In your #7 (“ It’s also hard because when bad people are scientists or writers, there’s no easy way to punish them without also punishing their ideas.”) I’d expand on ‘writers’ to include all artists — there are lots of examples of exceptional artists that are or were “bad people.”
For sure. Really it's anyone in any field where there's a strong norm that people "own" their ideas. Artists, journalists, academics. Borderline cases would be... comedians? Magicians? Politicians?
Politicians very much! There was a (mercifully brief) period in the UK where being pro growth associated you with the disastrous Liz Truss era, where being skeptical of privatisation associated you with Corbyn's wackier ideas, etc.
IMHO, gossip is evil and should be completely replaced by the justice system. If you don't like what the charming sociopath is doing, generalize a principle out of it and make it a law (sue him for emotional damage?). Otherwise, we get (metaphorical) lynching which is detrimental to the fabric of society.
Yes. I believe in freedom of speech, and I don't see a reason why you should not be allowed to mention/not mention whoever you want. I don't see a point, though. Do you believe it will discourage future philosophers from becoming Nazis (because their names will be memory-wiped)?
I certainly don't claim it makes much difference. But on the margin, I think the collective effect of many people shunning Nazi philosophers creates some small incentive for future intellectuals to not join extremist political movements? But more generally, I was just trying to make the argument that some degree of "gossip" seems good, at least in the current world.
I'm open to the idea that maybe we should try to build a world where gossip no longer has any positive role to play. Maybe through suing? Or maybe through some kind of advanced form of insurance?
It's hard for me to believe that this incentive doesn't round down to zero. If someone has proto-Nazi views, would they really care? I just don't see it, but maybe you're right 🤷 Still, I'm unconvinced by this example that "gossip" could be good.
To be clear, I don't have a good idea for an alternative, just a vague intuition of "let there be laws, courts, and procedures". I just think that in the current world, on the margin, we should push against cancelling people.
I'm curious how do imagine insurance could work? Like, I have insurance against assholes that would pay if I get harassed? Why would assholes participate?
I think we'll have to disagree regarding the merits of being nice to dead Nazis. Regarding insurance, I just thought of the idea! But probably it would have to be mandatory to participate. Unless, of course, we decide to use social coercion to get people to participate...
That's... quite extreme. Who draws the bright line between gossip and non-gossip speech? Does that bright line always stay in sync with changing social mores?
It feels like you have a specific notion of gossip in mind that's very different than my own, and I wonder if some kind of "negative consequences" predicate is baked into it. If so, then why not just directly deal with the negative consequences? Clearly we need emotional communication between people. Some of that communication definitely looks like gossip but still functions mostly as a means of bonding and emotional processing. Don't we want to not punish positive functions like this?
By "gossip" here I mean what Dynomight refers to in the post as social punishment. Something like "that guy is evil, don't cite his ideas", and not "did you hear that John and Mary always squabble?". Is that the kind of gossip you mean? (that's definitely a more common usage of the word)
My opinion is that no one should be judged and persecuted by evil tongues not bound by procedure, requirement to tell the truth, or anything else. If there are punishments, then there should be bright lines that are decided by the people and applied consistently.
That's a nice, clear articulation of your opinion. Thanks! So you're advocating for a kind of legibility (at least in principle) of punishment or negative consequence structures. That does sound nicer than impenetrable implicit rules that might some day punish you without warning.
To a first approximation, I'd say we already have some of what you want with defamation law and its ilk. "The people" have decided what constitutes legally punishable "gossip" and it is applied as consistently as we're able. But how far do you take it? Do you want judicial oversight of all the minutiae of raising a child?
What happens if you have a one-sided relationship with a friend and want to amicably part ways but they don't? Are we now bound to paying the cost of court cases to decide the matter? Now making friends or forming any kind of relationship effectively amounts to entering into a formal contract by today's standards. Steep potential downsides, so people will be way more cautious.
More generally, I see a continuum of possibilities. On one extreme you have zero judicial rule over social constructs and on the other every interpersonal interaction is bound by large swathes of law. The former has historically led to clear exploitation, and the latter obviously looks like a 1984-esque dystopia. So where is the optimum balance point and how do we find it? How does finding that balance point look different than the system we already have?
Personally, I'd almost take a different tack. If social interaction and potential ostracization feel like looming spectres in one's life, instead of forcing others to make things more legible, it seems more expedient and robust to improve one's social literacy. Or rather, maybe we should have better education on how to relate well with our fellow humans.
