Transcription
A society will assign absolute ethical value to a dog while applying industrial utility to a pig. The capacity to suffer is identical in both. The only variable that shifts is human funness. The easy explanation is selective empathy. But we can't feel for everything equally, and that's necessary. A person can't sit their feeling for every tragedy in the world equally. They most likely will not be able to function. They might go crazy, uh, just by feeling too much.
So we distribute our empathy selectively, and there are practical, functional, reasonable explanations for why it is, um, you know, selective empathy is about, you know, distribution. Who receives the feeling and who doesn't? That's one question. There's a different question, you know, what happens to our moral values when the feeling is not even there at all, completely absent? Because the pig is not receiving less empathy than the dog. They are receiving practically none, you know. There is just not much feeling there for them in most places. There is no empathy for them on a large scale. But most societies would regard dogs as human friends, so it's very emotional. And alongside, inside this absence of feeling for pigs, the moral concern seems to also disappear with it. The principle that we have, the suffering matters, which, you know, most people would say the belief, it's not activating much at all in this case.
So my observation is that most of the time, we don't really have very specific moral principles in real life. We have, in quite general and generic sense. We operate, you know, on vague generalizations because most of the time we are not sitting here outlining every little moral choice we're making, every little crossroad of, of our lives, you know, every confusion, every ambiguity, every act of every minute. So I would argue that the general moral principles we do have are just too vague to act upon in specific situations. We don't have clear guidelines on how to judge what's morally wrong or right in most, uh, real life situations. The guidelines we claim to have are usually too abstract to apply to specific situations.
You can go on Reddit, right? People are asking others to be the judge of that all the time. A lot of the questions underneath are really asking, is what I'm doing, you know, what he's doing, that person doing morally wrong? People genuinely don't know. So they, so they outsource the judgment to, uh, strangers to get a sense. Now, giving them a quote from Kant or Nietzsche at that moment is useless. That's the real dilemma of everyday life. You know, how do you navigate this world and make moral judgments and decisions? You, you can't open a book of philosophy every time something confusing happens. Not to mention, there is no consequence to a lot of decisions and actions. Sometimes moral or immoral, it just doesn't matter, right? We have vague principles. We outsource judgment when there are no consequences pushing us either way. Nothing at stake.
You know, what, what's left in a person is, uh, something purely internal. It doesn't matter if this internal moral compass is learned or taught values or behaviors by, you know, parents, by peers, by society. At some stage, some things outward are going to be internalized. I'm talking about right now. Even if the whole village, you know, tells you that you should torture your dog, including your family, friends, uh, you know, the guy in the shop down the road, your chubby high school teacher, you know, famous person on TV, you know, they're all telling you it's the right thing to do. You're not going to do it. Or at least you won't believe it's morally right. That is your internal moral compass, right? 100 people, 10,000 people tell you otherwise, it won't change your mind. It won't make a difference. You know, no amount of hierarchical power can make you truly believe that, right? That's your internal moral compass.
But my suspicion is that this largely comes from a feeling attached to that moral compass. You know, remove the feeling, and the moral compass is not going to stay. So in my observation, it's quite rare that someone can operate on theoretical principles with no feeling attached. It would be a peculiar way to be in this world. If you have no feelings for any of these things, what are you holding on to, right? What's left? There is a reason we say, you know, sociopaths and psychopaths, uh, are usually immoral. So when there is no feeling, then, then there's no genuine moral concern. Like with pigs, there is a real feeling attached to dogs. But for pigs, there's mostly just food on the plate, right? Nothing much else. Therefore, uh, no moral concerns or principles needed there.
It seems actually, if you observe, uh, vegan activists on the street trying to apply moral concern to pigs or any other farm animals, people get visibly, uh, irritated, as if you're calling their mother some dirty words. Another example, um, take people who committed a violent act toward others. You will hear some of them say, you know, they grew up with violence, that it was conditioned into them, you know, as a way of, uh, functioning. But I highly, uh, doubt they simply can't grasp the concept that a violent act is immoral. Of course, they understand that it causes, you know, direct harm to another person. It's a violation. But what is absent is a certain feeling attached to the act itself. Like, I understand it's wrong, but I don't feel that it's wrong. And without that feeling, I cannot make myself care enough to alter my behavior. Of course, uh, this is just one aspect of it. So basically, is that the intellectual understanding of what's immoral existed, but without the feeling attached to it, you know, it produced no moral response.
