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There is an often quoted claim suggesting that if you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole, but if you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole. This isn’t always true – there are never black-and-white answers – for reasons we will examine, but it implicitly focuses on an important issue: How do we determine whether we’re right or wrong? How do we determine, “am I the asshole”?

There’s even a Reddit thread where people share incidents with strangers and expect them to answer, “Am I the asshole”? Of course Reddit, like the internet at large, relies on consensus. If 10,000 people insists you’re wrong, they must be right… Right? At least that’s what the bandwagon fallacy would like us to think. Obviously enough, this takes us back to the “assholes all day” problem.

But again, there are never easy answers.

So in this post, let’s try to unpack all this. Let’s see why we can’t rely on public consensus to figure out whether we’re right or not, and what we can do about it.

Are You the Asshole in a Group of Assholes?

Let’s repeat the catchy – and unreliable – quotation: If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole, but if you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.

But how about if you’re in a context where you’re surrounded by assholes?

To name an extreme example for demonstrating purposes, if I spend a day in “the most racist town in America”, and run into assholes all day, would I be the asshole?

Yes, there are plenty of nuances even here: Maybe both the people I encounter and I are assholes – regarding different things. Or maybe neither they or I are. Perhaps we consider each other an asshole and we are all right (wrong?) if we assumed morality to be subjective and context-based. Maybe they are not a representative sample or I was in a foul mood.

The bottom line is that we can’t rely on public consensus for reaching moral conclusions.

“Am I the Asshole?”: Inability of Thought vs Inability of Action

When someone asks people to tell them whether they’re right or wrong, it’s not that they can’t determine that. Morality, for most people, is a highly problematic but ultimately personal thing. Deep down, we know if we’re right or not. In a sense, the very action of posing the question, Am I the asshole? means that, at the very least, we have doubts.

The fact that we actually voice the question, allowing it to leave the confines of our mind, is what separates inability of thought from inability of action. In plain terms, when we literally ask others to tell us if we’ve done something wrong, we’re actually asking them to tell us what to do.

Asking others if we’ve done something wrong means we can’t deal with the repercussions of our actions.

To Determine Morality Is To Determine Action

Children are particularly vulnerable to dealing with the repercussions of their actions. They break grandma’s favorite vase, then they hide the pieces. “Where is the vase?” a menacing grown-up asks. “I… I don’t know,” comes the reply.

If a confident adult does the same thing, they say “sorry, I broke the vase. Let’s see if we can piece it back together”. There are many assumptions here, obviously – the main one being, there are “adults” aplenty who would hide the pieces and feign ignorance – but an adult response to a moral assessment usually involves the following:

• Understanding. You can’t proceed, morally or practically, before you realize what actually took place. In our example, before you apologize for breaking the vase you must know that the vase is broken and you did it (duh).
• Determining Morality. In simpler words: figuring out if it’s your fault. For such a simple example, this is usually fairly straightforward. If you pushed the vase while wiping the dust, it’s your fault. There are degrees of amelioration (sharing culpability; “The vase was unstable”, “To be fair, it’s hard to see”, etc.) but most confident people wouldn’t bother with them.
• Determining Action. The reason most people wouldn’t bother with excuses about a simple vase is because the action – dealing with the repercussions of moral decisions – is fairly simple: “Sorry, it was an accident. What can we do about it?”

Essentially, the whole chain goes a bit like this: Event → Am I the asshole? → (if yes → apologize, rectify, and/or similar) || (if no → stand ground, negotiate, or some other similar action).

All this is good and nice and really simple. But remember: This is only an example for demonstrating purposes. In reality – and here’s where difficulties emerge – all of the steps above involve a great degree of complexity and ambiguity.

Life and Societies Are Complex

The search to “find the asshole”, assign culpability, is a human trait that goes back a long, long time. Who knows, maybe all the way to our Stone Age ancestors and the asshole who fell asleep and allowed the enemy tribe to steal the meat.

To assign blame is also to implicitly absolve one’s self from blame.

In other words, being social beings who want to be liked, we have a powerful incentive to avoid being blamed. And this invariably means to create binary dilemmas and try to blame someone else. “I’m not the asshole for missing my brother’s birthday party, it was his fault for not informing me well in advance”. It’s the “unstable vase” excuse; only sophistication becomes progressively as complex as the underlying dynamics.

But again: There are no simple answers. Life and societies are complex. Sometimes, in this necessarily flawed life where everything is evil, it’s simply nobody’s fault.