I agree with your view of the problem as a continuum. Clearly, legislating every minutiae is an overkill.
The people should decide where we land on the spectrum. If nobody bothers to sue their former friends, it will remain unregulated. Or if there is a precedent because some thin-skinned person was gravely offended and did sue the ex-friend, it doesn't have to be a binding precedent: if two former friends don't want to sue each other, they shouldn't be required to.
As to the difference from the current system: I guess it would be in making it acceptable to deal with the issues this way, and for people to understand why it is a better way (if it indeed is. I don't have a manifesto, a plan, or certainty that this is a good idea).
Thankfully, I'm not personally threatened by ostracization. However, I am annoyed by its effects on the conversations held in a polite society (a part of the society where most intellectual conversations happen). It is detrimental to frank discussion of potentially interesting ideas. Forbidding to talk about the Nazi-philosopher-who-shall-not-be-named just removes information from the world, making us all poorer.
Maybe social punishment should be different than capitalist punishment-is punishing a bad person's business the same as punishing the person but not the ideas? I certainly have a personal list of places that I will not support with my money [or my labor] because the person/owner at the very top of the business is bad. But this does not reach the level of social punishment [usually] since I may be the only one or one of few punishing the business. It's being internally ethically consistent. And what about education and curricula? How should we teach the idea without social punishment issues?
"On the other hand, I really wish we were all more accountable to the future. So maybe we should lean into this."
As usual, I am glomming onto a tangential point because I have nothing to add to your well-stated main ones...why do you wish this? I don't see why I should change my ethics to conform to those of future generations any more than I should change them to conform to those of past generations. Both groups come from foreign cultures with (probably) some values I don't share, and in the first case I don't even know what they are. Of course, I have more responsibility to help future people (according to *my* values) than past people, because helping future people is not impossible and helping past people is. But that's different from caring about their judgment of my actions (as distinct from how *I* would judge my actions if I could perfectly predict their consequences). I assuredly do not.
Ah, in that particular sentence I didn't mean specifically that I want us to be more more accountable in terms of changing ethics. I also mean even in terms of our own ethics! Our choices have all sorts of "externalities" in the future and broadly speaking it's very hard to internalize them. Posthumous cancellation is an unusual exception to that rule.
I see...but surely most posthumous cancellation is either over differences in values or due to later generations having extra factual information about the consequences of actions? The examples you mentioned certainly seem that way to me. I'd think that not many people are going around deliberately doing stuff they know is bad for future generations, and those who are doing that would not stop merely because they observed a higher frequency of posthumous cancellation over unrelated stuff done by past generations.
I think I actually disagree? At least, I think that most people don't spend that much time thinking about how their actions affect future generations one way or the other.
Maybe what's off here is this assumption that we need to tie ideas to people. Ideas can stand on their own without attribution to a person, I don't think it's too hard but egos get in the way. I'd like to believe that ideas would have happened even if a specific person didn't discover then, ie a counterfactual exists where said good idea/bad person person didn't exist - someone else would have eventually come up with it and then we're less married to the notion of ideas being strongly coupled with individual people.
Also, for anyone who has had interactions with the US justice system - many will find that it sucks and is a lousy mechanism for social punishment.
There are lots of fields where social norms strongly reinforce the idea that people "own" their ideas. All of science and academia most notably, but also writers, journalists, etc. I'm very hesitant to say that system should be overturned. But I guess you could override it (or "de-contextualize") in some specific cases?
I agree that the US justice system (and most justice systems) are not great. But I reckon they're probably *less* bad than just leaving people to it. Gossip sorta kinda works in small bands, but I don't think it "scales" very well.
I guess I'm influenced by the open source software movement that (a) is not credited enough for the real advances in the tech sector and (b) is fairly explicit in its culture of believing ideas belong to everyone and aren't so obsessed with attribution (which is something I experienced during my Econ Phd as a software guy).
I know the narrative around geniuses and their ideas are often perpetuated in media but there are a lot of substantial contributions that don't feed into the propaganda/marketing machine - but we're perhaps largely unaware of.
Yes we need a justice system, just making the point that many in America don't think getting convicted by the justice system is a symbol of bad behavior. More often than not, a symbol of a bad justice system. Overall agree we need justice systems, the one in the USA is especially fraught.
