Morality Doesn’t Care About Our Happiness or Discomfort
Or, It’s unbelievable that we’re living in a world where “Be as selfish as you can!” is a moral theory
👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
The flaw that people hate most in others is usually their own greatest weakness.
A father who has been smoking cigarettes his entire life wouldn’t want his son or daughter to start smoking. Even if he is the most tolerant of parents, one who may accept almost anything from his children, accepting his children imitating this deadly mistake he had made, and keeps making would be impossible.
This happens everywhere. Cheaters always gripe that others are dishonest. The liar always accuses other people of lying. Parents absolutely lose it when they see their children making the same mistakes they did.
This may seem like pure happenstance, but there’s a good reason for it.
When we look in a mirror, we dislike seeing all the flaws in our appearance, and the same thing is true when we examine other people. They, too, are like mirrors.
We are far more likely to forgive a weakness we have never experienced than one we struggle with daily.
Enough talk! On to this week’s essay. It’s about 2,100 words.
One more thing. If you find this issue valuable, can you do me a favour and click the little grey heart above? It helps get the word out about this budding newsletter. 😍
Q: Is our own happiness the moral purpose of our lives?
Imagine there’s an electrician (let’s call him Raju) working on a transformer at Star Sports during the cricket World Cup final between India and Sri Lanka in 2011.
Raju slips and falls behind the transformer — gets really wedged in there — and the electrical equipment starts repeatedly jolting him. We could get Raju free, but doing so would require that we shut the transformer down for a few minutes, interrupting the broadcast of the most important cricket match in the world.
The strict consequentialist (people who follow consequentialism, the doctrine that the morality of an action is to be solely judged by its consequences) makes an easy call here: tens of millions of people would be so sad if the feed gets cut, so, sorry, Raju, you’ll just have to stay there and get continuously zapped until your bones are visible through your skin like in cartoons.
But that answer leaves us cold. It feels wrong to let poor innocent Raju suffer so others can be happy. That’s what a lot of the problems with consequentialism boil down to, really — sometimes it simply feels like the conclusion we come to, when we tally up the total “pleasure” and “pain” resulting from a decision, just can’t be right.
Now, utilitarians (people who follow utilitarianism, the doctrine that actions are right if they are for the benefit of the majority) have a clever response to this: If we conclude that a certain action created more good than bad, but it seems like this action can’t possibly be morally permissible, well… that just means we did the calculation wrong.
When we’re totalling up the good and bad of the action, we have to consider the entire picture; that is, how much pain would be caused not just to the one innocent person who suffered, but to all people, who now know that this has happened and that our society has deemed it permissible — which means the same thing could theoretically happen to them.
Hearing that we let Raju get zapped like the robber in Home Alone 2 when he touches Kevin’s booby-trapped, electrified sink just so we could watch a cricket match would thus make a lot of people at least a little bit miserable.
So we have to add their psychological and emotional pain to Raju’s actual physical pain, which makes the total amount of “bad” far greater than we at first thought.
This is both a brilliant defence and a total cop-out, because anytime a utilitarian calculation leads to an unpleasant conclusion, the utilitarian can just tell us we did the math wrong.
But, regardless of what we do about Raju, we can agree that the intention behind both utilitarianism and consequentialism is maximising overall “good” or “happiness,” and above all, they are about doing the right thing.
Now, what if there was a school of thought that suggests the exact opposite: maximising your own happiness regardless of others?
Today, let’s talk about philosophy. More precisely, let’s about about Ayn Rand and the philosophy she introduced — objectivism — and its inherent flaws that gives us the license to do “evil” without batting an eye.
Alice O’Connor, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum (1905 – 1982), better known by her pen name Ayn Rand, was a Russian-born American novelist and philosopher who offered her readers the deal of a lifetime. Developing a nineteenth-century idea called “rational egoism” or “rational selfishness,” she suggested that the true path to moral and societal progress involves people caring only about their own happiness.
