made of human flesh. He swallows it nonetheless.

Now, in both euthanasia cases, the patient winds up dead. The difference is that Dr. Scott failed to act while Dr. Smith acted. Similarly, both John and Jeremy eat another person; Jeremy failed to spit out the bite. Our interest was in whether subjects—this was an online sample—judged the omission worse than the commission. We wanted to hit a bunch of different moral domains in addition to physical harm, so we developed similar vignettes exploring prostitution, cheating, theft, and so on. (You can see the original paper here; the vignettes are in the Supporting Information, at the bottom.)

The results were as predicted by the coordination view: commissions were judged worse than omissions for nearly all of the kinds of wrongs that we investigated.³ What John did is worse than what Jermey did (or didn’t do).

Oedipus Wreaks Havoc

Just as humans focus on actions, they also focus on what's visible about the actions rather than the (invisible) beliefs that motivate them.

Let’s take the case of poor Oedipus.⁴ For those of you who don’t recall, before Oedipus was born, it was prophesied that he would kill his father and marry his mother. To escape this fate, his parents, King Laius and Queen Jocasta of Thebes, abandon him on a mountainside. Subsequently, a shepherd finds Oedipus and brings him to the childless King Polybus and Queen Merope of Corinth, who raise him as their own, keeping Oedipus unaware of his true parentage.

Oedipus visits the Oracle at Delphi and is told of the prophecy, so he leaves Corinth because, as far as he knows, Polybus and Merope are his real parents and he doesn’t want to kill Polybus and, well, the rest of it. On his journey, Oedipus encounters and kills a man who, as it turns out, is King Laius, his biological father. Arriving in Thebes, Ed solves the Sphinx's riddle and, as a reward, is made king and marries the widowed Queen Jocasta, his biological mother. Thus he unknowingly fulfills the prophecy.

Let’s have a look at the moral quagmire.

Did Oedipus commit incest? Well… yes? In at least some sense, he did. However, one might reasonably think that how one’s judges poor Ed depends on some invisible stuff. One might think that whether one committed a wrongful act depends on invisible things such as intentions and knowledge. In this case, the intention is a little fraught. I mean, Oedipus intended to have sex with his wife, but he didn’t intend to have sex with his mother. The two people are, in fact, one and the same, but he didn’t know that they were. An invisible thing—knowledge, in this case his actual biological relationship to Jocasta—changes the moral weight of the action.

Now, in the case of the play, Sophocles is kind enough to furnish us with certainty about what Oedipus knew and when he knew it. This is well within the purview of the playwright, making visible the invisible through the stasimone, the exodus, and, especially, the chorus.

In the real world, however, including Disney parks, there is often hidden information that is relevant, with no Greek chorus to inform us.

Moral Fires

There is an expression to the effect that you should not stop to tie your shoes in someone else’s garden. Sure, you know that you’re bending down to tie your shoe, but the gardener might be forgiven for thinking you’re after a free carrot. Your shoe, and the knowledge that it’s untied, is invisible to observers, just as in the Dumbo case.

Many modern formal justice systems—those produced by governments—are built to try to take this issue into account. While one’s invisible intentions play a crucial role in one’s guilt, the justice system has the process of discovery (the surfacing of information relevant to a case), cross examination (to get witnesses to reveal hidden truths), and big penalties for lying on the stand.⁵ Court systems have these elements because they are designed to determine the truth of the matter, whether the person in the dock is guilty or innocent.