Open source software is a very interesting contrast to credit-obsessed academia. I wonder if there are examples of people trying to apply social punishment to someone and removing their contributions? (Aside from people who contributed security vulnerabilities.)
i don't think that really happens, version control and open source licenses sort of prevent that sort of behavior. once it's out there, it's out - and it belongs to everyone - and there isn't a lot that anyone can do about it.
there are some very impressive people that have made very substantial contributions in OSS who don't feel the need to put in the extra effort to make it all about themselves.
This is one area where consequentialist thinking really shines, IMHO.
Once you grok some terminal values, then parsing out how those are affected by the different degrees of ostracism offers a sharp tool for differentiating on unforeseen variables. E.g. if ostracizing an asshole veterinarian ends up with more dead puppies, then maybe dial it back, but if tolerating your racist uncle just causes everyone to have a bad time, maybe ostracize more. Or vice versa, if you swing that way.
There's a important distinction between people I might actually interact with - where social knowledge like 'he gets belligerent when drinking' serves a practical purpose - versus discussing ideas. Requiring idea discussions to attribute the idea to an author and then list their personal failings creates unnecessary overhead and distracts from the discussion at hand.
My natural inclination is to agree with you here, but this in practice becomes more complicated when the person's private views may have had a very real impact on their more abstract ideas - look at, for instance, research on gender equality in early hunter gatherer bands. The evidence is pretty thin in general, and one's pre-existing views seem to have a pretty big impact on how that evidence is interpreted. Holden Karnofsky did a good summary (linked below), and he's a pretty rigorous thinker, but he's also pretty pro Progress (with a capital P) in general going by his other writinga, so could be inclined to find that things have gotten better.
i take the position on 'badness' that robert sapolsky does in his book determined: behind every 'bad action' is a deficiency in someone's genetic predispositions, environment, or some mixture of both. nobody would want to 'blame' or 'socially punish' a psychotic bipolar person for harassing people on the streets during a manic episode. eventually, with increased understanding of how people work, we will begin to view all instances of antisocial behavior in this way.
In general I take a consequentialist view of punishment (and most things). So, of course bad actions ultimately have to have some kind of material cause, but this doesn't really change anything because punishments should anyway be calibrated to make the world overall better off. On this view, harming someone who has misbehaved is only justifiable if that prevents more harm elsewhere. I think our evolved sense of justice is somewhat aligned with this goal but far from perfectly.
i think that truth is a cardinal virtue. framing other people as 'bad' (and the implicit assumption behind it that they have supra-material accountability for how they turned out) is a social fiction designed to disincentivize bad behavior. i understand the purpose, but i disagree with social fictions, and i feel like there are other effective ways to decrease bad behavior (psychiatric treatment, school reform, rehabilitation-oriented or harm-mitigatory incarceration, etc).
I of course agree that "bad people" is a social fiction, but I used that phrase not to try to reinforce that social fiction but simply to emphasize that in this post I didn't want to contest if any particular set of actions are bad but rather what to do in cases where they are. I think most people, if they tried to be charitable, could think of cases where they'd say punishment was appropriate but no institutional punishment currently exists.
i don't think that there is any practical way to perform social ostracism without reinforcing that fiction. maybe it is abstractly doable, but i don't think i have ever seen anybody practically ever do it. i would rather just have people not socially ostracize anybody, and instead: (a) count on the criminal justice system to handle extreme cases of antisocial behavior and (b) behave judiciously in regards of who they choose to associate with.
I think it would be very hard to draw a line between (b) and social punishment. If everyone decides Bob sucks and stops associating with Bob, that would be social punishment as far as the way I'm using that word.
Your essay seems to primarily present this as societal progress ('truth') vs social morality ('justice'), but I believe part of it is how predisposed people are to mutual generosity, a tit-for-tat forgiveness. Most of us are probably going to be wrong at some point. What's considered wrong is heavily dependent on one's social scene and there's a million and one things to have opinions about. There's a reason family reunions for Thanksgiving has a reputation for tension. Sometimes you somewhat forgive people in the hopes that the others will somewhat forgive you someday.
In your #7 (“ It’s also hard because when bad people are scientists or writers, there’s no easy way to punish them without also punishing their ideas.”) I’d expand on ‘writers’ to include all artists — there are lots of examples of exceptional artists that are or were “bad people.”
