Central to the experience of the victims of many serious crimes and moral wrongs is feeling that the perpetrator is creepy as hell. But moral psychologists generally overlook the creeps, instead emphasizing that immoral activity can cause or make fitting anger, fear, disgust, indignation, blame, guilt, shame, or remorse.
In our forthcoming paper in Ergo, we focus on what we call “the moral creeps” – an emotional response to creepy people (i.e., creeps). “Creep” is often used to refer to misogynists who harass, stalk, or otherwise abuse women. However, those are not the only creeps. For example, we discuss the movie Get Out at length because, we think, it conveys the utter creepiness of white supremacy, a creepiness which deserves more philosophical attention. Furthermore, we think that vegans who are creeped out by the common and casual endorsement of industrialized torture and slaughter of animals are on to something. So, we offer an account of creepiness that vindicates many victims’ experiences of the creeps and shows why it is an important moral emotion in its own right.
According to our account, the creeps is emotionally fitting just when its object is creepy agential activity. Creepy agential activity, in turn, is activity that is insensitive to basic moral norms, reasons, or values. For brevity, we call such insensitivity “moral insensitivity” or “insensitivity to moral considerations.” When someone is disposed to moral insensitivity, they are a creep.
What precisely is moral sensitivity? It certainly does not require moral perfection. One is sensitive to moral considerations just when one recognizes and responds to them in a way that is not egregiously deficient or off base, which is to say: in a minimally reasonable way. By contrast, moral insensitivity is, or reflects, badly mistaken judgments about moral considerations. Metaphorically speaking, morally sensitive people have their moral searchlights aimed in the correct vicinity of considerations, even if imprecise placement or poor illumination leads to imperfect identification of or response to the relevant considerations. They operate within a minimally reasonable margin of error. By contrast, creeps’ moral searchlights are significantly off the mark (or, worse, intentionally extinguished). For while creeps do engage in mental activity with respect to moral reasons, they do so appallingly.
Due to their moral insensitivity, creeps are disposed to activity that raises reasonable doubts about their ability or willingness to live with at least some others on moral terms. Consequently, their status as members of the community of moral agents may be doubtful or precarious; they are certainly moral patients, and certainly agents, but their moral agency may be questionable, underdeveloped, or non-existent.
So while the creeps is somewhat like fear, disgust, or anger, it is not a simply a type of any of these other emotions. For, among other things, the characteristic intentional object of the creeps (moral insensitivity) differs from the characteristic intentional objects of fear, disgust, and anger (danger, contamination, and wrongdoing, respectively). The creeps is, however, similar to what Noel Carroll calls art-horror, and thus, perhaps, a form of moral horror.[1]
So, we think the (moral) creeps accurately represents its intentional object (i.e., is fitting) just when:
- It is directed at an agent,
- In response to their general (but not necessarily total) dispositional insensitivity to moral considerations:
i. Across the board (a “creep simpliciter”);
ii. Within some social domain (a “domain-specific creep”);
iii. As they pertain to some class(es) of persons (a “sectarian creep”); or
iv. Regarding one basic moral value (a “single-value creep”); and
- Their insensitivity calls into question or makes precarious their membership in the community of moral agents.
Condition (1) precludes stones and other non-agential objects from being creeps. Since, on our view, moral insensitivity reflects implicit, if not explicit judgments about moral considerations, condition (2) precludes agents who are incapable of engaging in such activity (like insects) from being creeps. And condition (3) requires that creeps’ moral insensitivity have moral import sufficient to call into question their willingness or capacity to live on moral terms with others.
(Further conditions must be met for an instance of this emotion (even if fitting) to be morally and prudentially appropriate to feel. We’re happy to discuss this in the comments.)
We have many lingering questions about the creeps, creepy activities, and creepy people that we would love to see philosophers confront.
First, does moral insensitivity always involve the sort of activity required for moral responsibility? If not, then under what conditions are creeps morally responsible (and so potentially blameworthy) for their creepy activity?
Relatedly: how should one respond to creeps and their creepy behaviors, besides by feeling the creeps? Blame might not be a sensible response to someone who entirely lacks moral sensitivity, and full-blown creeps might not be moral agents at all. So, when, if ever, should we try to reason with, punish, and/or reform creeps?
