While I see the intuitive appeal of this idea, it honestly seems a bit ad hoc. The physics analogy is interesting, yes, but we should be careful not to mistake the practical usefulness of local level deontology or virtue ethics for an actual normative difference between levels. If we just accept the local heuristics as useful for social cohesion etc. without critically assessing whether we could do better, we run the risk of not actually improving sentient experience—just rationalizing standards that mainly exist because they were evolutionarily expedient, or maintain some power structure.
To be more specific, it’s very much an open question whether trying to be a “good” friend/family member, in ways that significantly privilege your friends/family over others, actually achieves more good in the long run. It seems very unlikely to me that, say, (A) buying or making a few hundred dollars’ worth of presents for people during holidays (reciprocated with similar presents, many of which in my experience honestly haven’t been worth the money even though I appreciate their thought) makes the world a better place than (B) spending that money/time on the seemingly cold utilitarian choice.
The usual objection to this is that B weakens social bonds or makes people trust you less. But: (1) from the perspective of the people or animals you’d be helping by choosing B, those bonds and small degrees of weakened trust would probably seem paltry and frivolous by comparison to their suffering. There also doesn’t seem to be much robust evidence supporting this claim anyway, it’s just an intuition I’ve seen repeated without justification. (2) It’s possible that this is one of several social norms that we can change over time by challenging the assumption that it’s eternal; in the short run, perhaps people think of you as cold or weird, but if enough people follow suit, maybe refusing to waste money on trivialities for holidays could become normal. Omnivores have argued that veganism threatens social bonds and the (particularly American) culture of eating meat together; c.f. this article. I think that that argument is self-evidently weak in the face of great animal suffering, so analogously it isn’t a stretch to suppose that deontological norms we currently consider necessary for social cohesion are disposable, if we challenge them.
While I see the intuitive appeal of this idea, it honestly seems a bit ad hoc. The physics analogy is interesting, yes, but we should be careful not to mistake the practical usefulness of local level deontology or virtue ethics for an actual normative difference between levels. If we just accept the local heuristics as useful for social cohesion etc. without critically assessing whether we could do better, we run the risk of not actually improving sentient experience—just rationalizing standards that mainly exist because they were evolutionarily expedient, or maintain some power structure.
To be more specific, it’s very much an open question whether trying to be a “good” friend/family member, in ways that significantly privilege your friends/family over others, actually achieves more good in the long run. It seems very unlikely to me that, say, (A) buying or making a few hundred dollars’ worth of presents for people during holidays (reciprocated with similar presents, many of which in my experience honestly haven’t been worth the money even though I appreciate their thought) makes the world a better place than (B) spending that money/time on the seemingly cold utilitarian choice.
The usual objection to this is that B weakens social bonds or makes people trust you less. But: (1) from the perspective of the people or animals you’d be helping by choosing B, those bonds and small degrees of weakened trust would probably seem paltry and frivolous by comparison to their suffering. There also doesn’t seem to be much robust evidence supporting this claim anyway, it’s just an intuition I’ve seen repeated without justification. (2) It’s possible that this is one of several social norms that we can change over time by challenging the assumption that it’s eternal; in the short run, perhaps people think of you as cold or weird, but if enough people follow suit, maybe refusing to waste money on trivialities for holidays could become normal. Omnivores have argued that veganism threatens social bonds and the (particularly American) culture of eating meat together; c.f. this article. I think that that argument is self-evidently weak in the face of great animal suffering, so analogously it isn’t a stretch to suppose that deontological norms we currently consider necessary for social cohesion are disposable, if we challenge them.