There’s an other-moral-minds effect, where you’ll never buy any public moral posture that’s stronger than the weakest one you’ll cop to yourself looking in the mirror (which you may or may not cop to publicly as well). You’ll suspect some sort of hypocrisy or trickery or denial.
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It’s the moral equivalent of being unable to imagine anyone smarter than yourself. You suspect some sort of trickery.
Internalizing that there are in fact people smarter and more morally courageous than you means learning to recognize signs, not just theoretical possibility)
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Life gets much more interesting when you calibrate yourself on both scales. You can see others more clearly. Calibrate their actual moral courage during mask-slip moments. Then discount their public moral postures accordingly. It’s not hard. You just need mask-slip data.
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It’s actually easier than reading the gap between performed and actual intelligence because intelligence is higher dimensional and more context-sensitive than moral courage. Good vs bad is simpler than smart vs dumb.
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2x2 with you at the center: x: morally weaker.stronger, y: dumber/smarter.
Morally stronger but intellectual dumber is the hardest relationship to process. You can neither lead nor follow.
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Interesting. Then will one also pretend to buy another’s public moral posture in the hope of signalling your own moral courage to be stronger than it is?
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