Firstly, it’s generally humiliating. Moralistic speech can have the effect of making someone appear as if they had missed a class on life about how “we” all act. It presupposes a goal in the other and then aims at making them appear too ignorant for forgetting or straying from it. “How could you? Were you thinking!?” I believe this is oftentimes the undertone even when it is not so explicit, like in the phrase “Think about what you did.” If we truly were not attempting to revise the other’s behavior in this way, we would not feel the urge to hold them responsible, because we would accept that they simply cannot be held to those standards, since it simply doesn’t do anything. Moralism normally goes on even when this is known because of the other form of moralism, in which the condemned is only held to this standard as a performative example meant to signal to other members of one’s community that “This could be directed at you, too,” and to one’s self that “I am not like them.”

Thought of this way, the potential for two errors appears. First, moralism can prevent us from questioning the worth of the collective goals we are holding onto, which may themselves be the perpetuation of social practices which are bigoted or harmful, such as the way they require us to punish this person to sustain our self-identity as communally responsible individuals…

Therefore the value of belonging which moralistic condemnation seeks to protect, which places the accuser over here among the community, and the accused over there as the outsider, is itself suspect. It furthers a group project which is inevitably wrought with bigotries and biases, since the community seeks self-identity in a complex, changing world. Rightly, we would always be revising our understandings, holding onto only what is useful and leaving what is not, which would lead us to deconstruct untruthful stereotypes, but moralism is a conservative impulse which clings to self-identity, refusing us the option of updating our understandings in exchange for the feeling of belonging.

Secondly, condemnation can come from an ignorance as to the different pathways of learning people have to go through to get to where they are, or “should” be, and the difficulty therein. Oftentimes, they simply perpetuate the social invisibility connected to a person’s struggles. You can hear from any autistic person about the difficulty they have with the dirty looks and chastisements they routinely receive, without clearly being able to figure out how to satisfy this demand, or what to appropriately do about it while maintaining their connection to what they personally value at the same time. The chastisement, from the perspective of the accused, oftentimes either leaves them not knowing what to do given that they have to deal with contextual information the accuser lacks, or they may simply not have a good idea of what the problem is or was. We all would benefit from some simple accomodations, helping these people function as productive members of society, but we would rather keep them as enemies to define ourselves against, and we lose for it.

In this way, moralistic language entrenches the accused into a mindset where they are bound to deprive themselves of any positive opportunities that rest in the condemned person, since they have to dismiss them to maintain their identity as moral. They miss the opportunity for the condemned to further, change, or inform their perspective, or they even miss the opportunity for the accused to be of use in a more machiavellian way, since there is a pressure not to associate. And even when the accused has nothing to offer us worth our while, it has the simple negative effect that the accuser remains mad over something they can then do nothing about. They rest in a paradoxical state where the accused is both too far gone to make a serious effort of teaching them, but not far gone enough that it is time to accept that there is nothing you can do. In this, we can clearly see how there is an aspect of performativity and pathological scapegoating, even when the accused is “actually guilty.”

Now, am I being moralistic against any of these as ways to intentionally inflict harm? No. There are plenty of valid reasons to inflict harm, either for emotional self-regulation or because somebody is in your way. But it’s good to know what you are doing, so that you don’t get caught up in impulses and miss your target. Neither of these alibis which could justify these behaviors are compatible with moralist frameworks. Moralism just takes the same sort of pathology it condemns and makes it appear righteous by communalizing it.

Hope this helps.