The demands placed on our time and attention make it difficult for anyone to be perfectly moral, but we all still have some tacitly assumed moral responsibilities towards others. We execute on such responsibilities all the time; many of us take care of our parents when they become old, turn down loud music once it hits 10PM to not disturb neighbors, and give some amount of our yearly salary to charities.
For a variety of reasons, though, we may not always take the morally better action. Perhaps you’re playing the music loud because you’re hosting a party, and turning it down too much would really kill the mood. Maybe you’re just out of school and strapped for cash, so you don’t donate to a charity. Such reasons for not taking the morally better action seem circumstantial, and don’t seem to be a huge deal.
But there is another more interesting, general class of reasons that prevent people from taking the moral action that involves the lack of perceived impact the action would have. These reasons are usually given for actions that would only seem useful if everyone took them. For instance, we know at this point that there are a variety of human activities that contribute to non-negligible increases in average global temperature, and that if many of us were to no longer take these actions, we would be decreasing the likelihood of catastrophic natural events taking place in the near future. If everyone flew less, airlines would operate fewer flights, which would translate to less air pollution and thus a slightly lower global temperature, or so the logic goes. This is nothing new.
The trouble comes, of course, with actually getting everyone to do this. If we choose to take fewer flights in a given year, it’s likely that someone else will just fill our seat on each of those flights, making us feel like not booking the tickets would have effectively no impact in the big picture. Then, based on this reasoning, we take the flights anyway.
This sucks. In principle, many pressing problems could be solved by a coordinated effort that would require little commitment from each of the individual actors while making a disproportionately large collective impact. It’s not like we’ve hit a dead end in the search for solutions. But I can’t entirely blame people for acting this way, since the consequences of their actions under this framework don’t really matter.
If we aren’t taking the action because of the positive consequences we hope they would bring about, what else could motivate us to act this way? It feels wrong to just throw our hands up in the air and buy the plane tickets anyway, since any progress would be even harder to come by if everyone collectively gave up. Luckily, there are still people who would do this for a bunch of different reasons. One motivation is to stay true to our principles; we refrain from buying the plane tickets because it simply is the right thing to do, and making the right decision is good for its own sake. I think that many of us reason exactly this way when we don’t buy the plane tickets, or when we order a vegetarian option at a restaurant instead of a meat-based one. We know it doesn’t have an impact, but taking the action makes us feel good since we are, at least to some extent, sticking to the principles of right and wrong that we set for ourselves. There are also other reasons for acting in this way, such as virtue signaling, if there is an opportunity to advertise to the world that we decided not to buy the tickets. But I still think the most common motivation to do the hard moral thing is to stay committed to your values, and it does feel good to be in line with yourself. We should not buy the plane ticket because that’s in line with our values, which is good for its own sake.
However, I think there is an intriguing potential benefit to acting from your values that is rarely discussed. There’s a way in which acting in line with your values is the only power you have to affect anything.
I recently came across some of Carl Jung’s work, and what’s compelling about his views is that they make it seem as if there is no plausible alternative but to stick to one’s principles in trying to make a difference. During the 20th century, he observed an ever greater number of individuals tilting towards collective ideologies and mass movements while simultaneously detaching from the more traditional belief structures imposed by religions. This made sense to Jung, as he believed that it was necessary for human beings to possess a set of values to draw upon in their everyday lives, and in this time, the values of religion were being replaced by those of political elites and leaders. But Jung thought that neither of these should be the base for one’s values, as it was dangerous to source them from anything else than one’s internal well of insights and capacity to reason. To Jung, having a clear sense of your values and the reasons for choosing them, as well as acting upon them irrespective of their impact on the world at large, should have been the norm instead of borrowing from religion or the state. The reason for this was that excessive identification with either entity led to the individual feeling insignificant, since in so doing they were in line with most of the population and pushing away the potentially disruptive, but ultimately freeing internal cues that inform the individual of their unique abilities and contribution to the world.
Jung believed that it was precisely through paying attention to these feelings of insignificance, however uncomfortable at times, that could melt away existential angst and pave the way to human flourishing. Since the problem that arose from religion becoming less present in everyday life could be characterized as a lack of self-knowledge, getting familiar with one’s internal world was truly the only way to cope with the demands placed by this mass spiritual shift. Jung calls this journey of self-knowledge individuation. Once it is complete, the individual is able to live out their purpose by having their actions follow directly from their values, regardless of whether they are aligned with those of society at large. For Jung, being true to one’s self was the only lasting solution to psychic ailments.
Thinking about whether or not these theories are correct is a topic for a separate, longer post, but I want to touch on some of the moral implications of the ideas they put forth. Jung would have ultimately traced most societal problems – inequality, access to medical care, and the like – to spiritually plagued individuals. I don’t think it’s wrong to believe that institutions are actually the ones that carry responsibility for such issues, but an institution is still a group of people led by a few individuals who, in turn, leverage the power at their disposal and act on corrupt values that arise from group dynamics (such as greed and virtue signaling). You can oust the leaders of institutions to change their policies, but unless those individuals themselves change after this, they can just find new ways for their values to manifest and cause trouble. To Jung, our responsibility and duty lies solely with changing ourselves, since at the root, social problems are individual problems, so the individual taking charge of their own behavior resolves these larger problems.
While this framework is still flawed, I think its value lies in presenting some of today’s most pressing issues in a way that makes them much more conquerable for the individual. If we can identify lack of self-alignment and its resulting negative, external manifestation as the mechanism responsible for much of the turmoil present in the world, tending to this at the very least in myself feels empowering. It doesn’t (and shouldn’t) free me from the duty to help others as well, but it’s this kind of thinking, about simply starting with myself, that’s gotten me out of depressive spells and made me productive when it counts. I don’t think it completely solves the plane ticket problem, either – but it’s what would get me to not buy it.
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Notes
I want to eventually write some more, detailed posts about ethics, but there are a few points I should add.
1. First, if you asked me whether I have a more comprehensive moral framework, I’d want to say yes ( most likely a strange blend of utilitarianism and virtue ethics, leaning more heavily on the former), but the reason I presented above for not buying the plane ticket doesn’t adhere to it. Also, if I deliberate the morality of an action, I feel like I do refer to my framework. So it seems like my conscious thinking about morality is rule-based, but my snap judgments are much less so. And that’s definitely a disconnect! Thinking about the role of conscious reasoning in moral judgment seems interesting.
2. I was thinking a lot about Susan Wolf’s “Moral Saints” when writing this -- it's my favorite contemporary piece. By thinking about different motivations for the more ‘moral’ action, I don’t mean that it should always be taken.
"People think of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." -Leo Tolstoy
