feotakahari

This interests me, because I was also bullied in school, and I turned out very untrusting of social contracts in general.

At the school I went to, there was always one student in each class who was the unofficial designated victim. So long as the bullies only targeted this one student, they would never be punished or made to stop, and the victim would often be punished if they tried to speak up. I think my homeroom teacher chose me because of my different cultural background–I wasn’t used to figurative language and commands phrased as questions, and she interpreted my misunderstanding as deliberate defiance and mockery. When I left, my friend switched to being the new victim because she wore cheap clothes, and I’ve heard of other victims who probably had behavioral disorders.

To be clear, there were students who would have at least attempted to be bullies in any school. But in a healthier environment, they would have been made to stop, as opposed to only being reprimanded when they targeted students other than me. And in a healthier environment, students who were nice and friendly wouldn’t have internalized the idea that bullying me was okay. Even if they never showed any inclination towards bullying, they still targeted me sometimes, because they were acting within a social structure where bullying me seemed like a fun and harmless thing to do.

In retrospect, I suppose I could have distinguished between explicit and implicit contracts like OP did. But that was never a thought that crossed my mind! To me, the system that allowed me to be bullied was a social contract, just as if the teachers had created an explicit rule saying “It’s okay to bully Feo.” Instead, I dug into the idea of the students who bullied me despite not normally being bullies, and the ways in which their normal instinct not to be bullies was stifled. I wouldn’t learn the term until years later, but I was trying to build a moral code that would be resistant to the Lucifer effect.

This is how someone who’s fundamentally against sacrificing one person for the good of the many arrived at Utilitarianism, which is so often criticized for allowing the sacrifice of one person for the good of the many! When you take it for granted that any system of specific rules can potentially lead to sacrificing someone, and that people won’t even consider it a bad thing so long as the sacrifice follows the rules, then the only thing you’re left with is a system where sacrificing people is always worse than helping everyone.

In retrospect, I wonder how I would have turned out if I’d concluded that we just needed explicit rules saying that bullying was always wrong. I don’t think that’s a conclusion I would come to now, though. There are people in this world who are very good at interpreting rules to mean whatever they want to mean, and there are other people who listen to their interpretation and think following that interpretation means they must be morally pure. The only thing I can think of to do is to take their rules away.