Our point isn’t that moral outrage is bad and that we should all be civil to each other, or anything like that. Our point is the opposite: Genuine outrage is a crucial part of a moral existence. It motivates us to act, to fight injustice. Moral outrage porn is troubling because it threatens to undermine the all-important function of the real thing.

Genuine moral engagement is difficult. When we care about doing the right thing, we have to pay attention to the details. And then we have to do the hard work of pushing against the world to fix it, while sweating those details.

But when you are interested only in the pleasures of moral outrage, you engage with the world differently. The pleasures of moral outrage are maximized when morality is simple and the world is starkly divided into good and evil. So the consumers of moral outrage porn will seek out the most cartoonish depictions of the enemy. They will want a newsfeed full of unambiguous stories of the other side’s wickedness. Over time, they may even develop a less nuanced and more easily inflamed sense of right and wrong, to increase their moral outrage.

Notice, too: You could have a porn-y relationship with your outrage at other people’s moral outrage. You could gratify yourself with urgings for civility and calm in the face of too much antagonism. And you could do it just for the smug pleasure of your own high-mindedness. This would be civility porn — a species of moral outrage porn.

It’s bad enough that moral outrage porn can lead to inaction. But if you do decide to act after consuming all that moral outrage porn, you are liable to act in light of the cartoon morality it cultivates. Recall a traditional worry about sexual pornography: that it evokes pleasure by portraying sexuality in unrealistic terms, and that consumers of sexual pornography then risk exporting unrealistic expectations to the real world of sex, with potentially disastrous consequences.

The equivalent worry, with moral outrage porn, is that its consumers, having simplified their moral systems for the sake of self-righteous pleasure, will take that cartoon morality with them when they engage with the real world. We may already be seeing the results.

C. Thi Nguyen (@add_hawk) is an associate professor of philosophy at Utah Valley University. Bekka Williams is an assistant professor of philosophy at Minnesota State University, Mankato.

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