#39: 'Thick' ethical concepts and your sneaky inner critic
Everything's a judgment with your inner critic, isn't it? It's never 'I'm having trouble focusing today'; instead, it's 'I'm lazy'. And it's never 'I'm prioritising my own goals this morning'; it's 'I'm selfish'. Has it ever occurred to you that not every unhelpful character trait, choice, or behaviour is a moral flaw? You probably haven't noticed this, but your inner critic likes to sneak moral judgment into everything she says to you. Not only is that hurtful, but it also holds you back by distracting you from thinking strategically about how to work towards your goals. The Academic Imperfectionist is here to neutralise that shit and help you cut through the judgment and get to where you want to be.
Episode transcript:
Did you know that not having the character traits you wish you had doesn’t make you a bad person?
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hi there, team Imperfectionist. Something very exciting happened yesterday. Something momentous, in fact. I finally submitted my completed book manuscript to my agent, who’s going to look over it and send it on to the publisher. I started working on it in early 2015, and the publisher’s original deadline was late 2016, so I’m 5 and a half years late. The publisher has been extremely patient with me, as has my agent. It took me a very long time to work out why it was so difficult for me to make progress on the book. Until about 2 years ago, I thought it was down to laziness, that I just needed to be more organised, more self-disciplined, less distractible. Only fairly recently did I work out that the entire project is bound up with anxiety and trauma. I’m actually planning to do my next podcast episode about all this, so be sure to tune in for that if it sounds like the sort of thing you’d find interesting and useful.
Today, though, I want to focus on something else. Something that stops us thinking clearly about the critical things we say to ourselves. We can take the sorts of things I was telling myself about my progress on my book as an example of what I’m talking about. For most of the time I was working on this project, I was telling myself that I was lazy, weak-willed, and badly organised. Yet, evidence against those things was right there in front of me. I was getting up at 5:30 every morning to write in peace for a couple of hours before the children woke up - and given that at the time I lived in a draughty, chilly stone cottage and that in the UK the sun doesn’t rise until well after 8 a.m. in the winter, that was not a lot of fun. I was having no problem getting other writing projects done - just not, for some reason, that one. I was working out most days. I was raising two kids completely single handedly while working full time. None of this smacked of a lazy, weak-willed, badly organised person - yet that never occurred to me while I was saying those things to myself. And I know that many of you do similar things too. You tell yourself that you’re selfish, when evidence of all the things you do for others is all around you. You tell yourself that you’re stupid, when your CV tells a different story. You tell yourself that you’re lazy when in fact you’re burnt out, exhausted, and sleep deprived.
Why do we do this? Or to put it another way, how does our inner critic get away with accusing us of being what we are patently not? To get some insight on this, we’re going to draw on some distinctions from philosophy. Doing that is going to help us reign in our inner critic, and it’s also going to help us think constructively about how we might work more efficiently towards our goals - something we’re unable to do when we’re smarting from the horrible things we say to ourselves. I’m going to be sharing with you some insights that I’ve accumulated through coaching people, insights that I’ve found helpful in thinking about myself and the goals I’m working towards, and that my clients have also found useful. Let’s get started, shall we?
Moral philosophers often make a distinction between thick and thin ethical concepts. This distinction, in the context of ethics, goes back to Bernard Williams, who introduced it in the mid-1980s. This idea is this. There are certain evaluative terms that we can use to describe people and their actions. By ‘evaluative terms’, I mean ones that judge the person in some way, that say something about whether the person or action in question is good or bad, ethical or unethical, right or wrong, and so on. Many evaluative terms don’t describe the person or action in any way. So, for example, if I were to say to you, ‘Amit is good’, you’re going to be able to conclude from this that I approve of Amit or that he’s a morally upstanding person or whatever, but you’re not going to be able to conclude anything about what Amit is like; that is, what it is about Amit that makes him good. Does he donate lots of money to charity? Does he rescue injured wildlife? Does he volunteer as a sports coach with disadvantaged children? You just don’t know. All you know is that something about him makes him good. Because the term ‘good’ evaluates but does not describe, it counts as a thin ethical concept.
By contrast, thick ethical concepts evaluate, but they also describe. If I say to you, ‘Precious is generous’, I tell you something evaluative about Precious - she’s a good person, I approve of her, and so on - but I also describe her in a certain way. I tell you something about why she’s good - that is, she gives a lot to others, or she does a lot for others. To be generous is not merely to be good, it’s to be good in a certain way. And because ‘generous’ both evaluates and describes, it’s a thick ethical concept. Other examples of thick ethical concepts are: courageous, ignorant, friendly, cruel, selfless, selfish, modest, gullible - using these terms for a person or their actions not only indicates something about whether that person or action is good or bad, it also tells us something about what that person or action is like, what makes them good or bad.
