On the Virtue of Minding Our Own Business

We ought to mind our own business. This is generally regarded as a moral truism, as can be seen by considering how we rebuff what we take to be inappropriate utterances of it. The proper way for a person to resist a demand to mind her own business is not by saying that she does not have to do so, but that it is her business. One of the most interesting usages of the norm occurs as a response to moral criticism. Rather than denying blameworthiness, the person criticized denies the interlocutor’s standing to express blame. Such responses are frequently accepted as legitimate. Many of the affairs we are told to keep our noses out of have moral content. Sexual interactions, the cultivation of personal virtues and avoidance of personal vices, and the treatment of friends and family members all tend to be screened off from general interference. People who fail to mind their own business in such matters, or who misjudge what is their business, are themselves subject to moral criticism. They are condemned as nosy and presumptuous, as busybodies and meddlers. An ethic of minding our own business is itself enforced by the moral judgment promoted by a community and social penalties.

As a moral norm, the requirement of a community to mind our own business might seem to be in tension with many of our other moral commitments. We might think that if someone is a morally conscientious person, then he will not avert his eyes from wrongdoing. If something is genuinely a matter of morality, then it is the business of everyone. In better understanding the moral value of minding our own business, we will see that to be the sort of person who minds her own business is to possess a virtue.

At first glance, we might be tempted to label the virtue in question “tolerance.” However, the virtue of tolerance is commonly understood as a virtue that mediates potentially hostile relations between parties that disagree with respect to some important matter. Someone tolerates people who harbor a different conception of what is right, good, true, or sacred. The virtue of minding our own business may be called upon in cases of disagreement. However, it is also relevant to cases in which someone has good reason to believe that the other party accepts, at least in his better moments, the same values as she does but is now violating them. There appear to be cases where tolerance, as commonly conceived, is not put to the test, but where our mindfulness of our own business is.

Applying an Aristotelian model, we might say that a person who embodies the virtue of minding his own business is someone who characteristically restrains the moral judgment of others and tends not to interfere with the behaviors of other people, but instead chooses to intervene only at the right time, in the right manner and to the right degree. To support the claim that this is a virtue, let us consider the language of vice that is applied to people who fail to hit an Aristotelian golden mean. People who intervene too frequently or too strongly are typically accused of being moralistic, self-righteous, and hypocritical. People who do not intervene frequently or strongly enough are described as unprincipled, complacent or cowardly. Furthermore, people who are praised for minding their own business are often described as exhibiting other familiar virtues as well, such as tolerance, humility, mercifulness, or charity.

1 Not Getting Involved

When a bystander chooses to stay out of a moral issue, he may be choosing to do one or more of the following: to omit an intentional action such as voicing a moral criticism; to actively divert his attention from a situation, say, by looking away or leaving the room; to suppress an emotion or reactive attitude such as indignation; where the suppression of the emotion or attitude is not possible, to foreswear the emotion or attitude as inappropriate; to suspend moral judgment; or to divert his attention from a moral judgment that has already been formed and resists suspension. Given this set of possibilities, we can identify more and less thoroughgoing forms of minding our own business. In the most extensive form, the bystander abstains from overtly acting, reacting emotionally and even judging. Alternatively, the bystander may restrain his overt actions and emotions but not his judgment, or restrain only his overt behavior.

On the matter of overt behavior alone, there are further distinctions to draw. For example, although John Stuart Mill objects to punishing people for having vices that harm only themselves, he is not bothered by the fact that such people will be subject to what he calls natural penalties.¹ While we may not subject a rash, obstinate or conceited person to rebuke, we “are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates. We may give others a preference over him in optional good offices, except those which tend to his improvement.”² According to Mill, these “inconveniences … are strictly inseparable from the unfavorable judgment of others.”³ He does not object to a bystander forming the unfavorable judgment or emotions, or to her acting on them in the ways considered. The behavior that Mill condemns is only behavior which is aimed toward penalizing a vicious man for his vice. It is not the bystander’s business to punish him, though it is the bystander’s business to choose her own companions, hire her own employees, and give advice to her own friends. Yet even such actions must be undertaken with care. If they are paraded before others, then the bystander has ceased to mind her own business and has taken on a role that is not legitimately hers.

