Social Justice And The Ratchet Effect

It occurs to me that the parameters of "socially just" behavior for any particular group are subject to the ratchet effect. I doubt I'm the first person to ever make this connection, but I don't recall ever seeing it explicitly discussed before, so I figured I'd put down a few notes on the subject.

In a nutshell the ratchet effect says that, given the right circumstances, attitudes towards/treatements of a particular phenomena tend to drift in one direction in an unbounded fashion, even when such drift might be hard to justify or may be counter-productive in the long run. The example I'm most familiar with is the criminal justice system, where there are many incentives to be "tough on crime" and very few incentives to do the opposite. As such, absent deliberate activity to the contrary, the number of infractions on the books tends to grow over time, as do the associated penalties. It's not the case that the people making the rules are actively trying to be "tougher", but rather an emergent property that stems from the fact that all actors in the system are slightly biased in favor of turning the knob "up" rather than "down".

So what does this have to do with social justice? The example from my workplace which kicked off this train of thought:

1. Person A mentions, in passing, that they used to patronize Hooters.
2. Person B accuses Person A, at some length and volume, of creating a hostile work environment.

What's interesting about this exchange is that there was a great deal of private "WTF?-ing" regarding Person B's behavior, but no one said anything in the associated public forum. And thus was the Overton window nudged leftwards.

This leads me to meditate on the factors that led to the divergence between the private and public response. I'm probably more inclined than most to tell Person B that they're Doing It Wrong™, but I kept my yap shut just like everyone else. I was ready to quote Person B chapter and verse about "severe and pervasive", but ultimately came to the conclusion that it just wasn't worth the effort. Why get into a public tussle with this individual when the return is so very abstract?

Seems like a pretty clear collective action problem, if the private communications are any guide. There are lots of people who disagreed with Person B's assessment, but the individuals involved all came to the (probably rational) conclusion that the potential benefits of speaking up wasn't worth the bother.

Which brings us back to the ratchet effect. Stipulating that my above characterization is true, I've described an environment where behavioral norms will tend to drift towards wokeness even though such drift may not accurately represent the collective judgement of the group as a whole. There's just not much incentive for people to apply coutervailing pressure against the drift, and basically zero incentive to try to yank the window in an anti-woke direction.