Reciprocal Morality: You Can Only Be as Good to Others as They Are to You
Healthy relationships of all kinds are based on mutual respect. This means balance and reciprocity in all things. We are happy to do for others that which we believe they would be happy to do for us too. When they do not do what we have done for them (or would do), we naturally feel as though they have cheated us. We feel we must reassess the nature of our relationship with someone we thought we knew because their behavior is incongruent with the narrative they have put forth and the social contract we have formed.
In other words: You can only be as good to other people as they are to you before being good to them is no longer a good idea. Anything more makes you a sucker. Anything less makes you cruel.
A corollary of this understanding is that people can only be as good to you as you are to them. There is a perpetual battle between strangers and acquaintances testing the waters with one another, trying to figure out what they can get and give for maximum benefit. What do I owe to this other person I am just getting to know? What can I expect them to owe me? If either party is wrong in their assessment of the other, someone is going to end up the loser, i.e., suffering losses as a result of the courtesies they extended but which were not mutually reciprocated.
The man who is absolutely good, even to those who are not good to him, is always at a social disadvantage. He leaves himself open to attack and being taken advantage of. In contrast, the man who is good to no one, even those who are good to him, cannot form reciprocal bonds of support. The man who finds the right amount of himself to offer to others in proportion to what they offer of themselves to him is primed for optimal social benefit, as are those he associates with.
What do we owe to others? Only what they offer us in return. And vice versa. Tit for tat. Equivalent retaliation in all things.
If you find yourself asking whether you would be comfortable treating someone you are bonded to the way they are treating you, you have run into a serious problem. If you find yourself shocked by the way someone you think you know has acted, you have somehow been conditioned into misjudging their character and the basis of your relationship. Now you have to identify the source of the delusion. Have they manipulated you with false promises? Did they set your expectations with their words or a series of habitual actions? Or did you simply project what you wanted to be true onto them? One or both of you have initiated a false social reality, and now you are suffering the consequence.
When two good people contract with one another, there is mutual benefit. Both are gaining more than they are giving, and there is a net positive outcome to the social system they’ve constructed. When two bad people contract with one another, the outcome is pure chaos and destruction for both as they each attempt to take as much as possible from the other, sabotaging each other’s ill-gotten gains. But when a good person contracts with a bad person, the good person always loses while the bad person gains. Bad people turn good traits into weaknesses to exploit. This is the prisoner’s dilemma scaled up and applied on the level of all micro and macro social interactions. Having found a good person as a consistent source to take advantage of, the bad person will attempt to drag the relationship on as long as possible and continue “feeding” off them for as long as they permit it. Much of the time, they won’t even realize they are doing this, but they are still gaining at the other’s expense.
Treating people fairly means never being the first to transgress against another but never hesitating to transgress once they have proven they are willing to transgress against you. Let people take advantage of you exactly once. Not more. Everyone can be fooled one time via the benefit of the doubt that allows for the chance for people to prove themselves good first. It's possible to be a good person and still inadvertantly harm someone you love, someone you’ve developed beneficial social agreements with. But upon being confronted with the effect of how much you are hurting this person, how much you are damaging them, it should cause you to reflect and realize you need to stop doing this.
The Genesis of Expectation
In maintaining any mutually beneficial relationship, you establish an expected baseline of respect, support, and reciprocal action. If someone is treating you one way, consistently, for a significant amount of time, it’s neglectful of them to suddenly change that without properly reconfiguring your expectations. You are still committing to actions under the premises set by the old way they were treating you. It could be a certain frequency of interaction, a certain level of respect they give you, a certain depth of communication they offer, and so on. These become pertinent factors in your decision-making regarding how to interact with them, so any inaccurate understanding leaves you liable to waste your social investment and be taken advantage of. The moment one person stops scratching the other’s back and still expects to get scratched, they are neglecting the implicit contract they formed by developing an expected pattern of behavior. Now, one party is giving and getting nothing in return. The loser will continue to lose until they update their social schematic for the structure of the relationship they are in.