For sure. Really it's anyone in any field where there's a strong norm that people "own" their ideas. Artists, journalists, academics. Borderline cases would be... comedians? Magicians? Politicians?
Politicians very much! There was a (mercifully brief) period in the UK where being pro growth associated you with the disastrous Liz Truss era, where being skeptical of privatisation associated you with Corbyn's wackier ideas, etc.
IMHO, gossip is evil and should be completely replaced by the justice system. If you don't like what the charming sociopath is doing, generalize a principle out of it and make it a law (sue him for emotional damage?). Otherwise, we get (metaphorical) lynching which is detrimental to the fabric of society.
Should I be allowed to not mention the names of German existentialist Nazis?
Yes. I believe in freedom of speech, and I don't see a reason why you should not be allowed to mention/not mention whoever you want. I don't see a point, though. Do you believe it will discourage future philosophers from becoming Nazis (because their names will be memory-wiped)?
I certainly don't claim it makes much difference. But on the margin, I think the collective effect of many people shunning Nazi philosophers creates some small incentive for future intellectuals to not join extremist political movements? But more generally, I was just trying to make the argument that some degree of "gossip" seems good, at least in the current world.
I'm open to the idea that maybe we should try to build a world where gossip no longer has any positive role to play. Maybe through suing? Or maybe through some kind of advanced form of insurance?
It's hard for me to believe that this incentive doesn't round down to zero. If someone has proto-Nazi views, would they really care? I just don't see it, but maybe you're right 🤷 Still, I'm unconvinced by this example that "gossip" could be good.
To be clear, I don't have a good idea for an alternative, just a vague intuition of "let there be laws, courts, and procedures". I just think that in the current world, on the margin, we should push against cancelling people.
I'm curious how do imagine insurance could work? Like, I have insurance against assholes that would pay if I get harassed? Why would assholes participate?
I think we'll have to disagree regarding the merits of being nice to dead Nazis. Regarding insurance, I just thought of the idea! But probably it would have to be mandatory to participate. Unless, of course, we decide to use social coercion to get people to participate...
That's... quite extreme. Who draws the bright line between gossip and non-gossip speech? Does that bright line always stay in sync with changing social mores?
It feels like you have a specific notion of gossip in mind that's very different than my own, and I wonder if some kind of "negative consequences" predicate is baked into it. If so, then why not just directly deal with the negative consequences? Clearly we need emotional communication between people. Some of that communication definitely looks like gossip but still functions mostly as a means of bonding and emotional processing. Don't we want to not punish positive functions like this?
By "gossip" here I mean what Dynomight refers to in the post as social punishment. Something like "that guy is evil, don't cite his ideas", and not "did you hear that John and Mary always squabble?". Is that the kind of gossip you mean? (that's definitely a more common usage of the word)
My opinion is that no one should be judged and persecuted by evil tongues not bound by procedure, requirement to tell the truth, or anything else. If there are punishments, then there should be bright lines that are decided by the people and applied consistently.
That's a nice, clear articulation of your opinion. Thanks! So you're advocating for a kind of legibility (at least in principle) of punishment or negative consequence structures. That does sound nicer than impenetrable implicit rules that might some day punish you without warning.
To a first approximation, I'd say we already have some of what you want with defamation law and its ilk. "The people" have decided what constitutes legally punishable "gossip" and it is applied as consistently as we're able. But how far do you take it? Do you want judicial oversight of all the minutiae of raising a child?
What happens if you have a one-sided relationship with a friend and want to amicably part ways but they don't? Are we now bound to paying the cost of court cases to decide the matter? Now making friends or forming any kind of relationship effectively amounts to entering into a formal contract by today's standards. Steep potential downsides, so people will be way more cautious.
More generally, I see a continuum of possibilities. On one extreme you have zero judicial rule over social constructs and on the other every interpersonal interaction is bound by large swathes of law. The former has historically led to clear exploitation, and the latter obviously looks like a 1984-esque dystopia. So where is the optimum balance point and how do we find it? How does finding that balance point look different than the system we already have?
Personally, I'd almost take a different tack. If social interaction and potential ostracization feel like looming spectres in one's life, instead of forcing others to make things more legible, it seems more expedient and robust to improve one's social literacy. Or rather, maybe we should have better education on how to relate well with our fellow humans.
I agree with your view of the problem as a continuum. Clearly, legislating every minutiae is an overkill.