Third, what can we, both as individuals and in groups, do to prevent creepiness in ourselves and others? How should the public respond to and prevent creepy institutional behavior, especially regarding “big data”? Is it ever justifiable for institutions to allow (or, as with publicly traded for-profit firms, require) moral insensitivity?
Finally, why does creepiness so often accompany oppression? We outline four hypotheses for why creepiness and oppression are linked: because (a) oppression provides social permission to creeps, (b) oppression renders some people relatively powerless, which creeps can easily exploit, (c) the generalizing and stereotyping common in human cognition conduce to sectarian moral insensitivity, and/or (d) perhaps because political and economic structures incentivize it.
The quintessential puzzle about creeps is how generally sensible, even kind people can be so morally insensitive. As Kwame Appiah asks regarding chattel slavery, lynching, and the denial of women’s rights, “Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking?”[2]
[1] Noel Carroll, ”The Nature of Horror,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 46.1 (1987): 51–59.
[2] Kwame Anthony Appiah, “What Will Future Generations Condemn Us For?” The Washington Post. September 26, 2010. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/24/AR2010092404113_pf.html.
Hi Rachel & Jeremy! What an interesting topic!
I think you are certainly on to something. It’s precisely the moral insensitivity (as displayed in their behaviour) that we find creepy about misogynist creeps. But I have two notes that I’d like to hear your thoughts about:
– Not all misogynists come across as creepy. For example, a misogynist stalker comes across as creepy. But, say, a jock who calls a fellow student a slut, is first and foremost a jerk. I’m sure some would say that he’s also a creep; others would reserve that term for other cases. Creepiness seems to attach to specific sorts of behaviors, where the moral insensitivity is displayed in indirect ways.
– Ever since an incident a couple years back, I’ve worried that calling people creeps (when there is no information about their moral character) may occur on somewhat ableist terms: some people who are not at all at morally insensitive come across as creepy (to some), and this may have to do with neurodiversity. The incident a couple years back was as follows: my friend Jeff (names changed) asked me what I see in my friend Joe, who “gives him the creeps”. Jeff described how creepy Joe was at length — this wasn’t an off-the-cuff remark. Joe is the sort of moral mensch who sleeps in a tent for months to protest pipelines. He has Tourette’s syndrome which people don’t know if he doesn’t tell them, because the tics have gone away almost entirely. Yet his facial muscles sometimes move ever-so-slightly in ways they don’t for neurotypical people. This near-invisible disability comes across to Jeff (and people like Jeff) as creepy.
What do you think about these cases? How would you apply your account of creepiness to them?
It seems that all blameworthy moral wrong-doing is caused by some kind of insensitivity to moral reasons. But not all blameworthy moral wrong-doing is creepy. Does the paper provide an account of why certain kinds of insensitivity call into question the wrong-doer’s membership in the moral community?
Hello Polaris – thanks for your encouragement & questions! Working on this topic has been really fun for us, and we’ve been eager to hear from others about it.
On your first point, here is what I would say for my own part: if the claim is that common usage of the word “creep” does not extend to all misogynists, then I agree. Our project is somewhat revisionary. We are asking: once we start to treat creepy people, the emotion of the creeps, and creepiness itself as serious objects of study and start to have a more systematized view of what those things are, will we find good reason to extend common usage in certain ways (and maybe restrict it in others)? Given the account that Jeremy and I have come up with, I’m inclined to say that we should recalibrate our dispositions to feel the creeps and extend the label of “creep” to include many more misogynists than we currently do. I don’t have an argument for applying it to all misogynists, but maybe one could be developed. I think there are lots of types of behaviors that can be morally insensitive in lots of different ways, and I don’t (yet) see the pull of restricting our account of moral insensitivity and creepiness to indirect displays. (I’m not sure what would count as an indirect display of moral insensitivity. Could you clarify what you had in mind by that?)
