Woke Axiology

Is it worse to harm all bank tellers or just the feminist ones?

Tversky & Kahneman famously showed that many people judge (incoherently) that Linda is “more likely” to be a feminist bank teller than to be a bank teller. I’m often struck by people making a moral analogue of this mistake: thinking that something is more important when it affects just a subgroup than when it affects all of those people and more. The smaller problem gets conceived as an injustice, whereas the larger problem calls for “mere” beneficence. Injustice takes priority over beneficence, on many worldviews, regardless of scope or magnitude. I think this is messed up and people should rethink their moral priorities.

Should adding another beneficiary result in lower moral priority?

The standard “anti-woke” critiques of the social justice movement focus on respects in which the latter is outright bad: cancel culture, etc. I’m certainly no fan of the latter, but its significance may be exaggerated.¹ A more interesting critique focuses on opportunity cost: the idea being that many social justice concerns are good and reasonable (at least if we put aside the censorious means by which some choose to pursue these ends), but risk “crowding out” other, even more important issues.

I’m going to throw up the paywall at this point since not everyone reacts well to questioning woke axiology—the claim that pursuing race and gender equity is literally the most important thing in the world. (I personally think that well-meaning adults should be able to have an open, friendly conversation about the relative importance of various candidate good causes. I’ve found that not everyone shares that view, alas. But I trust that my paid subscribers can manage it.)