Moral Complacency and Guilt

one appeal of naturalism

by Vincent Sapone

All morally aware individuals should have a sense of guilt which can feel, on some occasions, as strong as a person's hunger mechanism. Those studying humans via the evolutionary process might even be able to explain how such a feature could have evolved enabling man to cooperate better in a Pleistocene environment. The biological origins of a primate's sense of guilt in a material world are a red herring to the actual issue here, however. All or virtually all humans are guilty. Naturalism can be appealing because it offers payment to a person's sense of guilt. But what guilt am I speaking of? A lot of people might think "We are good people. We don't murder anyone or rape people or steal from them and so on. We aren't one of' those "bad guys" that we see on the nightly news." The common view is delusional at best. We are in fact the "bad guys" we see on the nightly news and more importantly, deep down, we all know this.

To understand why we should feel guilty we only need to look to ourselves and to see how self-centered, how vain, how materialistic, how greedy and how individualistic much of the world is. A cursory examination of advertisement techniques, the fashion trends of popular magazines, and the idyllic beauty people aspire to easily delineates the crassness of society. Especially American society. This proposition is in no need of a tirade of examples tossed out in an apologetics defense. Show me a person who does not recognize this and I will show you a person without eyes.

Who do you say you are?

When you ask people who they are they will often identify themselves by their job. "I'm Bob and I am a business owner." Or "I'm Tom and I'm an executive at Lyons Incorporated." Or "I'm Karen and I'm a Dentist." Or I'm John and I'm a student." It doesn't take a rocket scientists to see that most people do not really "enjoy" their jobs or school but do them to make a living or do them to achieve high levels of success or do them to meet parental expectations or because it's the American dream of hedonism to make a lot of money. Yet many people tend to define themselves by their work. So we have a lot of people defining themselves as "getting by doing what they need to" or as "a crass individual taking advantage of capitalism". Certainly there is something wrong with this picture. Thousands of years ago one of the greatest philosophers on record might tell us that we are not truly "happy" and that we are not achieving our "entelechy". The philosopher would be Aristotle.

Ignoble Savages

Many people can feel guilt or regret about a wasted life, about not "blossoming into whom they were meant to be". People may also feel guilt because of immoral behavior. Some of us might be overly cynical, cranky, not as nice or honest as we should and so on. Lots of us might illegally download music, movies, television shows and so forth from the internet. By definition this activity is stealing. We justify it with self-patronizing lines such as "I wouldn't have bought it anyway so no one lost in the deal." Half the time this is a lie and the rest of the time it is still taking something that does not belong to us. Full time, it is a bad practice as humans are easily prone to the slippery-sloping exponential growth of evil. We simply justify theft here on the basis that it is victimless. By the same reasoning we might as well sell drugs and profit off the misery of others. After all, if we don't sell crack to these people, someone else will. The victim situation remains the same whether we partake or not thus there our actions are inconsequental to whether or not victims exist in this scenario. So why shouldn't I benefit from it rather than some bad drug dealer? If we feel file-sharing has made the industry better in that now we are given better special features, better covers and bonus CDs we are still mistaken. Theft of other people's property is not the solution. Boycotting a product is the correct course of action if you demand better product for your money.

The fact is that many people speed, many people will have a drink and drive (bars have parking lots!), many people drive and talk on their cell phones which all show a callous disregard for the welfare of others. Many people will "work under the table" if they can, many people will skim on their taxes a bit. Even a multi-millionaire such as Martha Stewart skimmed on her taxes. Yes, someone with hundreds of millions went to jail for not paying a few tens of thousands of dollars in taxes. It is mind boggling.

Let the children die, otherwise my Shrimp Scampi might get cold...

We also feel guilt for not doing what we should in light of things such a world hunger, the sex-slave trade still going on in the world, disaster relief and things such as the AIDS epidemic. The "lake example" is very informative. Suppose a man wearing an expensive pair of shoes, an expensive watch and a costly shirt is walking alone by a small lake in a park. He sees a child flapping his or her arms wildly spluttering water and pleading for help. Apparently the child is drowning and there is little time left. This man can a) keep on walking and ignore the child b) can go look for help though there is probably little time), 3) can get undressed, taking off his watch, his pants, his shoes, is shirt and then go in after the kid (time issues still involved) or 4) dive in immediately after the drowning child and hopefully save him or her.

