Sweet Little Moral Crusaders

“From 15 to 18 is an age at which one is very sensitive to the sins of others, as I know from recollections of myself. At that age you don’t look for what is hidden. It is a sign of maturity not to be scandalized and to try to find explanations in charity.”
(Flannery O'Connor)

As an ethics professor, I have long taken my students' capacity to be outraged as a good thing.

That is to say, I have mistaken my students' capacity to be outraged as a good thing, in far too many ways.

If they are outraged at an injustice that I present to them, I take it to mean that they care about justice.
I take it to mean that they are paying attention in class.
I take it to mean that I am a good teacher, for eliciting such responses.
I take it to mean that they are maturing as ethical beings.

This isn't true.

Or at least it may not be true.

Moral crusaderism is a stage, just as Flannery O'Connor says it is.  (She's not the only one.  Sociologists and developmental psychologists agree with her, although I doubt she'd need to know that to feel confident in her own observation.)

It's a mature stage for a child, but an immature one for an adult.  It's not a great stage for a child to be in for very long, especially if it happens to occur at the same stage as the All Authority Is Arbitrary and Evil and RUINING MY LIFE stage.  (Alas for parents of teenagers, this happens with some regularity.)

And it's sort of a bad sign when twenty- to twenty-four-year-olds are still in it.  Freshmen? Sure.  They're still children, really.  Grad students?  Um, no.  We are okay with it only because we still expect twenty-four-year-olds to be children.

Pragmatically speaking, encouraging students' moral outrage could be a short-term plus; they're more interested in class, class is more lively, they give better evaluations, it makes you look good, you have more fun doing your job.

I'm less and less convinced that it's a good practice, though, even in the short term.  Short term problems: you confirm their pre-existing prejudices, feed their habit of judgmentalism, and strengthen their addiction to the feeling of justifiable anger.  All that snippiness may just turn itself around and set its sights on you.

But it could potentially be a long-term disaster.  They cannot reach genuine moral maturity if they're encouraged (by their ethics professor, no less!) to substitute mere outrage for the pursuit of justice.  Outrage (especially of the click-to-share-and-raise-awareness variety) is a satisfying emotion, but does little actually to satisfy the demands of justice.

Far better for their moral maturity for us to prefer the slow, thankless, unfun task of getting them to do hard things--hard, boring, daily, unseen and unrewarded things.