What does this look like in practice? A person with scrupulosity could spend hours a day praying, worrying that he must get his prayers exactly right or his family could be hurt. He wonders with each prayer if he had the right intention or whether some sinful impulse had crept in, so he repeats until it feels right. Or a person worries that a stray comment to a stranger might have led that person to sin, so she spends days tracking down that person to clarify her innocuous comment. Or a person insists on greeting everyone she sees in order to ‘love thy neighbour’, circling back to catch people she missed. Or a person checks and rechecks receipts to make sure he didn’t inadvertently steal from a business by underpaying.
Those with scrupulosity might realise that their actions are atypical – but it’s also atypical to act morally in a morally mediocre world. People who give 20 per cent of their income to charity act atypically too, but that doesn’t make their action an indication of a disorder. So recognising that the actions are atypical is compatible with thinking that these are the actions that morality requires. And their chronic doubt about their actions is also compatible with moral judgments: saints often wonder if they are sinners, and philosophers professionally doubt even the most obvious. [...]
What the person with scrupulosity overlooks is that morality makes multiple demands on us simultaneously. A genuine moral judgment has to consider more than just a single issue at a time. A waiter can give a narrow justification as to why, if all else is equal, he ought to doublecheck that no solvents from the storeroom inadvertently ended up in the food he is serving. But all else is not equal: it was all but impossible for the solvents to end up in the food, and the time spent checking the storeroom is time he could have spent doing other things with some real moral value, such as having a conversation with a lonely diner or helping a parent wrangle kids to the table.
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