We might well wonder about the stability of Mill’s distinction between natural penalties and outright moral sanctions. As his use of the term “penalties” indicates, the effect of such behaviors on a vicious person will be negative. A vicious person will suffer disadvantages, possibly serious disadvantages, as a result of the negative opinions of other people. He will be deprived of the benefits of their cooperation and companionship. He may sense their emotional coldness, which may have a contagious effect on his own feelings of self-esteem. Mill himself was aware of what powerful psychological forces the negative regard of others and of ourself can be. Indeed, he identifies these forces as the chief motivators towards moral action.⁴ The penalizing effects may be both predictable enough and significant enough that it seems reasonable to conclude that bystanders will sometimes be required to refrain, not just from intentional, overt behavior, but also from forming moral judgments or indulging their feelings of indignation or disapproval.

The injunction to mind our own business is often used to block, not just penalizing behavior, but also persuasive behavior. Persuasive behavior is marked by rational argumentation about moral or prudential reasons for acting. A persuader does not attempt to manipulate the target’s choice options by threatening to make some of them more costly, but instead aims to guide the target to a proper evaluation of the options he already has.⁵ Despite Mill’s apparent appreciation of the value of minding one’s own business, he laments the fact that persuasive interventions into the affairs of other people are considered rude. He says: “It would be well, indeed, if this good office were much more freely rendered than the common notions of politeness at present permit, and if one person could honestly point out to another that he thinks him in fault, without being considered unmannerly or presuming.”⁶ Mill’s vision here is of a society in which everyone is permitted to engage in benevolently intended, rational assessments of the behavior of other people. Yet, as Ferdinand Schoeman says: “only a fine line prevents [persuasive] tactics from evolving into intimidation and harassment, particularly when one’s own critical assessment is widely shared.”⁷ What is benevolent and persuasive in intention will often be experienced as hostile and coercive. Simply being exposed to the gaze of others, whether kindly or harshly inclined, can itself be painful and damaging.⁸ A sphere of privacy can be crucial to the development of the self and the maintenance of intimate relationships.⁹ Mill seems to reluctantly accept limitations on persuasion because entrenched but regrettable norms of politeness associate persuasion with certain disutilities. But it seems instead that moral limitations on persuasive interventions can protect the very same values of individuality and self-development that Mill himself powerfully articulates in On Liberty.

The virtue of minding our own business has to do with both penalizing and persuasive behaviors. It has to do with the inquisitive behaviors, which provide the fuel for these other types of behaviors, as well as moral judgment and reactive attitudes. Inquisitive behaviors include efforts to gain information about other people, especially when it is suspected that something immoral or unvirtuous is afoot. Gossiping, peeping out of windows, and reading tabloid-like accounts in the media are examples of inquisitive behaviors.

2 Related Vices of Excess

“Moralism,” in the pejorative sense of the word, involves a tendency to make a number of related errors in forming moral judgments. A moralistic or judgmental person tends to over-diagnose moral failings, “indiscriminately putting every item of our behaviour under the moral magnifying glass, no matter how inconsequential or trivial,” as Robert Fullinwider puts it.¹⁰ In contrast, a person who minds her own business does not elevate to the earnest level of morality things that are better considered issues of manners or taste. Moralistic people also tend to apply unrealistically high moral standards. For example, they often treat the supererogatory as if it were obligatory.¹¹ They may also apply moral rules in ways that are insensitive to the circumstances at hand, which might force compromises on even highly conscientious people.¹² In these ways, moralistic people wind up disapproving where disapproval is not warranted. In their over-eagerness to engage in moral assessment, a judgmental person is also liable to a number of other mistakes, such as drawing a conclusion without considering all the evidence or over-generalizing from one transgression to a character flaw.¹³

Moralistic persons also tend to err in the ways they express their moral judgments, even their more measured moral judgments. Caroline J. Simon associates the vice of being judgmental with the older vice concepts of “censoriousness (the tendency to enjoy publicly finding fault with others), officiousness (the tendency to volunteer one’s services where they are neither asked nor needed), and impertinence.”¹⁴ An impertinent person acts as if he has a close, personal relationship with another person when this is not, in fact, the case.

