I think you, like Aristotle, wildly overestimate conscious awareness.
I'm not talking about doing wrong and believing it to be right, or even doing something without realizing it was wrong. I'm talking about just doing something without consciously knowing why you did it at all. The primary role of the conscious mind is not to make choices, but to rationalize after the fact the actions undertaken at the (largely amoral) subconscious's command. Expecting someone to always know why they made a decision is an impossibly high standard.
More directly relevant to this article, skim some of the posts on social signalling at http://www.overcomingbias.com/tag/signaling and realize that, while the author uses intentional language of decisions and preferences, most of what he's talking about are the sort of choices heavily subject to conscious delusion.
To summarize, accurate knowledge of one's own decision-making process is the exception, not the rule, and if questioned people are more likely to provide an ad-hoc rationalization based on inaccurate self-perception than anything resembling the actual reasons, and believe whole-heartedly that the rationalization is correct. To summarize the summary, nobody's generally aware of why they're doing whatever it is they're doing. To summarize the summary of the summary, being a person is a problem. [0]
I have no idea what the any of that has to do with the discussion at hand. My point is that it's what you do and how you behave that makes you an entitled jerk or not, not whether you have introspection or not.
My point is that you're calling people jerks for something they probably have very little control over and are helplessly unaware of. If you're walking behind someone with a broken leg, do you complain that they should be walking faster?
Perhaps you don't intend the term "jerk" to carry overtones of moral responsibility or social judgement, but that's a fairly common connotation.
You're implying nobody has any real control over what their actions and thereby assigning killers and rocks about the same level moral culpability. This may be rational if you accept a mechanist understanding of human behavior (as you explicated in your previous post) but if that's the case, it becomes ridiculous to argue about 'morality' in general. Moral judgment becomes just a tool to modify undesirable behavior and indignation in this case is perfectly 'justified.'
Put another way, yelling at a cripple is not likely to give them their health back, but guilting an insensitive 'jerk' will (likely) cause them to change their behavior to something more socially acceptable.
You're implying nobody has any real control over what their actions and thereby assigning killers and rocks about the same level moral culpability.
No, I'm just saying that the default state is to have neither control nor awareness of decision-making. Actual conscious decision-making is possible with effort and, to the extent that morality is a well-defined concept, it applies only to conscious minds.
guilting an insensitive 'jerk' will (likely) cause them to change their behavior to something more socially acceptable.
Not necessarily, if their reasons for behaving that way are unknown to them. More likely their mind will confabulate something sensible-sounding that fits their pre-existing world-view and (unless they already hold a positive disposition toward you) they'll just write you off as being a jerk, after all, you're attacking them for something they had a perfectly valid reason to do... they think.
No, I'm just saying that the default state is to have neither control nor awareness of decision-making. Actual conscious decision-making is possible with effort and, to the extent that morality is a well-defined concept, it applies only to conscious minds.
In which case they are culpable for not forming good habits (and we are back at Aristotle.) You're not going to get very far telling me that people are not responsible for acting like jerks because either you deny human moral choice altogether, or at some level they are.
I'm not talking about doing wrong and believing it to be right, or even doing something without realizing it was wrong. I'm talking about just doing something without consciously knowing why you did it at all. The primary role of the conscious mind is not to make choices, but to rationalize after the fact the actions undertaken at the (largely amoral) subconscious's command. Expecting someone to always know why they made a decision is an impossibly high standard.
The general inability to correctly interpret one's own motivations is discussed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection_illusion Note that this is not a cognitive defect, but the standard state of affairs. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia for when it goes more wrong than normal. A few examples:
Implicit Association Tests may be more accurate than conscious introspection in identifying prejudice. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_Association_Test
Grandmothers are hard-wired to be biased against some grandchildren vs. others. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=941739
More directly relevant to this article, skim some of the posts on social signalling at http://www.overcomingbias.com/tag/signaling and realize that, while the author uses intentional language of decisions and preferences, most of what he's talking about are the sort of choices heavily subject to conscious delusion.
To summarize, accurate knowledge of one's own decision-making process is the exception, not the rule, and if questioned people are more likely to provide an ad-hoc rationalization based on inaccurate self-perception than anything resembling the actual reasons, and believe whole-heartedly that the rationalization is correct. To summarize the summary, nobody's generally aware of why they're doing whatever it is they're doing. To summarize the summary of the summary, being a person is a problem. [0]
[0] With apologies to D. Adams.