'What If Everyone Did This?' Is Usually a Rationalization, Not an Argument — Here's How to Tell the Difference

"What if everyone did this?"

The question appears to engage ethical reasoning. In practice, it is usually deployed as a conversation-stopper rather than a genuine philosophical inquiry — and once you recognize the pattern, the difference becomes immediately visible.

The Legitimate Use

In Kantian ethics, universalizability is a genuine principle: an action is morally permissible only if the maxim underlying it could be universalized without producing a contradiction. "What if everyone did this?" is a legitimate test when:

• 1. The maxim underlying the action is accurately described
• 2. The universalized version is examined rigorously for consistency, not cherry-picked contradiction
• 3. The person asking applies the same test to their own behavior consistently [1]

The Rhetorical Abuse

The rhetorical deployment of "what if everyone did this?" fails at multiple points:

Applying it selectively. The person asking "what if everyone changed careers at 35?" will not ask "what if everyone stayed in the wrong career forever?" The universalizability test gets applied to the deviation from expected norms, not to the norms themselves — which are equally subject to the same scrutiny.

Using it asymmetrically. Individual exceptions to convenient social norms are challenged; collective adoption of those same norms is not. "What if everyone negotiated their salary?" applies with equal force to every person who accepts the first offer without negotiating — the deviation has no unique universalizability problem.

Deploying it as a covert appeal to conformity. The actual function is often social pressure, not ethical reasoning: "be like everyone else or face implicit sanction for defecting." The universalizability framing makes the conformity pressure look principled.

> 📌 Tversky and Kahneman's research on Omission Bias (1981, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) documented that people consistently judge harmful acts of commission more harshly than equivalent harmful acts of omission — the mechanism that lets "everyone defaulting to the status quo" escape universalizability scrutiny while deviations from it get challenged.[1]

The Detection Heuristic

Ask one question: does the person invoking "what if everyone did this?" apply the same rigor to the alternative — including the status quo?

If not, it isn't ethics. It's social pressure wearing ethical vocabulary.

The Rider can answer the universalizability question cleanly. The Elephant wants social conformity. When "what if everyone did this?" pulls you toward conformity without examination, that's the Elephant responding to social pressure — not the Rider evaluating an ethical argument.

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