Now, thick ethical concepts can be very useful. Just ask Aristotle - his list of virtues and vices is entirely made up of thick ethical concepts. In urging us to develop virtues and avoid vices, he not only tells us to be good, he also tells us how to be good. But thick ethical concepts can be sneaky too. They allow us to sneak evaluations into descriptions, to pretend to be merely describing the way things are while also subtly complimenting or condemning the thing we’re describing. That can be a very good and useful thing, but it also means that thick concepts are great news for people who are passive aggressive, manipulative, emotionally abusive, and so on. Here’s an example. Suppose that, one Sunday morning, after a really hard week, you sleep in until noon, and that when you finally get up your partner says to you, ‘Wow, you’re super lazy today’. ‘Lazy’ is a thick concept: it’s both descriptive and evaluative. We don’t like to be described as lazy. You might protest to your partner against being called lazy - and if you do, your partner might respond with something like, ‘What are you talking about? All I meant was that you stayed in bed late today, what’s the problem?’ The problem here is that you were hurt by the evaluative aspect of what your partner said, but your partner defends themself by pointing to the appropriateness of the descriptive aspect, and accusing you of overreacting when you’re hurt by it. Passive aggressive, right? And gaslighting, and manipulative, and - if it happens regularly - emotionally abusive. If you have a partner who does this, hit pause on this episode while you dump them. I’ll wait.
Nobody wants a partner who treats them like that. But you know who else behaves like that? Your inner critic. Your inner critic loves thick concepts. She’s constantly using them against you, and if you dare to feel hurt, she just points out that the descriptive aspect of those concepts is appropriate. Let’s go back to the way I was talking to myself while I was working, or failing to work, on my book. I was telling myself, among other things, that I was weak-willed. Was that true? Well … yeah, in a way it was. I was simply not getting on with the project, and my progress would have been faster if I’d just pushed through and forced myself to work on it. In this respect, the term ‘weak willed’ was accurate. But I wasn’t merely describing myself using the term ‘weak willed’. It’s a thick concept. I was also evaluating myself using that term; specifically, I was condemning myself, criticising myself, telling myself that I was a bad and inadequate person. It’s not good to be weak willed, after all. And when I felt bad about myself as a result, my inner critic’s attitude, like that of the abusive partner I just described, was ‘What’s the problem? I’m just describing the way things are’. But that reaction didn’t address the evaluative aspect of talking to myself in this way, and the evaluative aspect was the part that hurt. I could have described myself just as accurately without the negative evaluation, by saying something like, ‘I struggle to focus on this project’. But I didn’t. My inner critic didn’t.
So, here’s the first lesson I’d like you to take from today’s episode. Tune in to what your inner critic says to you, and try to notice any thick ethical concepts - ways of describing yourself that also evaluate yourself negatively. If you’re finding it cumbersome to get a grip on this thick/thin terminology, a more natural approach might be this: listen to what your inner critic says to you, and focus on noticing when her descriptions of you use terms that you’d find rude to say to another person. You’d probably think it rude to tell another person that she’s lazy, or selfish, or weak-willed, even if you think there’s some accuracy to those descriptions. If you had to describe them in that way at all, you’d probably find some more tactful or neutral words.
Why is it important to notice your inner critic’s thick concepts? There’s a couple of reasons. The first is that they’re hurtful. Just as, in the example I used earlier, the abusive partner’s ‘You’re lazy’ description is hurtful, so are our inner critic’s thick negative descriptions of us. When you notice one of these hurtful descriptions, have a think about how else you might describe yourself in a way that preserves the accuracy of the descriptive part of the thick concept that your inner critic has used, but which lacks the hurtful evaluative part. So, you might replace ‘I’m lazy’ with ‘I’m tired and need some rest’, and you might replace ‘I’m weak willed’ with ‘I’m having trouble focusing’, and so on. Just do this, as an exercise, just to show yourself that the things your inner critic says to you are not the only ways of describing you. And, it’s important to realise that describing yourself in neutral terms is not simply a way of putting a false, positive spin on your character flaws. Not every aspect of your behaviour warrants a moral evaluation. Your tendency to lose focus in the afternoon, or your tendency to procrastinate, or your difficulties with managing time are no more right or wrong than a plant’s tendency to grow towards the sun or a cat’s tendency to sit in boxes. Having these characteristics doesn’t make you a bad or flawed person. They just are. God knows how we end up thinking otherwise. So, lose the judgment.