In stark contrast, the human moral apparatus, and the informal court that it creates—the court of public opinion—is a very different matter. The court of public opinion often isn’t especially interested in the truth.⁶ As I have discussed elsewhere, human moral judgment is used to attack as much or more than a way of finding the truth. In today’s communication environment, many journalists, tweeters, and Instagrammers crave views and engagement more than the truth.⁷ Once a public accusation of a moral outrage has been made—King Oedipus killed his dad!—the coordination feature of moral judgment goes into full effect. People want to join in moral condemnations as part of the evolved function of morality as a coordinating device. There are big benefits to joining mobs when they gang up on victims—gaining approval in the group, the chance to vanquish a rival, grab others’ stuff, etc.—and big costs of taking the side of the accused, or even staying neutral. Cases such as the Salem Witch Trials, and other examples I’ve discussed in prior posts, illustrate the point. Humans stand to benefit from joining moral mobs—and bear costs when they stand against them, even in a “righteous” cause—which explains why it’s so fun to do so. You can think of the moral system measuring the chance that others will join in the mob and motivating doing so in proportion.

A consequence of this very human motivation is that, unlike actual courts, in the court of public opinion, invisible information often stays invisible. Actions that look shocking and morally weighted—Oedipus had sex with his mother!—get amplified through gossip (in the past) and social media (today). Even if the hidden information comes to light—yeah, but he thought she was unrelated because he didn’t know he was adopted—exculpatory information is unlikely to be spread with the same fervor as inculpatory information.

Why are formal justice systems so different from informal mobs? After all, our evolved psychology created those justice systems. One possibility is that while mobs are often spontaneous, justice systems are created in advance of putative violations. Each of us, before anything has gone amiss, has a long-term interest in living in the world in which guilt or innocence is arbitrated on the basis of the facts and evidence: no one wants to be torn limb from limb by a mob. In contrast, once a mob has started forming, our short-term interest is in joining the mob to avoid becoming its target.⁸

In all of this, it’s important to remember that moral judgment is for choosing sides rather than discovering truth. For this reason, once a loud, prominent accusation has been made, human evolved morality systems are designed to swing into action and join the moral mob. Not because people are bad per se, but because this is what the system is designed to do: side against the putative wrongdoer even if that person is a friend or ally. In short, humans, for good evolutionary reasons, are far more enthusiastic about joining a moralistic mob than taking the time to determine if the accusation is valid. Indeed, humans have a long history of punishing people, even killing them, for things they could not possibly have done, such as consorting with the devil and so forth.  

These dynamics mean that the court of public opinion is much less likely to find defendants not guilty than courts of law. The court of public opinion doesn’t really care about relevant hidden information—moral defenses—and, even if it comes to light, doesn’t spread in the same way as moral attacks do.

Dark Matters

There is an old story about a man who encounters a woman and offers her a surprisingly large sum of money in exchange for her favor. The woman, who is expecting money from her lover any day but is in dire straits, agrees to the transaction. This happens twice more. After the third time, the man bids her farewell. Puzzled, she asks why he won’t return and he replies that her lover paid him to deliver the cash to her—in three installments—and now his business is concluded.

I don’t mean to imply that this sort of trickery is, in the real world, a laughing matter. Amid the AIDS epidemic, California enacted a law (subsequently changed, in 2017) that made it a felony, punishable by up to eight years in prison, to withhold information that one is HIV positive, knowingly exposing a partner to the condition.

Some might think eight years as a penalty for consensual sex is excessive, but consider how you would feel about a person who withheld a life-destroying piece of information to persuade you to have sex with them.⁹ Just as in Oedipus’ case, you might have “consented” to having sex, but that consent was not informed: with the crucial piece of withheld information, you would have made a different choice. Indeed, legal scholars have wrestled with the question if such cases constitute “rape by deceit,” arguing that sometimes, at least, lying violates the other person’s autonomy and should be treated appropriately by the legal system.  

[The following contains serious SPOILERS for the Apple TV series Dark Matter. If you want to avoid them, advance to the section after END SPOILERS.]

Science fiction provides additional examples of invisible information that raises interesting moral quandaries. In Dark Matter, one character builds a machine that can navigate the multiverse, traveling to other timelines in which versions of himself have made different decision and, as a consequence, are living very different lives.

The character—call him Jason2—travels to a timeline he likes more than his own and kidnaps the version of him—Jason1—in that timeline and assumes the life of the man he replaced. He chose that particular timeline because—of course—Jason1 lived happily with a woman who Jason2, in his timeline, had let get away. Now, when Jason2 has sex with “his” wife, she believes him to be her actual husband, not a Jason from a different timeline.