The people should decide where we land on the spectrum. If nobody bothers to sue their former friends, it will remain unregulated. Or if there is a precedent because some thin-skinned person was gravely offended and did sue the ex-friend, it doesn't have to be a binding precedent: if two former friends don't want to sue each other, they shouldn't be required to.
As to the difference from the current system: I guess it would be in making it acceptable to deal with the issues this way, and for people to understand why it is a better way (if it indeed is. I don't have a manifesto, a plan, or certainty that this is a good idea).
Thankfully, I'm not personally threatened by ostracization. However, I am annoyed by its effects on the conversations held in a polite society (a part of the society where most intellectual conversations happen). It is detrimental to frank discussion of potentially interesting ideas. Forbidding to talk about the Nazi-philosopher-who-shall-not-be-named just removes information from the world, making us all poorer.
no let's do revel in confusion and perversity! i am 100% here for it.
Maybe social punishment should be different than capitalist punishment-is punishing a bad person's business the same as punishing the person but not the ideas? I certainly have a personal list of places that I will not support with my money [or my labor] because the person/owner at the very top of the business is bad. But this does not reach the level of social punishment [usually] since I may be the only one or one of few punishing the business. It's being internally ethically consistent. And what about education and curricula? How should we teach the idea without social punishment issues?
"On the other hand, I really wish we were all more accountable to the future. So maybe we should lean into this."
As usual, I am glomming onto a tangential point because I have nothing to add to your well-stated main ones...why do you wish this? I don't see why I should change my ethics to conform to those of future generations any more than I should change them to conform to those of past generations. Both groups come from foreign cultures with (probably) some values I don't share, and in the first case I don't even know what they are. Of course, I have more responsibility to help future people (according to *my* values) than past people, because helping future people is not impossible and helping past people is. But that's different from caring about their judgment of my actions (as distinct from how *I* would judge my actions if I could perfectly predict their consequences). I assuredly do not.
Ah, in that particular sentence I didn't mean specifically that I want us to be more more accountable in terms of changing ethics. I also mean even in terms of our own ethics! Our choices have all sorts of "externalities" in the future and broadly speaking it's very hard to internalize them. Posthumous cancellation is an unusual exception to that rule.
I see...but surely most posthumous cancellation is either over differences in values or due to later generations having extra factual information about the consequences of actions? The examples you mentioned certainly seem that way to me. I'd think that not many people are going around deliberately doing stuff they know is bad for future generations, and those who are doing that would not stop merely because they observed a higher frequency of posthumous cancellation over unrelated stuff done by past generations.
I think I actually disagree? At least, I think that most people don't spend that much time thinking about how their actions affect future generations one way or the other.
Maybe what's off here is this assumption that we need to tie ideas to people. Ideas can stand on their own without attribution to a person, I don't think it's too hard but egos get in the way. I'd like to believe that ideas would have happened even if a specific person didn't discover then, ie a counterfactual exists where said good idea/bad person person didn't exist - someone else would have eventually come up with it and then we're less married to the notion of ideas being strongly coupled with individual people.
Also, for anyone who has had interactions with the US justice system - many will find that it sucks and is a lousy mechanism for social punishment.
There are lots of fields where social norms strongly reinforce the idea that people "own" their ideas. All of science and academia most notably, but also writers, journalists, etc. I'm very hesitant to say that system should be overturned. But I guess you could override it (or "de-contextualize") in some specific cases?
I agree that the US justice system (and most justice systems) are not great. But I reckon they're probably *less* bad than just leaving people to it. Gossip sorta kinda works in small bands, but I don't think it "scales" very well.
I guess I'm influenced by the open source software movement that (a) is not credited enough for the real advances in the tech sector and (b) is fairly explicit in its culture of believing ideas belong to everyone and aren't so obsessed with attribution (which is something I experienced during my Econ Phd as a software guy).
I know the narrative around geniuses and their ideas are often perpetuated in media but there are a lot of substantial contributions that don't feed into the propaganda/marketing machine - but we're perhaps largely unaware of.
Yes we need a justice system, just making the point that many in America don't think getting convicted by the justice system is a symbol of bad behavior. More often than not, a symbol of a bad justice system. Overall agree we need justice systems, the one in the USA is especially fraught.
