On today’s episode of society skills, let’s take a moment to think about the normative-harmful alignment chart.

I am not the foremost scholar on the subject—I don’t even really know the right words for what I’m talking about. But if you’ve seen this hilarious post about making love to a raw chicken, well, that’s what we’re talking about today.

Alignment charts

Alignment charts are useful when we want to talk about two easily conflated axes. In DnD this is lawful-chaotic and good-evil: if you haven’t thought about it in specific, you might have a notion floating in your head that criminals are lawbreakers are evil, but in fantasy roleplay (and in real life), we might find ourselves facing the draconian constable, the generous rogue, etc. etc., so the alignment chart provides a mnemonic to distinguish.

The normative and harmful axes

Normative behaviors are conventional or usual, matching our expectations of how people act in a given situation. Non-normative behaviors are unusual or unconventional. It’s fairly easy to classify behaviors as normative or non-normative: just ask yourself “do I usually see this?” Probably don’t need to go too in depth, but as a trivial example, when somebody says “hello”, it’s normative to reply “hello” back, whereas it would be non-normative to say “goodbye”, to recite poetry, or to ignore them.

Harmful behaviors are intuitively understood, but can be tricky. Inflicting pain, endangering the lives of, causing distress are all harmful behaviors. Meanwhile, alleviating pain, improving the survival of, bringing joy are helpful behaviors. Of course, though we have a good intuitive understanding of harm, not every action is clear exactly where along the harmful/helpful axis it is. Punching someone in the face causes them harm, but excluding them from a group is significantly more muddled: maybe they’ll find another group to see to their needs; maybe their inclusion would’ve harmed members of the first group, and so on.

Why they get conflated

In a well-functioning society, there should be a strong correlation between these two axes. Specifically harmful behaviors should be non-normative, that is, unusual and occur rarely. Ideally also our normative behaviors should also be helpful, and helpful behaviors be usual and therefore normative.

But, of course, the correlation isn’t perfect. This in itself isn’t a problem: we want room in our lives for norms that are neutral harm-wise (eg wearing jeans), and not every helpful action makes sense to do constantly (can’t exactly give someone a house every day, after all). The problem is that making judgments on the hurt-help axis requires complicated consequentialist calculus, and making judgments on the normative axis is comparatively easy. So suddenly, normative becomes a heuristic for helpful. And while useful at times, this can lead us astray.

An example

Consider the norm, “when you take public transit, you sit down in a seat or stand up.” This norm is pretty well-correlated with helpfulness. By sitting or standing up, you make room for other passengers. But say one day, you find someone lying down across several seats. This is non-normative behavior---but is it harmful?

In some ways, yes. Lying down deprives others of seats. But for able-bodied people, this harm is fairly minor. If there are plenty of other seats on the train, maybe the harm is non-existent. In which case we have a non-normative behavior that is neutral, or maybe helpful. After all, the person lying down on the seat is presumably doing so for a reason---they might be sick or exhausted, and lying down alleviates their suffering. Asking them to sit up just because it is more “normal” might overall increase harm. But in the case where the train is packed, lying down might cause people to not be able to take the train, thus disrupting their own abilities to see to their needs, like getting to work to pay the bills or seeing their families, in which case intervening might be the better thing to do.

So this is a very situationally dependent calculus, one that multiple people might arrive at different answers. But compare this nuanced calculation against the immediate emotional reaction of seeing someone doing something that is “not allowed”---it’s hard for a complicated calculus to win out.

Reacting to non-normative behavior

As members of a conformist society, we’ve been trained to associate non-normative behavior with fear, shock, and disgust. Often participation in society, and thus access to food, shelter, social ties, etc., is conditioned on normative behavior. Diverge and you’ll likely be ostracized. We both feel this fear and pass it on to others subconsciously.

Secondly, our upbringing gives us no tools to handle non-normative behavior. Normative behavior we learn to respond to with more normative reactions, thus building a whole script of norms such that we always know what to do or say. Then, when we’re met with something non-normative, we’re lost. Haunted again by the fear of being ostracized for doing it “wrong”, this surfaces many negative emotions, which are easy to direct to the person behaving non-normatively.

Thirdy, this emotional reaction is extremely convenient to disrupt our ability to make the harm-help judgements that can guide us in these non-normative situations. Because, if we get too well-practiced at identifying harms and helps in non-normative contexts, we might start applying them to normative ones too. And then we might notice how deeply harmful some of our norms are. Requiring half the population to dress and act a certain way, the other half another. Limiting one’s civic participation to one day every four years. Buying and driving and business as usual as these behaviors bring us closer and closer to an unprecedented brink---

Working through the reaction

It is both necessary and possible to work through this emotional reaction and build our ability to think in terms of hurt and help. Necessary because there exists a whole spectrum of human existence beyond what can be delineated with norms. The sex of who you love, the way people refer to you, what clothes and colors you wear and how you dress, these things barely have an impact on society but bring joy to the person engaging in them. You wanna pretend to be a cat on the internet? Go for it. You’ve abdicated all responsibility of your home to your housemates because you’re a cat? You might wanna work through the help-harm calculus with them.

We may never be able to build a comprehensive script for responding to the non-normative, but each time we try, it builds our confidence that we can do it again. We lessen our fear, which allows us to make more reasoned judgments about what behaviors we do and don't want in our society. For now this process will be hard, awkward, and uncomfortable, but as we practice and forgive ourselves, we can only get better at it.