She called her theory objectivism, and it’s basically the exact opposite of utilitarianism — instead of trying to maximise pleasure and minimise pain for everyone, we do it only for ourselves. Or, as she wrote in the afterword to Atlas Shrugged:
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
This is an amazing philosophy. And not in a good way.
If our own happiness is the moral purpose of our lives, that means we’re obligated to maximise it at the expense of everything else, including, and especially, other people’s happiness.
In Ayn Rand’s world, there could be a thousand Rajus trapped behind that Star Sports generator, and I could be the only one watching the World Cup final on TV, and I’d still decide to let them all fry because I am happy and they are merely potential hindrances to my happiness. It’s bananas!
Here’s a preposterous quote of hers, wherein she takes a brave stance against “being nice”:
Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others.… The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice — which means self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction — which means the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good. Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him that dime. The issue is whether you must keep buying your life, dime by dime, from any beggar who might choose to approach you.… Any man of self-esteem will answer: No. Altruism says: Yes.
It’s surprising that a person who advocated radical selfishness and utter disdain for everyone but oneself wasn’t ignored or booed off the world stage. Even to this date, Rand has plenty of radical adherents — the “objectivists” who claim that Rand is heavily misunderstood by the general public, and that you need a certain level of “intellect” to make sense of her nonsense.
I suppose at some level, this shouldn’t be surprising. She is basically telling her readers that the only thing they need to do to be morally pure is greedily protect their own interests.
How convenient!
It’s the dietary equivalent of a book that claims you could lose weight and stay healthy by eating fried stuff and drinking Coca-Cola.
It would definitely sell a few copies.
The drawback of acting out of pure selfish reasons, even in small amounts, is that the window of what is acceptable slowly shifts and being slightly more selfish becomes easier, unless we learn to accept from the get-go that what we are doing is wrong.
The minimal harm we generate from a small bad action could be compounded if we pretend it’s not a bad action, or worse, we believe what we are doing is morally justifiable.
There’s a concept in public policy called the Overton Window, named after its inventor, American policy analyst Joseph Overton-Window. Just kidding! It’s Joseph Overton.
An Overton Window describes the range of “acceptability” a political idea has at any given time. Some ideas — say, same-sex marriage — begin as extremely unlikely, or even unthinkable.
Over time, various factors emerge in the culture — more acceptance of LGBTQ+ people generally, more gay characters on popular TV shows — and the window shifts a little, making same-sex marriage more politically possible.
As cultural norms continue to evolve (younger politicians take office, proponents engage in effective activism, people realise that we all have at least one LGBTQ+ person in our social circle), the Overton Window shifts with them, until finally the range of possibility described by the window includes same-sex marriage actually being recognised as the law of the land.
Something once unthinkable becomes possible, and then eventually it becomes reality.
Regarding our little transgressions, we see the potential problem, right? Overton Windows can represent any kind of range, including what we consider acceptable behaviour for ourselves.
For example, we know jaywalking is wrong, but we do it anyway… and then we’ve become “people who occasionally jaywalk.” No big deal! But once that’s true, it’s a short journey to becoming “people who always jaywalk.”
Then one day we can’t find a garbage can, and we think, “I mean, tossing a gum wrapper on the ground isn’t that much worse than jaywalking,” so we do that… and soon we’re littering all the time, and since littering is now acceptable we start parking illegally, which shifts our window to allow for duping contractors out of payment, and once we do that it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to cheating on our taxes, and then embezzling money, and cheating on our spouses, and smuggling endangered rhinos out of India, and selling black market weapons to Pakistan.
Now, is this likely? Of course not! That’s a deliberately absurd “what if” like my mother warning me as a kid that if I intake even a single drop of booze I’m on a fast track to becoming an alcoholic.
But there’s a serious point here: the shifting of an Overton Window often happens gradually, and we readjust to its new range very quickly, so there is risk in allowing ourselves to do anything we know is bad just because we want to.