On your second point: we share your worry about ableism in attributions of creepiness, especially as it relates to neurodiverse people, and discuss it at some length in the longer paper. I’m glad to have an opportunity to say something about it here. I think that, unfortunately, such false positive misdiagnoses are fairly common. Part of the value of developing an account of when the creeps is fitting (when it accurately represents its intentional object) is so that we can explain WHY these types of cases are usually false positives and help people start to recalibrate their emotional dispositions to reduce the incidence of such false positive misdiagnoses. In some such cases, especially where the observer lacks information about neurodiversity, they may (a) falsely take some morally neutral physiological fact as evidence of something morally significant or (b) confuse someone’s insensitivity to certain descriptive facts for moral insensitivity (we talk about (b), but not (a), in our paper). On our view, only moral insensitivity is relevant to being a creep. Hence, our discussion provides yet another reason (not that one was needed) to do better at educating people about neurodiversity. We also include a section about more general epistemic obstacles to accurately identifying creepiness that would be relevant to this point. We hope you’ll read the full paper, and let us know if you can see ways that we could / should adjust our view in light of such cases. (You can find a non-typeset version here: https://philpapers.org/rec/FISTCA-4).
Hi Polaris! Let me echo Rachel in thanking you for your thoughtful post. Also, we want to thank the blog and David Shoemaker for the platform to discuss our ideas!
As Rachel said, above, we agree that not all misogynists come across as creepy. In fact, one event that prompted writing this paper was watching the movie _Get Out_ and realizing that, even though racism can be very creepy, racists are rarely called “creeps” (in virtue of their racism). It seems to us that ordinary usage of “creep” restricts the term’s extension without reason. Another way of putting this, more positively, is that while, perhaps, the term originated or was popularized to discuss certain instances of misogyny, there is ample reason to extend those original insights beyond that domain.
I’d also like to add a comment about the case you mention of the student jock. I’m not so sure about what to think, and I wonder if the case might be somewhat under-described. If it turns out that the student jock is, for instance 40 years old, then I’m inclined to call him a creep for harassing others in the way you describe. But if the student is 12 years old, then I’m more inclined to say that he said a creepy thing but perhaps he is not a creep. In other words, perhaps age is a mitigating factor. Or perhaps what is morally insensitive varies by age. (What’s not creepy when done by a six-year-old may well be creepy when done by a 40-year-old.) What do you think?
Hi, Murali. Thanks for your post.
We agree that not all blameworthy moral wrongdoing is creepy.
But, we disagree with your first sentence. First, to clarify: we really aren’t making any _causal_ claim about the source of morally blameworthy wrongdoing (or causal claims about anything else, for that matter).
Second, we deny that all blameworthy moral wrongdoing involves moral insensitivity (as we understand that term). As we say in the post, moral insensitivity is, or reflects, egregiously mistaken judgments about moral considerations. A mistake doesn’t have to be egregious to be blameworthy.
One might, for example, deliberate in a morally sensitive way—attending to the right sorts of considerations, giving these considerations approximately the right weight, and so on—and yet commit a morally blameworthy mistake in the process of deliberating or enacting one’s decision. Or, if blameworthy moral wrongdoing is ever unavoidable, then a person in such a dilemma might be highly sensitive to morality, but simply be unable to act in a morally acceptable way. For these and other reasons, on our account, being morally sensitive does not entail acting in a morally acceptable way.
There is still much more to be said about when and why wrongdoers’ membership in the moral community is precarious or questionable, and when we have adequate evidence to believe that it is (we have said more in the full paper), but the gist of our answer is that their wrongdoing would have to reflect a disposition to make egregiously mistaken moral judgments.
I hope that’s helpful.
Hi Jeremy and Rachel
Thanks for the reply.
The two cases you provide, at least on the face of it seem like fairly clear cut cases blameless wrong-doing.
One might, for example, deliberate in a morally sensitive way—attending to the right sorts of considerations, giving these considerations approximately the right weight, and so on—and yet commit a morally blameworthy mistake in the process of deliberating or enacting one’s decision.
It seems that attending to the right sort of considerations and giving them the right weight is the sort of thing that agents who act responsibly (i.e. with due care and without negligence or malice) do. But, if someone has acted responsibly, they cannot be blameworthy even if they, through bad moral luck, end up committing some moral wrong.
Or, if blameworthy moral wrongdoing is ever unavoidable, then a person in such a dilemma might be highly sensitive to morality, but simply be unable to act in a morally acceptable way.