People who are moralistic are often also charged with being self-righteous, sanctimonious or holier-than-thou. Fullinwider describes a self-righteous person as someone who finds a moral issue to judge and comment upon in even the most mundane situation, thereby turning “every occasion into a testimony to his own moral gravity.”¹⁵ In over-moralizing, such a person implies that his own moral standards are higher than the standards of others, and he implies that he meets them. Jeanette Bicknell locates the error of a self-righteous person in an excessive certainty of the person about his own moral judgments.¹⁶ Rather than approaching moral disagreement with an openness to dialogue, a self-righteous person has no doubt that he is right and the other person is mistaken.

A self-righteous person is offensive but not merely because he is like the annoying classmate who always knows the answer and thereby makes us feel inadequate. Our dislike of a self-righteous person goes deeper than that. Fullinwider suspects that a person who is eager to expose the moral flaws of other people takes pleasure in malice and feeds his own pride and arrogance.¹⁷ Simon associates this sort of vice with the tacit belief that “one’s own moral worth is enhanced by the failures of others.”¹⁸ The pleasing sense of self-worth of a self-righteous person is maintained through contempt for other people.

A person who is moralistic and self-righteous is also typically accused of hypocrisy in not practicing what she preaches. This is not surprising, since few people could meet the high standards that a moralistic person insists upon. One of the remarkable features of hypocrisy is that the discovery of hypocrisy is frequently taken as grounds for dismissing or disdaining both the person and the values that she promotes. This is initially puzzling. Just because the hypocrite does not herself meet the standards she publicly advocates, it does not follow that they are inappropriate values.¹⁹ Ad hominem arguments do not prove the proposition in question to be false. Yet, people frequently suppose that they have sufficient grounds to ignore a moral judgment once the person who has been proclaiming that judgment is revealed to violate it herself. The charge that someone has failed to mind her own business has a similar force. It is used to block the conversational pressure to defend oneself against the criticism the meddler has issued. It is as if, having dismissed her qualifications to testify in the case, we can also dismiss the content of the claim. But what justifies this legalistic charge?

In connection with this puzzle it is helpful to notice another typical feature of judgments of hypocrisy. People are frequently amused, even gleeful, when someone is revealed to be a hypocrite. It is funny that Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, has expressed outrage that a draft of his memoir was leaked and published without his permission. Assange forced extraordinarily high standards of transparency on governments all over the world by indiscriminately publishing huge numbers of classified documents and then insisted on the privacy of his own information. His inconsistency makes him appear absurd, hence our amusement, but it also makes his values appear absurd. The moral demands he makes on others appear to be unreasonable given his own inability or unwillingness to be bound by them. The charge of hypocrisy becomes the grounds for dismissing both the person and the values he espouses. This may explain why some theorists explain what is wrong with hypocrisy by claiming that it undermines moral values.²⁰ It also explains why hypocrisy is not so funny, but instead feels like a betrayal, when the hypocrite is caught flouting values to which we are ourselves committed.

Charges of hypocrisy, as well as moralism and self-righteousness, are sometimes abused. Because nobody is perfect, everyone is probably a hypocrite with regard to some value or other. If only saints are qualified to judge, then anyone who negatively morally judges another person is criticizable. But this goes too far. To return to the Aristotelian picture, we can interpret moralism, self-righteousness, and hypocrisy as vices of excess in the formation and expression of moral judgment, thereby leaving space for moderate, virtuous moralizing.

3 Related Vices of Deficiency

Let us continue our investigation into the golden mean of properly minding our own business by turning to the vices of deficiency. Someone who has the virtue of minding her own business is to be contrasted with a person who does not respond often enough or strongly enough with moral judgments, negative reactive attitudes and blaming behaviors. Following Fullinwider, we could refer to these as vices of nonjudgmentalism. His list includes: “critical flabbiness,” “indiscriminate tolerance” and “mindlessness.”²¹ All of these vices suggest some sort of epistemic error, such as a lack of precision or discrimination in forming moral judgments or a general inattentiveness to moral matters, which result in negative moral judgments not being formed where they are indeed warranted.

In the various sources of epistemic errors, we find grounds for distinguishing a number of different vices. If the errors result from a person’s lack of concern for morality we might call the vice being unprincipled. An unprincipled person does not care much whether his own actions or the actions of other people are right or wrong. They are not among the main categories by which he organizes the world. He may notice the most obvious but not the more subtle forms of wrongdoing. An unprincipled person is unlikely to let the moral judgments he does make have much influence over his behavior.

