I think it's a case of a lot of things, but fundamental attribution error isn't one of them.
It's funny you should mention kicking dogs, as I think animal cruelty (and cruelty in general) is an example of one of the strongest rationales for virtue ethics. I don't attach a lot of moral weight to dogs, but if I witnessed someone kicking a dog, especially if they thought they weren't being witnessed, that gives me insight into what sort of person they are. They are displaying characteristics I do not favour.
People would be more inclined to trust and deal with me if I display pro-social characteristics they favour (and don't display characteristics they disfavour). There are a couple of approaches to me taking advantage of this:
1) I could conspicuously display pro-social characteristics when I believe I'm under scrutiny and it's not too costly to do so.
2) I could make myself the sort of person who is pro-social and does pro-social things, even when it's costly or unobserved.
For sure, option 2 is more expensive than option 1, but it has the advantage of being more straightforward to maintain, and when costly opportunities to signal my pro-social virtues come along, I will take them, while those option 1 people will welch out.
If I kick a single dog in private, this erodes the basis of having taken option 2. If anyone sees me kicking a dog in private, this will undermine their trust in me. As such, I should try as much as is reasonably possible to be the sort of person who doesn't kick dogs.
This argument works equally well when you replace "kicking dogs" with "playing violent video games" or "being an atheist in a place where you are expected to be a religious believer". But I would guess that most people here do not see it as a valid reason to stop those things.
[CW: This post talks about personal experience of moral dilemmas. I can see how some people might be distressed by thinking about this.]
Have you ever had to decide between pushing a fat person onto some train tracks or letting five other people get hit by a train? Maybe you have a more exciting commute than I do, but for me it's just never come up.
In spite of this, I'm unusually prepared for a trolley problem, in a way I'm not prepared for, say, being offered a high-paying job at an unquantifiably-evil company. Similarly, if a friend asked me to lie to another friend about something important to them, I probably wouldn't carry out a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis. It seems that I'm happy to adopt consequentialist policy, but when it comes to personal quandaries where I have to decide for myself, I start asking myself about what sort of person this decision makes me. What's more, I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad heuristic in a social context.
It's also noteworthy (to me, at least) that I rarely experience moral dilemmas. They just don't happen all that often. I like to think I have a reasonably coherent moral framework, but do I really need one? Do I just lead a very morally-inert life? Or have abstruse thought experiments in moral philosophy equipped me with broader principles under which would-be moral dilemmas are resolved before they reach my conscious deliberation?
To make sure I'm not giving too much weight to my own experiences, I thought I'd put a few questions to a wider audience:
- What kind of moral dilemmas do you actually encounter?
- Do you have any thoughts on how much moral judgement you have to exercise in your daily life? Do you think this is a typical amount?
- Do you have any examples of pedestrian moral dilemmas to which you've applied abstract moral reasoning? How did that work out?
- Do you have any examples of personal moral dilemmas on a Trolley Problem scale that nonetheless happened?
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