Similarly, being unable to avoid wrongdoing seems to be the sort of thing that undermines moral responsibility[2].
[1]I am using morally responsible in this instance as a term of positive appraisal of behaviour. For instance, someone who has driven carefully and done their best to avoid injuring others has behaved responsibly. As such she is not morally responsible[2] for accidentally wronging someone
[2]I am using moral responsibility in these two instances to refer to the thing which grounds liability for blame. English is a weird language.
Forgot to add: Perhaps some counterexample would be useful here. I’m just not seeing how it is possible for an agent to be sensitive in the right way to moral reasons but yet be blameworthy if she ends up acting wrongly.
Hi Rachel & Jeremy!
Thanks for the helpful comment. I can now understand your revisionary goals better.
What I had in mind about indirect displays of moral insensitivity is the following. If someone behaves in an overtly morally insensitive way, such as calling people names, engaging in or promoting violence, et cetera, I am not disposed to feel the creeps or to think of this person as creepy. Rather, I’m disposed to feel anger, outrage, terror, frustration, sadness, and so on, and call this person an a-hole or worse.
I’m rather inclined to get the creeps about people whose overt behaviour betrays enough moral insensitivity that I do not think them safe to hang around, but with whom I can’t quite put my finger on what part of their behaviour betrays that — or, I can, but it’s a behaviour that could be explained away. For example, the common enough situation that a straight man repeatedly and unpromptedly tells someone from a gender or sexual minority “I’m not sexually attracted to you” is creepy as hell, but it’s also something that they’re likely to explain away.
Of course, who I’m disposed to call a creep or get the creeps about is harmless to your argument given that it’s revisionary about our usage of the word. But that was my thinking regarding indirect displays.
Hi Rachel and Jeremy — super interesting project!
A question about the qualifier ‘moral’ in the phrase ‘moral creeps’. Are you thinking of this as a subspecies of a broader phenomenon? For example, I can imagine feeling creeped out by someone who stands a little too close to me as they talk, or someone who doesn’t realize that it’s weird to stare at someone while they’re eating, or lots of other non-moral examples like that. Is that going to end up being a matter of insensitivity to social cues more generally?
Also a suggestion, in case this hasn’t already occurred to you: you might find it interesting to read Amy Olberding’s recent book, *The Wrong of Rudeness* (OUP), in which she discusses the value of manners and etiquette, and warns against the dangers of misanthropy more generally. It strikes me that perhaps one way the rules of etiquette might have value is by helping us avoid creeping others out.
Postscript: A quick glance through your paper (that you linked above) shows me that you think all creeps are moral creeps. I wonder, then, what you think about people who just don’t quite “get” non-moral social norms. Is the “creeped out” emotion in those cases just unfitting?
Thanks for the follow-up, Polaris! You raise several interesting points.
First, you report that you aren’t disposed to feel the creeps towards someone who, for instance, engages in violence. I wonder if we simply have a clash of intuition (or rather feeling) here. I do find myself feeling the creeps towards unrepentant mass murderers, lynch mobs, and other such people. As I mentioned, watching the violent protagonists in movie Get Out prompted much of these reflections. (Maybe I’m overly creeps-prone?) Would you say that psychopathic violent criminals like Jeffrey Dahmer never give you the creeps?
Perhaps this is where your point about anger, outrage, terror, and so on enters the picture. So let us agree that these other emotions might well swamp the creeps on occasion. We discuss (in Section 6 of the paper) the case of George Zimmerman, the man who pursued and killed Trayvon Martin. Although it seems to me that such pursuit was creepy, fear or terror rather than the creeps might well have been the more prudentially appropriate emotion for Martin to feel in the moment—and perhaps anger and outrage are the more morally and politically appropriate feelings for third parties to feel after the fact.
In other words, although the creeps might be “fitting” (or accurate) in such cases, feeling the creeps might be inappropriate (prudentially, politically, or morally). Perhaps the creeps is often most appropriately felt when there are no other more pressing emotions to feel, as when violence has not (or not yet) occurred. So, regarding your point about not being able to put your finger on why exactly one feels the creeps: we share your intuition that the creeps is especially likely to be felt when the creepy person’s (or thing’s or behavior’s) strangeness, ambiguity, or unfathomability is salient (and we highlight that in the paper). What do you think?