The South African writer Coetzee touches on something close to this in his book, uh, called The Lives of Animals. His character argues against what she calls a, you know, ghostly reasoning machine. It's this idea that we can think our way through moral questions while remaining completely detached from what those questions actually involve, uh, in felt experience. You know, that we can debate the ethics of suffering as an intellectual exercise, you know, turn it into categories and arguments and positions, and somewhere in that process, what's actually happening in reality gets replaced by the analysis of it. So, is the ghostly reasoning machine highly efficient at making atrocities feel like logical necessities? You know, imagine there is a child starving in front of us. You know, instead of feeding the child, we start an, uh, intense intellectual debate about the nature of their suffering, the causes, the ethics, the implications. The debate is, you know, rich and thorough, and at the end of it, we feel we have done something meaningful, but then the child dies. We can conduct an entire mental exercise about suffering, debate it, analyze it, understand it fully, and none of that necessarily leads to action.
What converts an internal understanding into an outward response and action is almost always emotional, uh, motivation. Take the starving child, right? The consequence of not acting is the child's death. And yet, when that consequence, and yet even that consequence does not automatically produce a moral response in everyone, because registering that death as something that matters still depends on whether the feeling is there. The consequence alone does not, uh, generate the feeling. It doesn't guarantee that the feeling has to already exist. Without it, even the death of a child in front of you can be, um, observed, understood, analyzed, and then eventually walked away from, and it can mean absolutely nothing in the end.
Which brings us back to the same place. You know, the feeling has to come first, certain feelings, right? If moral concern follows feeling, we are pretty much doomed. I would say feelings shift like the weather. And don't we have one of the most unstable weather systems on earth? The moral concern collapses when feeling is absent. Then feeling is not really reliable. Sometimes reliable, sometimes not. Um, well, that does make, uh, ordinary people pretty dangerous in a way, and really confusing to judge as well.
Take, uh, domestic violence as an example. You often hear stories of an abuser who commits the act, right? Then the next day is, you know, full of remorse, then commits it again. The cycle is confusing for the person experiencing it, and for many people observing from the outside as well. However, their response is real. A lot of times, in that moment, they genuinely feel, you know, that what they did was wrong. The moral understanding is there. Then the feeling shifts, and the behavior follows. You know, same person, same understanding of right and wrong, completely opposite responses depending on what emotional state they're in. So the moral compass is present in the remorse stage and gone in the abuse stage.
Okay. Another thing is, take, take the increasing trend of xenophobia in political discourse. Right? Gradually, you know, certain groups of people get, uh, get described as a threat, as foreign, as fundamentally different from you. The feeling of connection toward them, you know, weakens over time. The sense that there are people whose suffering matters starts to fade. And when that feeling is gone, the moral concern goes with it. You know, policies that would be unthinkable if applied to people who we feel connected to, now becomes, you know, pretty acceptable and normal. So essentially, herd mentality means you lose your own moral compass and follow the mood of the herd. What I'm saying is, uh, the feeling isn't always shifting on its own. Sometimes it's shifting because the people around you are shifting, and you are moving with them without thinking. So the collective mood becomes your, you know, moral, uh, reference point, and you can say it's like you are, you are like a mindless zombie in that case.
However, there are people who manage to hold their moral principles steady, regardless of how their feelings shift. I have deep respect for that. You, you will find those peculiar people who have no animals in their life, have never demonstrated a particular funness toward any pet, never sought affection, um, from them, even, and yet they decided to not participate in harming other animals, not, you know, um, eating them, right? It could be an emotional reflex, but it develops into a real moral principle that is here to stabilize and stay. So what is different about these people is that they don't anchor their moral principles on what society considers a good or a bad person. They're not following an inherited belief system or responding to social pressure or waiting for the feeling to arrive, you know, before they act. Somewhere along the way, they built something from the inside. Maybe a type of, uh, you know, worldview with its own internal logic, its own rules that can hold its position regardless of what shifts around it or within them. But some of, some of them carry, you know, maybe a deep desire to cause the least amount of harm while they are alive. That begins as a feeling, a desire, but over time it develops, you know, into something more stable than feeling, a kind of orientation toward existence itself, a reason for, uh, being here, meaning for existence. When a moral principle becomes part of your, you know, meaning of life, when it connects to why you think you are alive and what you think life is for, then it becomes something much more concrete, you know, something, uh, reliable and steady, and trustworthy.
Now, that, that is a different relationship to morality that most people have, and it may be the only version that doesn't move with the weather. The question is, uh, whether this is a realistic standard for most people, right? To hold a moral principle steady when the feeling underneath, uh, it has shifted or disappeared entirely, or when there is no external pressure or consequences or rewards, right? To act on what you believe is right regardless of what you feel in that moment. And, and, and is this exceptional? You know, are most of us actually operating that way, or does it go against something very fundamental in how we are built?