Moralism is a certain pattern of thinking (and an accompanying rhetoric) which many comrades use, sometimes unknowingly. The purpose of this note is to clarify what this pattern is and to explain why it does not always lead to the correct decisions.

In practice, it means grounding one’s opinions in the following information:

• Feelings of guilt
• Beliefs about how other comrades will judge you
• Consulting a “hierarchy of oppression”, in which decisions that feel like they most immediately benefit those lower on the hierarchy are deemed to be correct

This is a very small amount of information.

Taking the correct action in any given moment requires effectively synthesizing as much of the available information as you can. The world is complex and the decision-making procedure which determines action must therefore be comparably complex. Concretely, what is going to happen depends on a lot more than your feelings of guilt, the hierarchy of oppression etc., so you had better take more information into account.

Thanks to DT for inspiring this post.