Is Gum-Chewing immoral Or Just Annoying?
If you’re like me, you have a younger brother whom you annoy to no end. No matter where you fall on the sibling spectrum, you know the paradigm of obnoxiousness that plays out in even well-adjusted families. It was an active choice on part, as well. My brother letting me know something annoyed him guaranteed that I would be doing that thing until bedtime. Mom and dad telling me not to annoy my brother just meant that I had to be sneakier about it. When it came to the playground though, bullies and bee-stings alike had no chance of getting to my little brother. Being annoyed was one thing, but I couldn’t allow him to be injured inside or out.
It’s that distinction between annoying acts and immoral acts that I think we need to make more distinct. It is so easy to respond to an annoyance as if it is a moral violation that the two are becoming conflated making morality less powerful, and annoyance more powerful than it should be. There are reasons to have rules against annoying acts, but we can’t enforce those as if they were moral rules. Let me see if I can illustrate.
In his book, “Sentimental Rules,” moral philosopher Shaun Nichols details a similar distinction between moral and conventional rules. Briefly, a moral rule is “unconditionally obligatory” and is motivated by welfare and justice. A conventional rule is a cultural norm that all in a society seem to follow. Nichols claims these are often motivated by a “gross out” factor, such as a revulsion to eating bugs though this is common in many other parts of the world. I would offer, we could substitute in “annoyance” for “gross out.”
Let’s take a standard rule of “no chewing gum in class.” This would be a cultural rule because it is likely motivated by the annoyance of having students smacking through the lesson, the grossness of sticking it under the desk, or maybe the revulsion of the smell. I don’t know that anyone could say that rule was a moral rule though. Now, if a student violated that rule, you could say that was a moral violation because they were disrespecting the teacher and that’s a universal rule, but the moral value has nothing to do with the act of chewing gum.
The issue comes when we don’t understand the reason for rules we establish. If we assume that the purpose of every rule is to follow the letter of that rule, we find ourselves going to war over the silliest things. If the point of the gum rule is to not chew gum, I should punish every person who chews gum. If we understand that the rule is to reduce distraction, or to keep the room clean, the rule transforms into a fluid form of guidance that only needs to be addressed when it becomes a distraction. The students in this scenario also learn not to “not chew gum,” but rather to chew gum in subtle way that does not draw attention from the professor, (distract the rest of the class.)
Getting yelled at every time I was obnoxious around my brother would have meant I was always getting yelled at. All of mom and dad’s rules would have blurred together and “stop making that noise,” would have had the same importance of “don’t hit your brother.” We can’t confuse annoying actions as the same thing as immoral actions. There are reasons to have rules against gum chewing but none of them are to prevent gum chewing. “That thing bothers me” is not the same thing as “That thing is wrong.” We can’t behave like they are.