In his phenomenal book, How to be Perfect, comedy writer Michael Schur, the creator of the shows like Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, recounts an advice given by his mentor that illustrates the concept of Overton Window excellently:
When I was writing on The Office, the showrunner (and my mentor), Greg Daniels, would warn us against jokes that made Michael Scott too cartoonishly stupid.
He would cite The Simpsons, which he’d written for, saying that in the early days of the show the staff would write a “stupid guy” joke for Homer that stretched the amount of stupid he was, hesitate, then decide to put it in an episode. Later they’d pitch another joke that made him even stupider, and they’d think…, “Well, I mean, he did say that other stupid thing last week, and this isn’t that much stupider.”
In a matter of a couple of seasons, Homer went from a kind of doofy dad to a guy so dumb he once got his arms stuck in two separate vending machines at the same time.
Now, that show is a cartoon (which makes it more palatable to have characters who are… cartoonish), and Homer’s rock-headedness is one of its greatest contributions to comedy, but Greg’s point was that even something as unimportant as the Overton Window for TV characters’ personality traits needs to be watched very closely, or things can spiral out of control.
Even with good intentions and level heads, if we give in to our lesser instincts too often there’s a far more likely outcome than “we become black market weapons dealers.”
It’s simply that we become selfish.
We start to believe that our own “right” to do whatever we want, whenever we want to do it, is more important than anything else, and thus our sense of morality concerns only our own happiness or pain.
In a sense, we become Ayn Rand, an “objectivist” who doesn’t flinch once before deciding to zap a thousand Rajus for their own happiness.
The most cursory glance at any moral theory — such as consequentialism, utilitarianism, deontology, contractualism, pragmatism, et al — sends objectivism hurtling toward the flaming garbage can of history.
It’s the flat opposite of utilitarianism. And one just cannot imagine Immanuel Kant — one of the most influential figures in Western philosophy who dedicated his whole life trying to define the very principles of ethical action — struggle through 1,172 pages of pompous writing in Atlas Shrugged and declare infinite selfishness a solid universal maxim.
And an Aristotelian in search of a golden mean (the belief that the virtue or excellence of a character trait lies in a balanced point between the extremes of excess and deficiency, such as courage being the mean between the extremes of cowardice and recklessness) would entertain a theory that tells the very concept of a golden mean to go jump off the window.
The problem is that our little moral transgressions, harmless though they might be, shift our Overton Windows ever so slightly toward a world where Ayn Rand’s goofy “rational selfishness” becomes slightly more plausible, and hence acceptable.
It’s sad that we live in a world where “Be as selfish as you can!” is somehow a mainstream moral theory. It’s out there, floating around, telling us we can do whatever we want, ignore the value of others’ lives, treat everyone else as a means to our own end, and decide we owe nothing to anyone.
Today I Learned
Humanity may have known that Halley was a repeating comet thousands of years ago. There is a reference in the Talmud to “a star that appears once in seventy years and makes the captains of ships err.” But back then it was common for humans to forget over time what they had already learned. Maybe not only back then, come to think of it.
At any rate, Edmond Halley noticed that the 1682 comet he observed seemed to have a similar orbit to comets that had been reported in 1607 and 1531.
Fourteen years later, Halley was still thinking about the comet, writing to Isaac Newton, “I am more and more confirmed that we have seen that comet now three times since ye year 1531.”
Halley then predicted the comet would return in 1758. It did, and it has been named for him ever since.
Because we so often centre history on the exploits and discoveries of individuals, it’s easy to forget that broad systems and historical forces drive shifts in human understanding.
While it is true, for example, that Halley correctly predicted the comet’s return, his colleague and contemporary Robert Hooke had already expressed “a very new opinion” that some comets might be recurring.
