Credentials

How much should a person's past good deeds, his "credentials," matter to us in evaluating his present behavior? (Click the title to read more. Long.) I was reflecting on this moments ago and was amused upon realizing that how most people answer this question is not the same as how they actually behave. Most people will say, "Each deed should be evaluated for its own merits." This often comes up in discussions where someone with seniority has wronged someone who is socially ranked lower than him. Most people would agree that a lifetime of good deeds does not entitle one to perform bad deeds free of persecution. And yet those very same people entitle their friends and family to more than they do strangers. Brief examples:
- if your 20-year old son steals food off of your plate at an outdoors picnic, you don't treat him the same as when a total stranger steals food off of your plate at that same outdoors picnic
- if your best friend snaps at you, you are much more likely to consider the possibility that he has had a rough day than you are to consider that he is a jackass; but the opposite is true for most people when a complete stranger snaps at them

Some will argue that it is a question of intimacy. Some people take this to mean that we put up with more from our intimates because we care about them more. Other people take it to mean that we put up with more from our intimates because they are investments of our time and emotion and we do not hastily cast them aside as we do rude or harmful strangers.

But this phenomenon still exists even if someone is not one of our intimates. For example, when the king dresses as a commoner and steals an apple from the merchant's applecart, the merchant may roughly grab hold of the king's arm before stupefiedly letting go as he sees 10 guards surround him on all sides, their swords drawn and at the ready. "Who do you think you're grabbing? This is none other than the king!" At which point the merchant begs for forgiveness and grovels on the ground. In some stories things end well for the merchant; in others, he returns to the status quo of just 10 minutes prior; and in others still he is punished, perhaps even killed, for his insolence. But in every telling of the tale the situation is the same: the king committed a crime but was excused from punishment because of his rank. After all, if our story is set in a time and a place where thieves lost their hand as punishment for stealing, one can hardly imagine the king volunteering his hand nor can one imagine the palace guards being willing to take His Highness's hand for the petty crime of stealing one apple.

Storytellers have many means of excusing this double-standard. "The King was hungry," they say. Or perhaps, "the King intended to pay the merchant back once he returned to the palace." The storyteller provides excuses for the king's immoral behavior that he or she is not willing to apply equally to the commoners within the same storybook setting.

So what is it, exactly, that makes us believe that people can be socially superior to us? and in addition what is it that makes us believe that our social superiors can get away with more than we can? Why is it that most Americans believe that in an ideal world our social superiors are our betters but at the same time they will allow "our betters" to behave badly and without threat of persecution? I'm not talking about people in positions of power getting away with murder because of their power, their resources: that is an entirely different topic, and (imo) a closed book at that. No, what I'm asking is, why is it that I am more willing to forgive certain people for wronging me in certain ways? It's a two-pronged question, really, because first I want to know where our brains draw the line between who makes the cut and who doesn't; and second I want to know how our brains decide that for those people who made a certain cut, where exactly is that cut on the list of moral transgressions? In other words, how do we decide both who may wrong us and how they may wrong us?