Is there a more moral choice here? Obviously the fourth one is the morally correct thing to do. To let a child die because you do not care to ruin your expensive designer clothes is repugnant. To go for help when there is little time because you do not want to ruin your designer clothes is a little more caring but repugnant none the less. Getting undressed and jumping in after the child is still better as a person can get undressed rather quickly but it is still not the appropriate thing to do as time is very clearly an essential factor here. The only morally responsible thing to do is to dive in after the child.

A situation similar to this was posed in Discover magazine (04, 04) where after discussing a scenario with a person drowning in a pond Justin Green said, "there are millions of children around the world in the same situation, where just a little money for medicine or food could save their lives. And yet we don't consider ourselves monsters for having that dinner rather than giving the money to Oxfam. Why is that?"

So we are monsters if we put our clothes above a child dying in our line of sight but we are not monsters if we buy those same over-priced clothes with the knowledge that a few dollars will save the lives of children who we do not directly see? Is evil no longer evil when we do not see it? Is suffering less harsh because we cannot witness it?

We buy more clothes than we need, we eat more than we need, we buy more gadgets than we need, we will waste hundreds of dollars at bars or on fancy dinners and so on. We might even think nothing of these things. But helping our neighbors is a real burden it seems to many people. But deep down we all know that we are not doing what we "ought" to be doing.

Misallocation of Baseball Bats and Telescopes

There are two more examples of guilt from, as I like to call it, "the misallocation of funds" that are very pervasive in the world today. The Hubble Space Telescope and Barry Bonds will be our targets. The Hubble Space Telescope cost billions of dollars. Who payed for it? Private investors and tax dollars presumably accounted for a significant amount of the cost. Barry Bonds makes millions of dollars a year in salary to play a game. Not to mention advertisement deals. Who pays his salary? Naturally, the fans do. The people who pay to go see the game, the people who buy merchandise and the people who watch the game on television and listen to it on the radio. Most people are into professional sports and are proponents of space exploration and projects like the Hubble Space telescope.

While children are dying and people are suffering from famine and disease in our own country and throughout the world we are paying billions of dollars for pictures of the Orion Nebula and to see a man hit balls over a wall. I do not mean to erect a straw man argument against space exploration or sports as a whole. Both clearly have positive and beneficial social aspects and one has intellectual benefits but there is still a clear moral deficiency here in that our money is being seriously misallocated.

Mommy needs more makeup, no dinner tonight....

To better illustrate this, suppose there was a man who wanted to explore a forest, take pictures and learn about that particular ecosystem. He had enough money to do this but he also has a daughter who badly needs an operation or she would go blind. He only has enough money for one of these. What should he do?

Clearly the moral choice is to get his daughter the operation. Yet how is the Hubble Space Telescope different from this thought experiment? Some might object and say that space exploration is beneficial to humanity in numerous ways (e.g. finding new energy sources, etc). While this is true, I do not see how exploration of Pluto is helping us find new energy sources or how it has any practical applications at this point in time. Utiliatarianism can be a very strong reason to allow one to suffer for the embettering of all but this analogy is only simplistic. We are talking about millions of suffering individuals. They should take precedence over pretty pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope. We must ask ourselves how paying Barry Bonds millions of dollars to hit home runs is ethically justifiable? Remember that in our free market economy the salaries of owners and ballplayers is fan-generated. The money these figures make is provided by the public who loves to waste eons of dollars a year on entertainment.

So then, can a moral person be a sports fan? Does not misplacing funds while so many people go without basic necessities make you irresponsible and immoral? I am not suggesting people should not have any entertainment as such activities are presumably necessary for our mental stability. The fact remains, however, that the money figures being tossed around are well past anything even remotely reasonable. Our priorities are well out of whack.

The more the unmerrier...

Another sad part of reality is our desire for more, for bigger, for better. But as the cliché's profoundly tells us, the more we have the more we want. It's a shame that creatures who have it so good do nothing but greedily desire more as we harbor private jealously of the beautiful or rich. Instead of accepting ourselves for who and where we are we secretly envy others. Do we hate ourselves that much? It would a pity since we have so much!

