People are often remarkably proud of their morals and morality and pride themselves on being loyal, compassionate, and selfless, without having ever encountered a situation where they’ve been tested in these characteristics. But what I wonder is how much of our morality is actually ours and how many are the product of circumstances that have never been challenged.
Are you really loyal? Or have you simply never met someone worth betraying your partner for? Are you generous? Or have you never had enough money to understand the temptation of keeping it all? Are you honest, or have you never been desperate?
Enough for dishonesty to seem like your only option.
This whole philosophical concept makes this question interesting: moral luck. Philosopher Thomas Nagel, in his 1979 essay of the same name ‘Moral Luck’ examines how circumstances beyond our control influence the way we judge ourselves and others.
The circumstances into which we are born, the opportunities we encounter and the situations that we are placed in can all shape our moral decisions. In other words, two people with similar dispositions might lead entirely different moral lives simply because they were exposed to different circumstances.
Psychology offers rather uncomfortable evidence for this. In their famous 1973 experiment, psychologist John Darley and C. Daniel Batson conducted what became known as the good samaritan study.
I studied this experiment in my psychology class and wondered about this “morality concept” and how diffusion of responsibility and the bystander effect puts morality and people’s self-perception into question. Participants, some of whom were preparing to speak about the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan, encountered a person apparently in distress.
Surprisingly, whether participants were in a hurry was a much stronger predictor of whether they stopped to help than whether they were preparing to discuss helping others. The study demonstrated how easily situational pressures can override the values which people consciously endorse.
Perhaps, then, morality is not as stable as we would like to believe. It is relatively easy to condemn dishonesty when you have never had to choose between telling the truth and feeding your family. It is easy to preach generosity when giving something away would barely affect your standard of living. It is easy to romanticise loyalty when temptation has never presented itself in a particularly convincing form.
However, this does not necessarily mean that everyone is secretly immoral. There is a distinction between possessing a virtue and having the opportunity to demonstrate it. A person who has never been wealthy cannot be expected to prove their generosity through financial sacrifice: equally, someone who has never experienced desperation cannot be fairly judged for how they might respond to it, nor should difficult circumstances automatically excuse ever harmful decisions.
The more uncomfortable possibility is that we often mistake the absence of temptation for the presence of virtue. We congratulate ourselves for decisions we have never actually had to make. We judge people for failing tests that we have never been required to sit.
Perhaps morality is not measured by the principles we profess in comfortable circumstances, but by the decisions we make when those principles become inconvenient.
And perhaps the greatest indication of character is not how confidently we describe ourselves as good people, but how willing we are to acknowledge that, given different circumstances, we might not be. As I was writing this article, I told my mom about this concept, and she said, “Pyar karne wale ko parakhna mat, parakhne me koi apna nahi rehta.” Which, when I try to translate it loosely, means “Do not put someone who loves you to the test; for in the act of testing, no one remains your own.”
Alaika Alam is a student of Ecole Globale International Girls School, Dehradun. Views are personal.
Also read: The false hopes of modern education