A complacent person is similarly unskilled and insufficiently critical in drawing moral judgments. But here the source is not a lack of caring about morality. A complacent person may care very much about morality. Her problem is that she is too inclined to believe that all is going well, that there are no moral problems that need attending to. This false sense of security is grounded in an inappropriate degree of self-satisfaction.²² Her contentment with herself and her own circumstances blind her to situations that ought to raise concern.

Another vice of deficiency in this neighborhood is moral cowardice. As Simon emphasizes, “a person who makes a negative assessment of someone else is taking a moral risk which does call for courage.”²³ He is risking the anger of the one he judges as well as the possible disapproval of the community, who might charge him with a failure to mind his own business. Excessive fear of such risks makes a person generally unwilling to form negative moral judgments about other people, especially powerful people, and unwilling to act on the negative moral judgments he does form.

4 Related Virtues

Let us now turn from the vices of deficiency to some familiar virtues that seem to be associated with minding our own business. Having emphasized the importance of the proper formation of moral judgments, the virtue of judiciousness seems relevant here.²⁴ The Oxford English Dictionary defines a judicious person as a person who is “wisely critical” in epistemic matters and “prudent” in practical matters. But this does not seem to go deeply enough into the source of such sound judgment to fit the virtue associated with minding our own business in moral matters. It also does not explain the emphasis on refraining from judgment and intervention, rather than simply judging accurately. Furthermore, the injunction for a person to mind her own business is not primarily a call to prudence. It is closer to a demand that she not venture into situations that are unconnected with her own interests.

The value of minding our own business seems to be related to the virtue of tolerance. When someone tolerantly refrains from negative judgment, emotion, or action he is expressing a tendency to regard reasonable differences with forbearance and even respect. He appreciates the status of the other person as possessing his own conception of the good and having the right to make his own choices as he sees fit, at the same time that he believes that he is morally mistaken. However, there are also differences between tolerance and a virtuous tendency to mind our own business. The virtue of tolerance is generally associated with situations in which there is a fundamental disagreement about value.²⁵ We can mind our own business with respect to a person who subscribes to a different value system than we do. However, we can also mind our own business toward a person who shares our value system but who appears to have violated it. Furthermore, tolerance seems to require the judgment that the other person is wrong, whereby in minding our own business we can refrain from forming the judgment at all, or suspend a judgment that we have formed.

Another difference between the virtues of minding our own business and tolerance has to do with the relative positions of the two parties at issue. Theorists of tolerance frequently define “tolerance” as a virtue expressed by a party who has power or authority over another individual, but who refrains from exercising the power or authority.²⁶ In contrast, even a person who lacks any power or authority with respect to the other party can mind his own business. Let us consider, for example, the servants in a large manor house. They lack the power and authority to actually interfere with many of the immoral behaviors of their employers. However, the servants may still exercise a virtuous restraint in forming moral judgments about the lords and ladies of the house, indulging in self-satisfying reflections about their comparative flaws, or listening at keyholes. Authority and power are not prerequisites of minding our own business as they are of tolerance.

The presumption of authority over another person makes Angela Smith consider whether there is something condescending about tolerance.²⁷ In assuming an attitude of toleration toward another person, we presume that we have a kind of authority over her at the same time that we choose not to act on the authority. In contrast, we may choose to mind our own business because we recognize that we do not have the authority to judge, be indignant with, or penalize the other person. When the lords and ladies of the manor refrain from moralizing to their servants, they may do so from the recognition that their authority as employers is not equivalent to a moral authority.

Someone who properly minds his own business is also typically associated with humility. The humility of the person can be seen through a comparison with a moralistic, self-righteous character, who seems to be constantly feeding his sense of moral superiority through the overactive judgment of others. A humble person does not see herself as better than other people, but is instead properly aware of her faults and limitations. However, a humble person does not see herself as worse than other people either.²⁸ Neither a humble person nor a person who virtuously minds her own business thinks of herself as unworthy to judge, or incompetent in judging, moral matters in general compared to other people. Her appreciation for the difficulty of judging and acting well is based in her understanding of the human condition.