Life for many of our predecessors was short, cruel and brutal. Most of them were illiterate and for the most part, never owned a book. Most of them were without the equivalent of modern schooling and they rarely ventured several miles outside of their birthplaces. The summers could be brutally hot and the winters fiercely cold. There was no weather prediction like today. No snow forecasts, hurricane warnings and so on. They toiled long and hard just to provide the basic necessities for themselves. At the end of a backbreaking day there was no entertainment or relief to comfort them. No television, Nintendo, CD players, video games, Internet, going to the mall, out to a bar, sports, books, movies and so on.
They did not have hygiene and sanitation like we do. Most people probably knew firsthand the gnawing pain of hunger and chronic, debilitating disease. The average life expectancy was probably around 30 and many parents watched a good deal of their children die in infancy. Even a poor person in contemporary society today has it pretty good in today's technologically advanced world given what any of our ancestors and some of our contemporaries endure. We have so much, yet we always want so much more.

Filling a black hole....

Material things tend to simply fill voids and holes in people's lives. They help us cope with the harshness of reality. As the existentialists would say, the absurdity evident in existence. I think a quote from Peter Gomes in the Introduction of Paul Tillich's "The Courage to Be" is very accurate:
"[T]here remains at the heart of the culture a grave and disquieting anxiety. We work hard and play hard not because we are more industrious or more playful than our ancestors but because we dare not stop lest in the stillness we are overwhelmed by the sound of our own anxieties and fears. Standing on the edge of a new century and millennium, seemingly "masters of the universe," in Tom Wolfe's sardonic phrase, we live more in a world in which, as described by George Orwell in his essay "Pleasure Spots":

The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
Lest we should see where we are--
Lost in a haunted wood;
Children afraid of the dark
Who have never been happy or good." (p. Xvi-ii)

Maybe that is what baseball and HST does. It keeps us from stopping and examining ourselves and our lives. Instead we can watch Barry Bonds and we can examine a hunk of ice 40 astronomical units from earth. It is far easier to do both than it is to peer into the depths of one's own soul. But as Socrates said, "the unexamined life isn't worth living" and I don't know why but I believe him.

Lest anyone is mistaken, I do not discourage gain, working hard to get ahead or success in a general sense. I discourage not putting things into their proper perspective which will inevitably bring moderation and temperance with it. The problem is that the proper perspective of our own examined life reveals something dark and scary. Something most of us simply do not wish to face. We find ourselves as finite individuals condemned to be free, stranded in a large and dark universe pervaded with greed and injustice. More troubling is the fact that we are active agents in that injustice and even passively allow it to occur. We find ourselves guilty and worthy of condemnation and reprobation.

Why Naturalism can be "liberating".

The belief that nature is all there is, that humans are mere advanced primates with no special significance or worth is the easy way out. To embrace naturalism is to give up. Such a philosophy can liberate one from what existentialists might term, an absurd existence. If human beings have no meaning then the apparent existential meaninglessness perceived in the world is a dead horse. Naturalism can then forgive us of our lack of philanthropy and outgoing inhospitality. It can alleviate us from our irresponsibility and genuine complacency. It can delude us into thinking we are happy and good in so far as we define the terms just as someone polluting their lungs with smoke thinks the cigarrette makes them happy (feel good). It convinces us that our guilt is not real and plays hide and seek with human ideas, choice and meaning. It makes life out to be a useful fiction. In doing so it hypocritically hides from a reality it must inevitable and simultaneously embrace.

The more "humane" view is too accept our guilt as it is. We feel guilty because we are guilty. We feel sad and alone because that is the whole we dug ourselves. We are children because we do not examine our lives as Socrates told us to and embrace fantasy as if it were reality. We have been alienated from ourselves, from our neighbors and from our Creator. A giant rift exists between us. There is a hole in the world and in our lives. We try to fill it with materialistic things but the more we put into the hole the bigger it seems to get.

We must dispose of the fictions of naturalism, "modernity" and pop ideology.
We must turn down the lights.
We must lower the music.
We must examine ourselves and see where we are.
Even as children, alone and afraid in the dark.
One we know where we are...
We can then bravely walk through that forest
Lest we remain lost children forever.
Nay! We must struggle to the forest's edge.
There and only there, can we be truly happy and good.
For that is where we will find our Maker…