I cannot drop litter. It’s impossible. I will walk 10 miles with an empty plastic bottle in search of a bin if I have to, because chucking it in the bushes where it will go unnoticed alongside similar rubbish strewn over weeks and months, is simply unthinkable. My whole being recoils at the notion. It’s not because I’m worried that the bottle isn’t biodegradable. I’m not anxious that a badger will choke on it (although I wouldn’t be pleased at the idea either). It’s that my father instilled in me, from an early age, the idea that dropping litter was egregiously antisocial, contemptuous of the social contract, a moral failure. He didn’t put it like that (I think he mentioned hanging people), but it was clear what he meant. He never knew his father and grew up practically an orphan, and I’m not sure what instilled the belief in him, except perhaps that the age he grew up in was one where certain behaviours were simply unacceptable. Littering, among other things, carried a stigma. My own son doesn’t live in anything like that age, but I’ve presumably shaped the same disposition in him as my father did in me.
I can form a whole morality from this. I know something important about a person who throws a coffee cup from their car window. I know with close to moral precision that they’re the same person who abandons a shopping trolley in a parking space or who plays music on a speakerphone on a train. The probability that they’re a fraudster, a thief or worse increases, too.
Littering is not a crime worthy of the name except in places like Singapore, where the consequences are severe enough to ensure its streets are immaculate. Drop a cigarette butt there, and the authorities will fine you $10,000, hand you a broom and make you sweep public areas while wearing a bright vest that identifies you as a litterer. Good. This is my kind of police state, although I’d make them use a toothbrush.
It shouldn’t need the threat of punishment, though. Antisocial behaviour ought to be rare because a happy society is one where its citizens value the shared space, each of us signed up to an unwritten social contract that says mutual respect will be rewarded; that my cleaning up after a picnic is the right thing because I know you will do the same, thus preserving the beauty of this spot that drew us here in the first place.
The disgust we feel toward those who transgress certain norms stems from something deeper than mere lawbreaking. It turns out that the same part of the brain that lights up when we face something revolting, like rotten food, responds in the same way to certain transgressions like jumping the queue or shoplifting. I could have saved scientists the trouble. When I see the remains of a McDonald’s Happy Meal on my country walk, I know that my visceral reaction is hardcoded in my brain. The same circuitry that has evolved to warn me off bad eggs activates in the same way when certain people (bad eggs of a different kind) violate the social contract.
The word stigma comes from Ancient Greece, specifically the practice of burning a mark in the skin of slaves and criminals, branding them as tainted or corrupted, a way for the community to know who to avoid and why. The mark became metaphorical over time, but its function remains the same: an expression of the collective agreement that certain behaviours are off-limits and disreputable. Not illegal, necessarily; just not done. Stigma became a means by which human communities delineated and enforced moral boundaries without laws through exclusion, defamation, and loss of status.
Stigma is closely associated with shame, that feeling of distress or humiliation when others judge us, measure our worth and find it wanting. Nietzsche, ever the psychologist before the profession existed, understood that we fear the loss of reputation far more intensely than the troubles of conscience. This is supported by evolutionary psychology today, and it makes perfect sense. For most of human history, social exclusion was a death sentence. If you were rejected by the tribe, you lost the community that helped keep you alive. We are hard-wired to care what the tribe thinks because that’s how our ancestors survived.