Human Experience as a Moral Tragedy

As inspired by Christine Korsgaard

No te escaparás. (You will not escape.) Francisco de Goya, 1796

Prelude: A Grotesque Defense of a Kantian View of Ethics
When we make moral judgements, we usually understand them to be universal. When I witness a person on the side of the road robbing another, and I say, “Hey! That’s not fair,” I am making a statement about a moral state of affairs that I take to be true. I am appealing to a perceived moral fact. Not only that, I am also appealing to this moral fact as if the robber is subject to the same moral fact that they have merely failed to recognize—that somehow by my reminder, the robber will go, “Of course! That’s my bad. I forgot,” and make amends. (Of course, these aren’t claims without contention—most passionately from non-cognitivists—but that debate will have to be addressed another time. Please forgive me, my small and practically non-existent audience. I am but a man.)

When we take moral judgements to be universal, what I mean is that we take them to be applied in all situations, at all times, for all relevant moral agents. One of the tragedies of human existence is that, as rational creatures, we are also moral creatures. We navigate the world through normative claims: we do not act without a good reason to do so, and we do so under the guidance of certain moral understandings. It is only a handful of people without such moral understandings, but arguably, these people are irrational—whether pathologically or not. Take, for example, a psychopathic murderer who derives immense pleasure from torturing random strangers before killing them. There is one primary normative claim that happens in the mind of the psychopath when he tortures his victims: that his values and desires (those of pleasure) outweigh his victim’s (avoidance of pain). This makes a mistake; we can formulate the maxim behind his actions as such: “I will torture people in order to achieve personal pleasure.” By acting on this maxim, the torturer is communicating that he believes the maxim to be a good reason to act or a solid moral principle which people should follow. However, the idea of other people following this principle brings up an issue that might suggest the maxim is not a good moral principle after all. Most obviously, if everybody else began torturing everybody else in order to gain pleasure, then there would hardly be any pleasure left in the world because everybody would be getting tortured. This brings up a sort of teleological contradiction. In this particular example, the means we adopt to achieve the purpose of pleasure for us will be the same means that will simultaneously also bring pain for us. In this sense, we can say that the maxim fails a principle of universalizability, and as such, it fails to be a good maxim to depend our moral actions on.

Notice also how this whole process was done solely through reason. This may be a way to interpret Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. When reason is absent in our moral decision making, we grow vulnerable to becoming moral monsters.

I. Starbucks and the Rocky Mountains – An Introduction
A common sentiment you might hear in order to avoid pessimistic despair about the nature of life is, “You can do whatever you want! Make your own meaning! Don’t let others bog you down!” In fact, I just had an online discussion with one of my classmates in a philosophy class (sorry to put you in the spotlight, Josh!) where he said:

“…find yourself and feel free to do whatever you wish to do… you are born in a time where you can enjoy a Starbucks coffee and drive around Colorado and experience the wonder of it all.”

Admittedly, that sounds great. There is nothing more that I would love more to do than drink a beverage with far too much sugar and drive through the Rocky mountains on a brisk autumn day. However, here lies a counter-intuitive problem. Such an act violates our moral ideals. Ideally, we strive for and support proper business practices; such a thing is a moral good. Ideally, we strive for the remediation of climate change; such a thing is a moral good. By buying a Starbucks drink we are helping maintain a corporation with less-than-ideal business practices. By driving to the mountains, we are emitting a less-than-ideal amount of waste into the air further perpetuating climate change. Both may be considered moral “bads”.

It seems that despite this we are still hard pressed to say that driving around sight-seeing after purchasing a Starbucks mocha is morally wrong. Proposing that seems violently counter-intuitive. But that is exactly what I am doing. Put your own views under scrutiny, and chances are that you will vaguely agree with the moral goodness of boycotting businesses with bad practices and limiting gas emissions into the atmosphere. However, being overly concerned with such minor things is highly displeasurable and greatly hinders our ability to find enjoyment in many aspects of our lives. This, to me, hints to a larger problem at play.

II. Powerlessness over our Circumstances

“I am I and my circumstances, and if I do not save them then I do not save myself.”

Jose Ortega y Gasset

Let us now consider a less dramatic, more sensible example than lamentation over a lack of Starbucks in the world. To begin broadly, simple human existence necessitates some sort of harm. Let us take the basic need of hunger, for example. In order to satiate hunger, we need food, but all of our food requires plant farming. The farming of plants is harmful in the following ways. In order to preserve our crop yields, we use fertilizers and pesticides that contain harmful chemicals that animals will eventually, but should not, ingest. Harvesting fields also removes many small animals’ homes leaving them vulnerable to predation. The process of mechanically tilling land itself can also kill animals with the machinery required to do so. Whatever your moral stance on the value of animal lives, it doubt that it is controversial to say that a world void of animal suffering is a better world than a world containing animal suffering. In other words, avoiding animal suffering is a moral ideal (I may write another, more in-depth post on this at another date). However, in this example, simply to eat is to harm animals, so we violate a moral ideal by fulfilling a basic need of humans.