Hi, Murali. Thanks for following up.
I wonder if you disagree with our claim that a mistaken judgment about moral consideration doesn’t have to be egregious to be blameworthy. The case we sketched in our previous comment of a person who gives moral considerations approximately the right weight (emphasis on _approximately_) was meant to point to a non-egregious moral mistake.
Whoops! Technical glitch.
That one above (by “J”) is from me.
Thanks for the post, Neal; I especially appreciate the book recommendation!
We originally introduced the qualifier “moral” in “moral creeps” to distinguish the emotional reaction that we were most interested in from the reaction that someone might have to, say, a spider or a derelict building. People often say that they find spiders creepy, and we think that the emotion in the spider case is different enough from the feeling we had in response to _Get Out_ to focus on just the latter type for the purposes of our paper. (For a creepy person, but not a creepy spider, can be “a creep.” This common linguistic usage marks a significant difference, we believe.) We’ve considered a few options for how to think about the relation between the types, and neither of us has yet settled our mind about what to think there. Someone should write a paper about that.
I do think that it is _understandable / intelligible_ to feel something very like the creeps, or even the creeps itself, when someone just doesn’t quite “get” non-moral social norms. And I think it can be fitting to feel _something_ in such cases. But I think that the fitting emotion (depending on circumstances) is probably surprise, or confusion, or the emotional equivalent of a simple “no thank you.” So yes, if nothing morally insensitive is going on, then I would just say that the (moral) creeps isn’t fitting.
Hi Jeremy,
Thanks for the reply. On the face of it, the severity of the moral wrong is a distinct issue from the question of whether someone is blameworthy. I think this is true. However, the egregiousness of an error in judgment is distinct from the severity of the wrong. Thus, while someone can be blameworthy for a minor wrong, it does not follow that someone can make a non-egregious error about the strength of a moral consideration and still be blameworthy.
Let’s ask ourselves why we might think that a given error is not egregious. One reason to think an error is not egregious is that the wrong involved is very minor. That is to say that nothing significant hangs on giving that consideration the right weight. If nothing significant hangs on giving that consideration the right weight, then we really shouldn’t demand that people get that consideration right and correspondingly people shouldn’t be blamed for making errors of that sort. Perhaps more severe errors will warrant blame, but the same considerations make us inclined to call those errors egregious.
Murali—
I think we part ways at the point in your argument where you seem to suggest that if a moral error is minor then nothing significant hangs on it. (I deny that the third sentence of your second paragraph is equivalent to the preceding sentence.)
I don’t have any interesting defense to offer for this assumption. Perhaps the following case will do: I might realize, upon reflection, that I treated somebody discourteously earlier in the day—and then call them up to apologize. I might be blameworthy for my discourtesy, but (surely!) there are other activities or people in the world that are more blameworthy. Nonetheless, I call to apologize because something significant does hang on it, namely, my relationship with them.
I think there’s a really important factor missing in this account, and that’s pleasure: creeps are people who take physical, sexual, or other pleasure in their wrongdoing or the results of their wrongdoing. That’s why it crops up so much more frequently in accounts of sexist wrongdoing than other forms: creepy offenders often take sexual pleasure in their sexist dehumanisation.
In other forms of discrimination, it’s not necessarily as common. A racist who lynched because he thought that non-white people were less than human would be wrong. A racist who enjoyed the pain that their victim suffered would be creepy.
You could frame creepiness as a kind of wrongness that straddles both consequentialist/deontological (i.e. act-focused) morality and virtue ethics (i.e. actor-focused). It involves both doing something wrong and enjoying it. And when the signals a person gives off about what they enjoy/don’t enjoy are easily misunderstood, as in the case of someone who’s not neurotypical, that can create a sense of creepiness, as Polaris notes above.
Hello Phil – Thanks for your interesting suggestion! Lots of the cases that Jeremy and I considered do involve people taking pleasure in being morally insensitive (or the results that follow from being morally insensitive). I do think that when such pleasure is involved, it makes it more likely for others to emotionally respond by feeling the creeps, and to feel it more intensely.
