布莱恩·卡普兰在《谴责的难以忍受的随意性》中探讨了人们对不同事件的反应差异。他认为，人们对某些事件的强烈谴责，而对其他类似事件却漠不关心，是因为人们倾向于被戏剧性的故事和流行趋势所影响。他以名人性骚扰、叙利亚政府使用化学武器等例子说明了这一点。

🤔 **对不同事件的反应差异**：卡普兰观察到，人们对某些事件的强烈谴责，而对其他类似事件却漠不关心。例如，人们对名人性骚扰事件的谴责声浪很高，但对同样令人不齿的职场霸凌却反应平平。同样，人们对叙利亚政府使用化学武器的愤怒反应强烈，但对该政府使用常规武器杀害更多人的行为却反应冷淡。 他认为，这种反应差异并非源于人们对不同事件的道德判断，而是因为人们更容易被戏剧性的故事和流行趋势所影响。当大家都对某件事感到愤怒时，人们出于从众心理，也会加入谴责的行列。

🧐 **对社会规范的反应**：卡普兰认为，人们对已经确立的社会规范的违反反应更为强烈。例如，性骚扰违反了人们对性行为的普遍理解和社会规范，因此更容易引起强烈谴责。而职场霸凌虽然令人不齿，但没有明确的社会规范对其进行约束，因此人们的反应相对较弱。 这种观点认为，人们在谴责事件时，会优先考虑那些更容易维护社会秩序的事件。因为有限的社会资源应该用于维护那些最基本、最容易被破坏的社会规范。

🤯 **谴责的有效性**：卡普兰认为，谴责的有效性取决于其是否能有效地维护社会秩序。如果谴责事件能有效地阻止类似事件的发生，那么谴责就是有效的。反之，如果谴责事件只是情绪化的发泄，而无法改变现实，那么谴责就是无效的。 因此，人们需要理性地看待谴责，避免盲目跟风，而是要思考谴责的真正目的和效果。

🤨 **谴责的局限性**：卡普兰的观点也提醒人们，谴责本身存在着局限性。人们对事件的反应受到各种因素的影响，包括个人经历、文化背景、社会氛围等等。因此，谴责并不一定能反映人们的真实想法，也不一定能带来实际的改变。 要真正解决社会问题，需要更深入的思考和行动，而不是仅仅依靠谴责来发泄情绪。

Last year, Bryan Caplan wrote about what he called The Unbearable Arbitrariness Of Deploring:

Let’s start with the latest scandal. People all over the country – indeed, the world – have recently discovered that many celebrities are habitual sexual harassers. Each new expose leads to public outrage and professional ostracism. Why does this confuse me? Because many celebrities do many comparably bad things other than sexual harassment, and virtually no one cares.

Suppose, for example, that a major celebrity is extremely emotionally abusive to all his subordinates. He screams at them all the time. He calls them the cruelest names he can devise. He habitually makes impossible demands. He threatens to fire them out of sheer sadistic pleasure. But the abuse is never sexual (or ethnic); the celebrity limits himself to attacking subordinates’ intelligence, character, pride, and hope for the future. I daresay the average employee would far prefer to work for a boss who occasionally pressured them for a date. But if the tabloids ran a negative profile on the Asexual Boss from Hell, the public wouldn’t get very mad and Hollywood almost certainly wouldn’t ostracize the offender […]

Or to take a far more gruesome case: When the Syrian government last used poison gas, killing roughly a hundred people, the U.S. angrily deployed retaliatory bombers, to bipartisan acclaim. But when the Syrian government murdered vastly more with conventional weapons, the U.S. government and its citizenry barely peeped. The unbearable arbitrariness of deploring!

In the past, I’ve made similar observations about Jim Crow versus immigration laws, and My Lai versus Hiroshima. In each case, I can understand why people would have strong negative feelings about both evils. I can understand why people would have strong negative feelings about neither. I can understand why people would have strong negative feelings about the greater evil, but not the lesser evil. But I can’t understand why people would have strong negative feelings about the lesser evil, but care little about the greater evil. Or why they would have strong negative feelings about one evil, but yawn in the face of a comparable evil.

He concludes people are just biased by dramatic stories and like jumping on bandwagons. Everyone else is getting upset about the chemical weapon attack, and people are sheep, so they join in.

I have a different theory: people get upset over the violation of already-settled bright-line norms, because this is the correct action if you want to use limited enforcement resources efficiently.