If, without warning, someone changes the way they interact with you, they've rewritten your implicit agreement without notice or consent. Perhaps this happens immediately after getting something specific they were seeking from you from the beginning of your encounter. They see no reason to keep the charade going after that. It turns out that they were never interacting with you fairly. They had an agenda, an ulterior motive that they failed to inform you of. They may not have even been aware of it until the moment of instant narrative reconstruction in the depths of their ego. They decided to tell a different story about you but never informed you of the new character you were taking on in their narrative.
On the other hand, a manipulative and overbearing person will insist that we have failed to fulfill obligations we never actually agreed to or set the expectation of through habitual action. They will even attempt to override our sense of self (and therefore our agreements about what would be in our best interest to do for others) with their own priorities. They seek the diminishment of who we are in order to amplify themselves. They are colonists of the ego.
What’s the correct, healthy, least destructive way to change an implicit contract or agreement with someone? Setting expectations as accurately as possible. If you don’t like something about the other person and feel you need to alter your relationship dynamic, you tell them as soon as you know. You give them time to adjust their expectations and resulting actions based on what you are now promising or not promising. When they know that you are going to soon be treating them differently, they can appropriately start treating you differently, too. But of course, that’s why unscrupulous people fail to inform and fairly rewrite implied contracts: They don’t care about the long-term repercussions of their actions, how they will harm the other party involved, and their ability to beneficially contract with them again or even their lasting social reputation.
Boundaries and “Self”-Defense
Over the years, I’ve gotten better at seeing warning signs in unprincipled people much earlier and adjusting my behavior accordingly. This minimizes my risk without necessarily having to destruct the relationship in its entirety, should there still prove to be some lesser level of mutual benefit to extract from it. When someone gives subtle clues indicating I need to distance myself from them to some degree, I listen to them. It doesn't mean immediately stopping talking to someone when they do anything mean to me. It just means I notice that their behavior is changing. The longer it goes on, the more I need to adjust my expectations about this person and their potential for betrayal of our implicit and explicit agreements.
When you have a strong sense of self-definition, it’s much easier to set borders and boundaries for what you are and aren’t willing to put with from the people you form relationships with. Without that sense of values and priorities that come from self-definition, you're going to let people take advantage of you because you won't recognize yourself as sovereign. You won’t establish your comfortable limits as worthy of absolute respect by anyone who voluntarily enters your life. You won’t know where the rest of the world and all its people end and you begin. They will always encroach upon you if you give them the chance.
Eventually, you start to see that is possible to categorize people by tiers of moral interaction, which determine how you are ethically obligated to treat them. It may sound very cold, possibly even sociopathic, to strip people down to machine parts and talk about them this way. Most people are used to applying respect and ethical obligation through an ambiguous one-size-fits-all filter to “humanity” as a disembodied ideal—not real individual people with their own volition and personal histories of ethical or unethical behavior. It’s a strange idea that everyone deserves the same level of respect, that the Dahmers represent the same platonic ideal of humanity as the DaVincis and everything in between. Should I treat the person who would betray and backstab me, steal from and manipulate me with the same level of respect and obligation as I would treat my best friends, my family, and the people who would help me, invest in me, and maybe even die for me? That’s madness. That widespread expectation is how the bad people are still winning in our society.
When am I willing to consciously manipulate someone? When they’ve proven they are willing to manipulate me and would do so if given the opportunity. I know I only have moral obligations toward those who would respect similar moral obligations toward me. That's the only rational way I’ve found to live in this chaotic social experiment called the human race. Otherwise, I will always be taken advantage of by unscrupulous actors seeking their next short-term gain, victims of their own constantly re-writing mental narratives about an objective world. Of course, I can't actually control for that fully. I can't perfectly assess whether someone is a shitty person or how they might be willing to mistreat me from the get-go. There is always risk involved. That’s part of what makes intimate relationships so special, so magical if we can actually pull them off. Both people give the other the power to destroy them and trust that they won’t use it.
Readers should know that this article covers a general principle about concepts related to philosophy, morality, and game theory, and that it is not about any specific individuals in the author’s life. Any apparent similarities are purely coincidental.