A person who minds his own business, unlike a moralistic person, is also charitable in his interpretation of the actions and motives of other people. Such a person is attentive to evidence of goodness and not over-hasty in interpreting something as evidence of badness. He is generous toward the other party in weighing the information he has. He is also aware that he may lack crucial information. A person who properly minds her own business generally also possesses the virtue of mercy. She tends not to insist on always giving people their negative deserts, but is instead willing to be moved to leniency, as long as leniency would not cause further problems.²⁹ The inclination of a merciful person toward leniency is motivated by compassion for the plight of the person doing wrong.³⁰ For example, she may refrain from penalizing the wrongdoer with her indignation or her criticisms out of compassion for him, since she sees that he has already hurt his own interests through his moral failings.

A related virtue could be called, a bit archaically, a proper sense of shame. This virtue can be contrasted well with shamelessness. A person who has a proper sense of shame appreciates the painfulness of certain forms of exposure that affect him or others. For example, a person with a proper sense of shame will avert his gaze from another person’s accidental nakedness out of sympathy for that person’s desire not to be exposed. Similarly, a person with a proper sense of shame will avert his gaze from another person’s exposure as immoral or unvirtuous in cases where his attention, judgment, or action would serve no purpose.

In making these connections between the virtue of minding our business and the more familiar virtues, we bolster the sense that the tendency to restrain moral judgment really is virtuous. We also see a range of different reasons for minding our own business. The connection to tolerance highlights the importance of respecting reasonable differences about value. In drawing the distinction between tolerance and minding our own business, we also note the possibility that we may lack authority with respect to the other person’s behavior. In reflecting on charity in judgment, we recognize the difficulty of forming appropriate moral judgments of other people’s behavior. The connections to humility draw our attention to the difficulties that flawed human beings have in abiding by morality. In considering the value of mercy and a proper sense of shame, we note the suffering of the wrongdoer and we see that we would need a good reason to add our own penalties to the suffering. All of these considerations are reasons to mind our own business.

5 Conclusions

In his discussion of the virtues that are associated with morally judging others, Fullinwider emphasizes that the tolerance, mercy, and charity that we show to other people is not always extended to the self. He writes: “as a general matter, morality imposes a basic division of labour: it requires from us charity toward others and strictness with ourselves. In Kant’s terms, morality sets for us two ends: our own perfection and the happiness of others.”³¹ A virtuous person holds himself to high standards of conduct. He is inclined to be critical of his own motives. But he does not take the same stance toward other people.

Why should our tendencies toward moral judgment be so different in the case of self and the case of others? Fullinwider, citing both Kant and Joseph Butler, identifies three reasons. First, we need to correct a tendency to excessive partiality toward ourselves, which naturally inclines us to judge ourselves too mildly and other people too harshly.³² This is reminiscent of Aristotle’s image of a crooked stick that must be bent even further in the opposite direction if it is ever to become straight. Secondly, we must be wary of the epistemic barriers to reading the motives of other people.³³ Finally, as Fullinwider observes, “public exposure of the faults of others lends itself too easily to our own corruption rather than perfection.”³⁴ Specifically it indulges the temptation to take pleasure in the faults of other people and imagine ourselves superior to them.

Simon, for her part, justifies the distinction between the self and other people by appeal to the practical point of forming moral judgments. She says: “the primary point of my making moral assessments is so that I can act well and do what I can toward being a better sort of person. First-person assessments are primary; third-person assessments are appropriate only to the extent they contribute to each person acting well.”³⁵ A tendency to be critical of ourself can reasonably be expected to result in better behavior. But, Simon suggests, a tendency to be critical of other people is less likely to bring good results. Simon advises us “to abstain from making any assessments of others at all when there is no practical point in doing so, and to try to root out the motives and accompanying attitudes which lead us to gloat over the failures of others.”³⁶

The virtuous character of a tendency to mind our own business in moral matters should be clearer. A person who has this virtue is hesitant to negatively morally judge other people, indulge in moral indignation, or act upon his negative moral judgments, although he will engage in such judgment, feeling, and action when he has reason to expect that doing so will serve some worthy purpose. This reluctance is not based on fear of retaliation or a lack of caring about moral matters. Instead it is motivated by an awareness of the difficulties of judging other people fairly, respect for reasonable difference, compassion for human frailty, and a wariness of the temptation to indulge feelings of superiority.³⁷