The sweetheart sees others around him, even strangers, as individually distinctive people with valuable perspectives, whose desires and opinions, interests and goals are worthy of attention and respect.
The sweetheart yields his place in line to the hurried shopper, stops to help the person who dropped her papers, calls an acquaintance with an embarrassed apology after having been unintentionally rude. In a debate, the sweetheart sees how he might be wrong and the other person right. The moral and emotional failure of the jerk is obvious. The intellectual failure is obvious, too: no one is as right about everything as the jerk thinks he is.
He would learn by listening. And one of the things he might learn is the true scope of his jerkitude — a fact about which, as I will explain shortly, the all-out jerk is inevitably ignorant. Which brings me to the other great benefit of a theory of jerks: it might help you figure out if you yourself are one.
First, no one is a perfect jerk or a perfect sweetheart. Human behaviour — of course! Different situations sales-team meetings, travelling in close quarters might bring out the jerk in some and the sweetie in others. Second, the jerk is someone who culpably fails to appreciate the perspectives of others around him.
Also, not all perspectives deserve equal treatment. Failure to appreciate the outlook of a neo-Nazi, for example, is not sign of jerkitude — though the true sweetheart might bend over backwards to try. I said that my theory might help us to tell whether we, ourselves, are jerks. But, in fact, this turns out to be a peculiarly difficult question. The Washington University psychologist Simine Vazire has argued that we tend to know our own characteristics quite well when the relevant traits are evaluatively neutral and straightforwardly observable, and badly when they are loaded with value judgments and not straightforwardly observable.
But few of us want to be inflexible, stupid, unfair or low in creativity. Such characteristics are, after all, connected to outward behaviour in somewhat complicated ways; we can always cling to the idea that we have been misunderstood.
Thus we overlook our own faults. The term is morally loaded, and rationalisation is so tempting and easy! Why did you just treat that cashier so harshly? Why did you just cut into that line of cars at the last minute, not waiting your turn to exit?
Why did you seem to relish failing that student for submitting her essay an hour late? By definition, he fails to respect the perspectives of others around him.
Part of what it is to fail to appreciate the perspectives of others is to fail to see your jerkishly dismissive attitude toward their ideas and concerns as inappropriate.
Ironically, it is the sweetheart who worries that he has just behaved inappropriately, that he might have acted too jerkishly, and who feels driven to make amends. Indeed, the distress itself constitutes a deviation in this one respect at least from pure jerkitude: worrying about whether it might be so helps to make it less so. Then again, if you take comfort in that fact and cease worrying, you have undermined the very basis of your comfort.
A ll normal jerks distribute their jerkishness mostly down the social hierarchy, and to anonymous strangers. Waitresses, students, clerks, strangers on the road — these are the unfortunates who bear the brunt of it. With a modicum of self-control, the jerk, though he implicitly or explicitly regards himself as more important than most of the people around him, recognises that the perspectives of those above him in the hierarchy also deserve some consideration. Often, indeed, he feels sincere respect for his higher-ups.
Perhaps respectful feelings are too deeply written in our natures to disappear entirely. Perhaps the jerk retains a vestigial kind of concern specifically for those whom it would benefit him, directly or indirectly, to win over. He is at least concerned enough about their opinion of him to display tactical respect while in their field of view. However it comes about, the classic jerk kisses up and kicks down. Because the jerk tends to disregard the perspectives of those below him in the hierarchy, he often has little idea how he appears to them.
This leads to hypocrisies. He might insist on promptness, while always running late. He might freely reprimand other people, expecting them to take it with good grace, while any complaints directed against him earn his eternal enmity. Thinking yourself important is a pleasantly self-gratifying excuse for disregarding the interests and desires of others.
Embarrassment, too, becomes practically impossible for the jerk, at least in front of his underlings. Embarrassment requires us to imagine being viewed negatively by people whose perspectives we care about.
As the circle of people whom the jerk is willing to regard as true peers and superiors shrinks, so does his capacity for shame — and with it a crucial entry point for moral self-knowledge.
As one climbs the social hierarchy it is also easier to become a jerk. Thinking that the people around you are idiots seems like a good reason to disregard their intellectual perspectives. As you ascend the hierarchy, you will find it easier to discover evidence of your relative importance your big salary, your first-class seat and of the relative idiocy of others who have failed to ascend as high as you.
Also, flatterers will tend to squeeze out frank, authentic critics. Maybe jerks are actually more likely to rise in business and academia than non-jerks — the truest sweethearts often suffer from an inability to advance their own projects over the projects of others. But I suspect the causal path runs at least as much in the other direction. T he moralistic jerk is an animal worth special remark. Yet I see in myself and all those who are not pure sweethearts a tendency to rationalise my privilege with moralistic sham justifications.
Philosophers seem to have a special talent for this: we can concoct a moral rationalisation for anything, with enough work! Such skill at rationalisation might explain why ethicist philosophers seem to behave no morally better, on average, than comparison groups of non-ethicists, as my collaborators and I have found in a series of empirical studies looking at a broad range of issues from library-book theft and courteous behaviour at professional conferences to rates of charitable donation and Nazi party membership in the s.
Coat the whole thing, if you like, in a patina of academic jargon. The moralising jerk is apt to go badly wrong in his moral opinions. Furthermore, mercy is near the heart of practical, lived morality. Practical mercy involves letting these imperfections pass forgiven or, better yet, entirely unnoticed.
Hard moralising principle therefore comes naturally to him. Sympathetic mercy is natural to the sweetheart. And on the rare occasions when the jerk is merciful, his indulgence is usually ill-tuned: the flaws he forgives are exactly the one he recognises in himself or has ulterior reasons to let slide. Indeed, sometimes an abstract and general concern for moral or political principles serves as a kind of substitute for genuine concern about the people in his immediate field of view, possibly leading to substantial self-sacrifice.
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