What is the moral status of this interaction? As a viewer, I can say the scene is uncomfortable to watch.¹⁰ One does not have the sense that his wife has consented to having sex with the doppelganger, even though, just like Oedipus, she willingly had sex with the person in question. Did she consent to having sex with him? In the final confrontation between the two Jasons, Jason1 claims that Jason2 has raped his (Jason1’s) wife. Yes, she consented to the sex, but, Jason1 would argue—with justice, in my view—that she did not provide informed consent. I’ll put polls here so you can voice your view.

[END SPOILERS]

Conclusion

If humans were a reluctantly moralistic species, condemning others and joining moral attacks only grudgingly, then the problem of invisibility would not loom as large.

That is not, however, our species.

Humans are enthusiastically moralistic, a fact explained in part by the fact that the evolved function of morality is to do with side-taking. When someone makes a moral accusation, it can be advantageous to join the group, as we saw in the post about hiking.

A result of this enthusiasm is that hidden information plays a more limited role in informal processes—what I called the court of public opinion—than formal ones. This dynamic explains why it’s easy to launch a moral attack and gather allies but often hard to unwind it. This dynamic also explains why individuals and groups work so hard to get their narrative out as fast as possible, starting the bandwagoning process before hidden facts come to light. You might have noticed this phenomenon in certain recent armed conflicts.

Even in the Happiest Place on Earth,¹¹ an accusation can rapidly escalate, building outrage in the mob. Thankfully, in the case of the story with which I opened this piece, everyone lived happily ever after. When the invisible information was made visible—abracadabra!—the court of public opinion acquitted.

Unfortunately, because human moral psychology is hungry for moral accusations and eager to join moral mobs, villains can prevail by making loud, visible accusations because that which is invisible, all too often, remains unseen.

Note: Living Fossils will take a break during the week of Labor Day. We’ll be back in two weeks and report the results of the polls in three weeks.

1. For the uninitiated, people who visit the parks are called “guests” not “customers.”

2. In this context, the translation would be something like, wtf?

3. Some accounts of moral judgment hold that human moral judgment is a collection of different evolved cognitive mechanisms. (See, for example, Jon Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory and Oliver Curry’s work.) If those accounts are correct, then this difference, the distinction between commissions and omissions, evolved in each separate case.

4. I recently spent a month in Greece and, while there, read and listened to the excellent books by Stephen Fry about Greek gods, myths, and heroes. The next few posts will be heavy with reference to our Hellenic friends. You’ve been warned.

5. Lady Justice’s blindfold is a little misleading in this context. The symbolism of the blindfold connotes blindness to the identity of the accused, not blindness to evidence. She’s got her scale there to remind you that she cares about the balance of facts of the matter.

6. Katherine Brodsky recently made exactly this point persuasively in an excellent piece, writing that “unlike the courts, which award verdicts and dole out punishments based on a number of factors, no such reasoning exists in the court of public opinion.”

7. Yes, scientists and scholars too.

8. I thank an anonymous editor of this essay for this suggestion. Hat tip. The same reviewer pointed out to me that there is a certain thread of argument that mobs are, ackshually, a good thing. The intuition is that formal rules—laws, contracts, employee handbooks—don’t cover all the stuff we don’t like so we need mobs to shame and punish those who say and do things we don’t like because the formal apparatus won’t. My own view is that this sort of vigilantism is bad, in part for the reasons discussed here: mobs don’t care about evidence, the truth, or due process. More generally, support for vigilantism puts everyone on every side at risk. As norms change, those who supported informal mobbing might well find themselves on the wrong side of it. Mobs, after all, are fickle.

9. I don’t think this penalty excessive, but I recognize my bias on this issue. #iykyk

10. A similar scene occurs in the movie Face/Off.

11. Every Disney park is the Happiest Place on Earth. Impossible, you say? No. It’s magic!