Open source software is a very interesting contrast to credit-obsessed academia. I wonder if there are examples of people trying to apply social punishment to someone and removing their contributions? (Aside from people who contributed security vulnerabilities.)
i don't think that really happens, version control and open source licenses sort of prevent that sort of behavior. once it's out there, it's out - and it belongs to everyone - and there isn't a lot that anyone can do about it.
there are some very impressive people that have made very substantial contributions in OSS who don't feel the need to put in the extra effort to make it all about themselves.
This is one area where consequentialist thinking really shines, IMHO.
Once you grok some terminal values, then parsing out how those are affected by the different degrees of ostracism offers a sharp tool for differentiating on unforeseen variables. E.g. if ostracizing an asshole veterinarian ends up with more dead puppies, then maybe dial it back, but if tolerating your racist uncle just causes everyone to have a bad time, maybe ostracize more. Or vice versa, if you swing that way.
There's a important distinction between people I might actually interact with - where social knowledge like 'he gets belligerent when drinking' serves a practical purpose - versus discussing ideas. Requiring idea discussions to attribute the idea to an author and then list their personal failings creates unnecessary overhead and distracts from the discussion at hand.
My natural inclination is to agree with you here, but this in practice becomes more complicated when the person's private views may have had a very real impact on their more abstract ideas - look at, for instance, research on gender equality in early hunter gatherer bands. The evidence is pretty thin in general, and one's pre-existing views seem to have a pretty big impact on how that evidence is interpreted. Holden Karnofsky did a good summary (linked below), and he's a pretty rigorous thinker, but he's also pretty pro Progress (with a capital P) in general going by his other writinga, so could be inclined to find that things have gotten better.
https://www.cold-takes.com/hunter-gatherer-gender-relations-seem-bad/
Lots of food for thought. Thanks.
By the way, there is a typo in the last paragraph; "was" instead of "wad".
Fixed, thank you!
i take the position on 'badness' that robert sapolsky does in his book determined: behind every 'bad action' is a deficiency in someone's genetic predispositions, environment, or some mixture of both. nobody would want to 'blame' or 'socially punish' a psychotic bipolar person for harassing people on the streets during a manic episode. eventually, with increased understanding of how people work, we will begin to view all instances of antisocial behavior in this way.
In general I take a consequentialist view of punishment (and most things). So, of course bad actions ultimately have to have some kind of material cause, but this doesn't really change anything because punishments should anyway be calibrated to make the world overall better off. On this view, harming someone who has misbehaved is only justifiable if that prevents more harm elsewhere. I think our evolved sense of justice is somewhat aligned with this goal but far from perfectly.
i think that truth is a cardinal virtue. framing other people as 'bad' (and the implicit assumption behind it that they have supra-material accountability for how they turned out) is a social fiction designed to disincentivize bad behavior. i understand the purpose, but i disagree with social fictions, and i feel like there are other effective ways to decrease bad behavior (psychiatric treatment, school reform, rehabilitation-oriented or harm-mitigatory incarceration, etc).
I of course agree that "bad people" is a social fiction, but I used that phrase not to try to reinforce that social fiction but simply to emphasize that in this post I didn't want to contest if any particular set of actions are bad but rather what to do in cases where they are. I think most people, if they tried to be charitable, could think of cases where they'd say punishment was appropriate but no institutional punishment currently exists.
i don't think that there is any practical way to perform social ostracism without reinforcing that fiction. maybe it is abstractly doable, but i don't think i have ever seen anybody practically ever do it. i would rather just have people not socially ostracize anybody, and instead: (a) count on the criminal justice system to handle extreme cases of antisocial behavior and (b) behave judiciously in regards of who they choose to associate with.
I think it would be very hard to draw a line between (b) and social punishment. If everyone decides Bob sucks and stops associating with Bob, that would be social punishment as far as the way I'm using that word.
What if acceptable social punishment included getting the good ideas plagiarized?
I guess that's similar to "decontextualization"? That's one of the policies where I'm least confident if people really try to use it in practice!
Your essay seems to primarily present this as societal progress ('truth') vs social morality ('justice'), but I believe part of it is how predisposed people are to mutual generosity, a tit-for-tat forgiveness. Most of us are probably going to be wrong at some point. What's considered wrong is heavily dependent on one's social scene and there's a million and one things to have opinions about. There's a reason family reunions for Thanksgiving has a reputation for tension. Sometimes you somewhat forgive people in the hopes that the others will somewhat forgive you someday.