Even putting aside the Talmud’s possible awareness of periodic comets, other sky gazers were beginning to have similar ideas around the same time. Seventeenth-century Europe — with not just Newton and Hooke, but also Boyle and Galileo and Gascoigne and Pascal — saw so many important scientific and mathematical breakthroughs not because the people born in that time and place happened to be unusually smart, but because the analytic system of the scientific revolution was emerging, and because institutions like the Royal Society allowed well-educated elites to learn from one another more efficiently, and also because Europe was suddenly and unprecedentedly rich.
It’s no coincidence that the scientific revolution in Britain coincided with the rise of British participation in the Atlantic slave trade and the growing wealth being extracted from colonies and enslaved labour.
We must, then, try to remember Halley in context — not as a singular genius who emerged from a family of soap-boilers to discover a comet, but as a searching and broadly curious person who was also, like the rest of us, “a bubble on the tide of empire,” as Robert Penn Warren memorably put it.
That noted, Halley was brilliant. Here’s just one example of his use of lateral thinking, as discussed in John and Mary Gribbin’s book Out of the Shadow of a Giant: When asked to work out the acreage of land in every English county, Halley “took a large map of England, and cut out the largest complete circle he could from the map.” That circle equated to 69.33 miles in diameter. He then weighed both the circle and the complete map, concluding that since the map weighed four times more than the circle, the area of England was four times the area of the circle. His result was only 1 percent off from contemporary calculations.
Halley’s polymathic curiosity makes his list of accomplishments read like they’re out of a Jules Verne novel. He invented a kind of diving bell to go hunting for treasure in a sunken ship. He developed an early magnetic compass and made many important insights about Earth’s magnetic field.
Halley’s writing on Earth’s hydrological cycle was tremendously influential. He translated the Arab astronomer al-Battānī’s tenth-century observations about eclipses, using al-Battānī’s work to establish that the moon’s orbit was speeding up. And he developed the first actuarial table, paving the way for the emergence of life insurance.
Halley also personally funded the publication of Newton’s three-volume Principia because England’s leading scientific institution, the Royal Society, “rashly spent all its publishing budget on a history of fish,” according to historian Julie Wakefield.
Halley immediately understood the significance of the Principia, which is considered among the most important books in the history of science. “Now we are truly admitted as table-guests of the Gods,” Halley said of the book. “No longer does error oppress doubtful mankind with its darkness.”
Of course, Halley’s ideas didn’t always hold up. Error still oppressed doubtful humankind (and still does). For example, partly based on Newton’s incorrect calculations of the moon’s density, Halley argued there was a second Earth inside of our Earth, with its own atmosphere and possibly its own inhabitants.
Interestingly, Halley’s comet is not a monolithic spherical miniplanet flying through space. Instead, it is many rocks that have coalesced into a peanut-shaped mass — a “dirty snowball,” as the astronomer Fred Whipple put it.
In total, Halley’s dirty snowball of a nucleus is nine miles long and five miles wide, but its tail of ionised gas and dust particles can extend more than sixty million miles through space.
In 837 CE, when the comet was much closer to Earth than usual, its tail stretched across more than half of our sky.
In 1910, as Mark Twain lay dying, Earth actually passed through the comet’s tail. People bought gas masks and anti-comet umbrellas to protect against the comet’s gases.
In fact, though, Halley poses no threat to us. It’s approximately the same size as the object that struck Earth sixty-six million years ago leading to the extinction of dinosaurs and many other species, but it’s not on a collision course with Earth.
That noted, Halley’s comet will be more than five times closer to Earth in 2061 than it was in 1986.
Timeless Insight
You don’t need to be smarter than others to outperform them if you can out-position them.
Anyone looks like a genius when they’re in a good position, and even the smartest person looks like an idiot when they’re in a bad one.
When circumstances change, the person with low leverage and cash in the bank has many ways to play their hand and come out on top. On the other hand, the person with high leverage and no cash buffer has few.
Time is the friend of someone properly positioned and the enemy of someone poorly positioned.
What I’m Reading
There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
— David M. Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
Tiny Thought
Motivation comes only after action. Action creates progress. Progress creates momentum. Momentum creates motivation.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