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The darkness within

Bentham's Bulldog · · ·13 min read
Commentary by Hex Index staff

The Darkness Within

A unsettling psychological claim cuts through comfortable assumptions about human nature: social norms, not innate morality, keep civilization from barbarism. Bentham's Bulldog argues that most people would commit horrific acts if embarrassment and social disapproval stopped penalizing them.

When Norms Collapse

The piece opens with a stark observation about human behavior. Bentham's Bulldog writes, "In general, people are nice and helpful. But that is because social norms direct people to be nice and helpful." The argument builds: remove the social cost of bad behavior, and people routinely choose evil over goodness.

The darkness within

The evidence starts with everyday moral failures. People who believe eating meat is egregiously evil continue eating it. Those convinced that failing to donate to effective charities equals walking past drowning children give basically nothing. Bentham's Bulldog notes, "Most people aren't willing to save lives for 10 or 100 dollars." This shows callous disregard for human life when no social stigma attaches to inaction.

"Monsters aren't confined to fairy-tales—they live inside us all."

Authority Over Conscience

The Milgram experiment provides the most disturbing evidence. Bentham's Bulldog writes, "65% of people continued all the way to 450 volts" despite hearing screams and heart trouble complaints. When participants couldn't hear the victim, basically 100% complied. The takeaway: abstract knowledge of torture weighs far less on conscience than the awkwardness of disobeying authority.

Critics might note that Milgram's methodology has been questioned for decades—participants may have suspected the shocks weren't real. Yet replications persist, and the distress participants displayed suggests they believed the harm was at least possible.

The Rwandan genocide illustrates what happens when authority sanctions violence. Bentham's Bulldog quotes a killer: "Afterward we got used to killing without so much dodging around. Killing became an ordinary activity, since our elders and everyone did it." Neighbor hacked neighbor to death with machetes. Between 250,000 and 500,000 women were raped. Most killers were psychologically normal before the norms shifted.

Testing Your Own Morality

The piece offers a practical test: if you believe you'd resist atrocities, demonstrate it now. Bentham's Bulldog writes, "You can save a bunch of lives fairly cheaply. You can, at some cost, stop torturing animals." Those who go along with what they believe wrong because it's easy shouldn't confidence they'd stop when the wrong becomes grisly.

The author includes themselves: "I do things all the time that I think are wrong. I give far less than I ought to." In a society of angels, Bentham's Bulldog claims they'd be regarded as equivalent to Jeffrey Dahmer. Probably so would most readers.

Critics might argue this framing is too pessimistic—human cooperation and empathy have built civilizations, not just destroyed them. The piece underweights how often people resist authority for moral reasons, from whistleblowers to civil rights activists.

Knowing Evil Through Resistance

C.S. Lewis provides the closing frame: only those who try to resist temptation know its strength. Bentham's Bulldog writes, "The more you cultivate in yourself genuine concern about doing what is right, rather than faux concern as an excuse to judge your enemies, the more truly you will know how rotten you really are and the less rotten you will become."

The Holocaust stands as the extreme case—psychologically normal people administered genocide. The lesson isn't that humans are irredeemably evil, but that moral motivation is fragile when social norms invert.

Bottom Line

Bentham's Bulldog's argument is uncomfortable but empirically grounded: social norms constrain barbarism, not innate goodness. The verdict: moral self-confidence without demonstrated sacrifice is dangerous delusion. Start saving lives cheaply, stop eating tortured animals, and test whether you're the person who'd resist—or comply.

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The darkness within

by Bentham's Bulldog · · Read full article

1 Introduction.

One of the more unsettling findings from psychology is that people are terrifyingly evil in all sorts of circumstances. And not “a bit rude to their neighbor,” level evil. No, I’m talking “hacking their neighbors to death with machetes,” or “electrocuting people to death,” level evil.

In general, people are nice and helpful. But that is because social norms direct people to be nice and helpful. You feel bad being rude. You feel the reproachful eyes of the people around you, boring into your back. People hate that feeling. So most of the time, they behave pretty well. Social norms constrain our most vicious impulses.

But what happens when bad behavior and social norms come apart? The answer, for which there is abundant empirical evidence, is that people start behaving very badly. If doing the right thing is a bit costly and socially disapproved of, most people just won’t do it. The empirical evidence is overwhelming—we are just a few social norms away from barbarism.

Note: many of the points I make here are similar to the ones Michael Huemer makes in this piece.

2 Doing what is predictably wrong.

One bit of evidence for this thesis is that humans do things all the time that they believe to be wrong. If what people believe to be wrong carries no social stigma, and is a bit costly to avoid, people generally do the thing they think is wrong.

I’ve had a lot of discussions about veganism with people over the years. Oftentimes, people grow convinced that eating meat is egregiously evil. Even that factory farming is the worst thing we do as a society. Nonetheless, they mostly keep eating meat. And not for sophisticated consequentialist offsetting reasons—most of them don’t offset. They just don’t care enough about avoiding evil to stop eating meat.

Similarly, of the people who are convinced that failing to give to effective charities is like walking past drowning children, almost none of them give all their excess wealth to effective charities. Most of them give basically none of their excess wealth to effective charities. A non-trivial number of people who think abortion is murder nonetheless get one—ideally secretly—if the alternative would be costly and embarrassing. It’s hard to know exact numbers, but a non-trivial share of the population seems willing to carry out an action that they believe to be murdering the innocent, absent ...