Another example is with construction. Modern life demands complex infrastructure whether it be for roads, housing, hospitals, and so on. The process of creating these types of infrastructure—which we may deem necessary for human survival and flourishing—requires decimation of natural land for the harvesting of natural resources and for providing room to build the infrastructure at all. This harms animals and humans alike. The animals living in these environments are suddenly without habitat so they die by starvation and predation, and the humans are affected by the byproducts of manufacturing these resources into usable materials. Accommodating 8 billion people’s infrastructure needs is not a harmless task.

Let us take another example with violence and war. Such things, it seems, are ineffably and regrettably inevitable. There will always be bad actors who wish harm upon other people. Despite our best wishes, and despite our best intentions, this will not stop. We may recognize the wrong-ness of murdering other people, but even if I have never personally murdered somebody, I cannot control the actions of others, and murder prevails.

This is now where I will make the claim that we are powerless over many aspects of our moral circumstances. Murder in the world is a moral bad, but no matter how hard I try to stop it, I never will. The same can be said about farming: it is a necessary institution. We cannot go without farming plants or else the entirety of the human population will be wiped out. The same can be said about the harvesting of natural resources. Such things are necessary evils.

Here is my point: consider any moral evil in the world, take a good hard look at it, and realize that there is nothing you can do beyond your immediate circumstances to mitigate it. This is what I mean by the section title. We are powerless over our moral circumstances; we can never reach our moral ideals. We are unable to save our circumstances, so we are unable to save ourselves. Simply existing causes harm.

We recognize moral ideals, but necessarily must break them. This is what I call powerlessness.

III. The Tragedy of Moral Experience
Now to understand our condition, we should expand on this idea of powerlessness. As stated in the prelude, humans are necessarily moral creatures. We have no choice but to recognize these moral ideals if we were to reflect on them. When we recognize these moral ideals, we also take them to be good reasons to act. When I recognize the wrongness of causing unnecessary harm, I take this to be a good reason to refrain from punching the person sitting next to me on the train unprovoked.

In order to live a good life, we have to make moral judgements about what is good, but when we do, we must also simultaneously make judgements about—and therefore recognize—what is bad. When we become aware of moral bads, we also become aware of the magnitudes in which these bads happen—often through no fault of our own.

This is how I think we should understand Schopenhauer’s declaration of life as a mistake. Recognizing the magnitude of badness is not conducive to well-being, so if I want to live a happy life, then I have to ignore these judgements, but in doing so, I would also have to resign some of my judgements of what is good.

To use an example, if I ignore the badness of the ubiquity of cancer, then I also must ignore the goodness of cancer treatment research. Then, how can I live a good life when I do not even have a full understanding of what good is? I either choose a good life or a happy life, but despite being opposed, they are knit together such that we can never actually achieve either one. I can not be good if I am happy, and I can not be happy if I am not good. Since we can never be good (I will never instantiate my moral ideals as long as I live), our happiness becomes challenged in the same breath.

This is human life as a moral tragedy. Is it not most rational, perhaps even noble, to try to be a moral person? And is this not in direct conflict with casually living our lives trying to find enjoyment?

So here it is: the tragedy of experience is found in the most fundamental part of experience—the moral. Life is fundamentally flawed because our moral interests are not in-line with what nature demands of us. When my moral interests and my well-being seem to be in direct conflict with each each other in significant places, I think this is a justifiable position.

Ought this bring despair? Hardly. Ought it bring pessimism? Probably. It should not bring despair because it merely highlights a part of our fundamental experience. I still ought to bring about moral goods (this is tautologically true), so resignation and despair hardly seems like an appropriate response. Should I not cook a meal for my sick grandmother just because doing so requires an oven that will release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere? No. You should cook a meal for you grandmother. It is only tragic that doing so requires of us a moral ill.

But this is evidence for the inherent badness of life. To do a moral good, I must first traverse through a moral evil. To experience good in life, I must first experience suffering the bad. To try to deny and avoid suffering is trying to deny a life you cannot help but to live. Let me put it this way: what can you absolutely guarantee to a newborn baby? Happiness and joy? Not particularly, they could be born with a horrible and painful birth defect. Love and care? No, they could be born into an abusive household. But what is in common between all human experience? Suffering and pain. You cannot guarantee any experience to a child except suffering and pain. If a person came up to you and told you that she experienced nothing but pain every moment of her life, would you believe her? Possibly. However, if this same person came up to you and told you that she has experience nothing but happiness and joy every moment of her life, would you still believe her? Likely not.

I will leave you with this. Where there is suffering and pain, there must also be its opposite. Laughter is only known through tears, joy is only known through sorrow, love only known through hate, and life only known through death. For what other reason is our first reaction to cry when we enter into the world? In preparation.

Thanks for reading. Much love.