Now, the fact that your inner critic’s thick descriptions are hurtful is itself a reason to push back against them - but there’s another reason too. These descriptions are actually preventing you from understanding yourself, from removing obstacles in your path, and from finding ways to work towards your goals more efficiently. Let’s go back to the example I used earlier, of the person whose partner tells her that she’s lazy because she’s stayed in bed late. She’s hurt by this description, yet she also recognises that in some sense it’s accurate - she did stay in bed late, and that’s what lazy people do, right? The problem is that her hurt, combined with her recognition that the descriptive part of what her partner said is not completely devoid of accuracy, leads her to focus on what a bad person she is. It leads her to ruminate. God, I am lazy, everyone else is thinking about lunch and I’m still in my jammies and making coffee, what a bum. And while she’s busy beating herself up, she’s distracted from reflecting on the facts of the matter: that the week she’s just had was so exhausting that she’s slept until lunch time. If she were able to ignore the hurtful evaluative part of what her partner said, she might be able to see that there are problems here that she needs to solve. Problems like: perhaps her current lifestyle, where she reaches the weekend feeling completely exhausted, is not sustainable and perhaps she needs to make some changes so that she’s not completely wiped out by what happens during the week. Perhaps the fact that she’s clearly so tired means that she needs to take some time to rest and recharge, and if so perhaps she ought to sit down and think about some activities she could do over the weekend that would help restore her energy levels. These are important, urgent things that would prioritise her wellbeing and help her continue to do well as she works towards her goals. But because she’s busy beating herself up about being so lazy, it doesn’t even occur to her to think about them at all. The negative thick concept that her partner used has left her literally unable to think straight. She’s in a place where she’s fully focused on what a bad person she is, and not at all focused on taking stock, understanding herself, and strategising about any changes she might need to make in the future.
This is what’s happening with you. Your inner critic is leaving you unable to think straight. This is what happened with me as I struggled to work on my book. I was telling myself that I was weak-willed, and because I was so busy feeling bad about how weak-willed I was, it didn’t occur to me to question why I was having such trouble focusing on this particular project, especially when I had much less trouble focusing on other projects, and what I might be able to do to change that. Feeling bad about ourselves doesn’t help us take positive action to improve ourselves and succeed - contrary to what you might tell yourself. I talked about this in the previous episode - #38: Freud, sublimation, and your toxic attachment to your inner critic - and also in episode #23: The way you’re trying to motivate yourself is all wrong. It was only when I stopped beating myself up about my slow progress on my book that I started to gain some insight into myself and my relationship to this project, and ultimately made some changes that eventually helped me complete it.
So, here’s what I want you to do. Practise keeping your inner critic at arm’s length - hard though that might be. The first step, as I’ve said, is to practise spotting when she uses thick concepts to describe you, and thinking about how you might replace those descriptions with ones that don’t contain any evaluative spin. You want to be sucking the evaluation, the judgment, completely out of the ways in which you’re describing yourself. Just as an exercise, mind - I’m not suggesting that you can overhaul the voice of your inner critic overnight. Practise describing yourself and your behaviour in purely dispassionate, non-judgmental terms. You’re a scientist observing an experimental subject. So, you’re going to want to be saying things like, ‘I notice that my ability to focus on my writing tends to drop off dramatically around lunchtime’, instead of things like ‘I’m so lazy that I never get anything done after lunch’. Write these dispassionate descriptions down, and scrutinise them for any negative evaluative content. Remove and replace thick words like ‘fail’ and ‘weak’. Remove and replace generalisations - words like ‘never’ and ‘always’ - you’re a cautious scientist interested in descriptions that are supported by the evidence, remember? You don’t want to overstate your claims. And then take a look at your dispassionate, evaluation-free description of yourself and ask: does this raise any questions that I need to answer? Does this suggest any problems I need to solve, any obstacles I need to remove, any changes I need to make? For example, if - as was the case with me and my book project - you find that you struggle to focus on one project in particular, but not on others, then it would be helpful to try to understand your relationship to that project, what it means to you. That might be something you could do with a therapist, or through journaling, or just through being aware of it and reflecting on it over time. And, when you’re thinking about what problems you might need to solve and what changes you might need to make - this is all so much easier if you knock the judgment out of it. So, suppose you can never focus on writing after lunch. If, as a result, you’re telling yourself that you’re lazy, you’re going to be too busy feeling bad about yourself to have time for thinking strategically about how you might deal with that. But if, instead, you stop judging yourself and just adopt an ‘it is what it is’ type attitude, you can make some progress. If you have trouble focusing on writing after lunch, then perhaps you just need to ensure that you always try to schedule writing time in the morning, and devote the afternoon to tasks that your afternoon self finds easier to deal with - answering emails, looking up references, tidying your desk, whatever. Your inner critic’s sneaky judgments are holding you back. You make progress when you filter them out. Confiscate them at the door. No negative evaluations allowed. Descriptions only. Because you can do something with descriptions. Descriptions help you understand and make progress, and understanding and making progress is the way forward for you, imperfectionists. Until next time.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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