However, I don’t think Jeremy and I ever discussed whether taking pleasure is _necessary_ for creepiness. It sounds like that is what you want to say.
I’m not so sure, and here is an initial reason why I probably don’t want to _require_ taking pleasure for being creepy. In the paper, we mention a category of people who we call oblivious creeps. In brief, their insensitivity is grounded not merely in a failure to care about others (as with those deliberate creeps who enjoy the pain they inflict on others), but also or instead in a failure to notice the impact they have on others. And it seems that at least some of these oblivious creeps take no pleasure in their creepy activity.
In real life, I’ve sometimes been creeped out about how a person can be completely unaware of the ways in which they are harming, offending, or otherwise wronging someone (and not, or at least not obviously, be unaware because of neuroatypicality, sensory overload, illness, or other mitigating factors). If possible, I want to preserve an account that allows me to say that (a) what I felt in such cases really was the creeps, regardless of whether they took pleasure in what they did, and (b) feeling the creeps was fitting (if my assessment of the situation was correct). In any case, I’ll continue thinking about this suggestion.
Hi, Rachel. Thanks for that reply. It may well be that we have slightly different intuitions about creepiness. I wonder if there is a way to marry them, though. You mention examples where a person is oblivious to the harm they are doing. I still suggest that taking pleasure is a vital feature of creepiness, but taking pleasure *in the harm itself* is not.
So in the classic case of sexual harassment, imagine that person A lays a hand on person B in order to enjoy person B’s body. Person A could be oblivious to B’s discomfort, but enjoys the sexual contact. I would count that as creepy, because A takes pleasure in something that is wrong, even though they are not even conscious of the wrongness.
I’m not sure if that fits with your intuitions, but I hope so – it would certainly be convenient if we are all working off closely aligned intuitions.
Thanks, Phil, for your follow up. It sounds like we agree that taking pleasure _in harm itself_ is not vital for creepiness. I was wondering whether that was the case in formulating my initial response to you.
I agree with everything you say about that “classic” case of sexual harassment. I think that, whenever we are talking about cases involving anything sexual, it is very much to be expected that initiating parties take pleasure in what they do. I’m not, however, convinced that all cases of creepiness similarly involve the creep taking pleasure in their creepy behavior (though I’m happy to say that most cases probably do). For example, imagine someone with a large, fresh scar riding on public transit and a seemingly typical adult staring quite fixedly at it for the duration of a long ride. I found that morally insensitive and creepy when I experienced it (multiple times) after a minor surgery, but I really don’t think the people who stared at my scar were getting any pleasure from doing so. They may have even felt disgust, or something else unpleasant.
Overall, I do think our intuitions are pretty closely aligned, which is good news. I hope that others will weigh in on the cases where we seem to disagree to help us calibrate our views.
I found that morally insensitive and creepy when I experienced it (multiple times) after a minor surgery, but I really don’t think the people who stared at my scar were getting any pleasure from doing so.
Hi Rachel, I’m not entirely sure why it is wrong. The best explanation as to why people staring at someone’s scar could be wrong is that it makes the person stared at uncomfortable and it is fitting (or at least not unfitting) that they feel uncomfortable by the staring. That is to say, it is wrong because it is creepy. But, if it is wrong because it is creepy, then it cannot be creepy because it is wrong in a way that calls into question the wrong-doer’s membership in the moral community. In fact, staring at other people’s scars, tattoos, other markings is such a completely human reaction (even if it does sometimes make others uncomfortable) that it is absurd to think that someone’s membership in the moral community is called into question just because she does something that is so common. This puts pressure on you to either claim that it is not appropriate to be creeped out in this case, or, that it is fitting to be creeped out, but creepiness is not just about cases which call into question the wrong-doer’s membership in the moral community
Hello Murali – I did not say it was morally wrong for people to stare at my scar; I disagree with your premise that moral wrongdoing and moral insensitivity are the same thing.
I also disagree with your claim that a person’s membership in the moral community cannot, without absurdity, be called into question when and because that person does actions that are common. Many historical cases involve practices that were at the time incredibly common but that we now recognize (and some small number of people at the time did recognize) as morally insensitive (if not outright heinous) and thus grounds for questioning or doubting the perpetrators’ status as members of the moral community.