Why Bother Being Good?

A secular reason for morality

What’s the point in acting good? Why does it matter for someone to act with integrity, honesty and other virtuous characteristics? If you’re religious, then the answer is easy – because it’s your duty to act in this way in the eyes of God. To do otherwise guarantees damnation. However, this is a luxury most secular people don’t have, since they have no hope for a reward of afterlife. Thus, how do you justify acting virtuous if you essentially get nothing out of it? This is a question I’ve been struggling to answer for a long time and is a question that I think needs to be answered for an increasingly secularised society.

So how do we begin to answer a question as big as this? To do it, we’ll need to go back in time and experience life under brutal totalitarian rule. We’re going to answer this question by looking through the lives of 2 prolific authors of the 20th century: Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychologist who survived Auschwitz, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian soldier who survived and brought awareness to the Soviet Gulag system.

The Cycle of Suffering – A Theory of Moral Entropy

In thermodynamics, entropy is described as (and I am oversimplifying here) a transformation in energy states from usable to unusable energy. Essentially a slow decay from order to disorder. Similarly, I propose a theory of Moral Entropy, where the moral state of the world naturally decays from good to evil. Here’s my proof.

1. All Life Is Suffering

At first glance this seems like an overdramatic statement. Yes, of course terrible things happen to people, but that doesn’t mean that ALL life is suffering. What about those who are extremely rich? What about those with a decently comfortable life? I’d argue that even these people suffer. After all, if money solved the issue of suffering, then we’d see a correlation in a decrease in suicide rates and wealth.

When I talk about suffering, I’m not only talking about the suffering of people in internment camps, or of those that experience war famine and other catastrophes. Suffering can be as simple as feeling rejected by someone you care about. It can be as simple as feeling like a failure. Granted, the suffering felt in these examples is probably not as great in magnitude as the suffering of a war refugee, for instance, but it still exists.

So, when I state that all life is suffering, what I’m trying to say that everyone experiences some level of emotional pain. This emotional pain is often amplified by the fact that we tend to feel negative emotions (associated with pain) with greater intensity than positive emotions. Thus, it appears that no matter how well off you are, you cannot escape suffering.

'Pieta of Kosovo' - Georges Merillon (1991)

2. Suffering necessitates moral apathy

Think about your first heartbreak. Maybe you asked someone out and they said no. Or maybe you had a long-term relationship that ended poorly. How did you feel at that time? I could be wrong, but I’d guess you felt alone, hopeless and full of despair – or in other words, suffering. Now how did you act afterwards? I think a reasonable guess to this question would be that you started to emotionally shut yourself off. You may have become apathetic, not caring about your responsibilities.

So, if we can see a link between minor suffering and apathy, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to infer a direct link between tremendous moral suffering and moral apathy – not caring about good and evil. This is exactly what we see from Frankl in Auschwitz, and from Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag.

Frankl, a psychotherapist, often gives insight regarding his painful experiences at various Nazi concentration camps. He discusses the psychological impact of the torture endured by prisoners in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning .

Apathy, the blunting of emotions and the feeling that one could not care anymore, were the symptoms arising during the second stage of the prisoner’s psychological reactions, and which eventually made him insensitive to daily and hourly beatings. By means of his insensibility the prisoner soon surrounded himself with a very necessary protective shell.

An eerily similar phenomenon is shown in Solzhenitsyn’s book, The Gulag Archipelago . However, instead of beatings, the Russian author discusses the moral degradation caused by hunger.

Hunger, which forces an honest person to reach out and steal (“When the belly rumbles conscience flees”)…Hunger, which darkens the brain and refuses to let it be distracted by anything else at all…

So, we can conclude that if a little suffering causes a little apathy; then tremendous suffering causes tremendous apathy.

3. Moral apathy incentivises evil, producing more suffering

If you are morally apathetic, what’s to stop you from committing evil? The answer is: nothing. In fact, it almost always seems to be easier to alleviate your personal suffering by committing evil, than it is to act morally good.

Frankl often discusses how “the degenerating effects of camp” leads individuals to sacrifice their character and their morals. Prisoners start to rob rations from each other out of hunger, often under threats of violence. Moreover, they lack the will to resist the tyranny of the guards, which further incentivises acts of violence upon them. An even greater argument for this is found in Solzhenitsyn’s disturbing account of the behaviour of child prisoners (12 year old boys, specifically) in the gulag. He writes:

Some excited and frightened children ran to the nurse of a children’s colony [a child labour camp] and summoned her to help one of the comrades who was seriously ill. Forgetting caution, she quickly accompanied them to their big cell for forty. And as soon as she was inside, the whole anthill went into action!

Some of them barricaded the door and kept watch. Dozens of hands tore everything off her, all the clothes she had on, and toppled her over; and then some sat on her hands and legs; and then, everyone what he could and where, they raped her, kissed her, bit her.

If the moral apathy is sufficient, then there is no moral incentive to stop someone perpetuating the same acts of evil as these children. Thus, when they commit these heinous acts, more suffering is produced, and the cycle continues.

How Do We Break the Cycle?

The cycle of suffering seems impossible to break. Even a tiny bit of suffering could theoretically plunge everyone into a state of perpetual suffering and moral decay. And this would be depressingly true – if we didn’t have free will.

As miserable as my reading of Man’s Search for Meaning and The Gulag Archipelago have been, both provided an incredibly optimistic message at the end. Yes, it seems like people who endure tremendous suffering are doomed to commit evil and cause more suffering, but only if they choose to abandon their moral principles. In both texts, the authors provide ample evidence of people acting selflessly despite the impossible conditions, maintaining a strong conviction in their morals as an affirmation of their free will.

In fact, this is how I concluded that the reason we ought to act morally good is because it’s the only way to affirm our free will. Something I aim to explain in the next sections.

People are both good and evil

Solzhenitsyn lamented the complexity of categorising people into good and evil. He states that he wished that he could bring about utopia by rounding up the evil men and getting rid of them. But reality is never that easy. Solzhenitsyn highlights the inextricable duality of man, in that all of us are some parts good, some parts evil. No matter how hard we try, no one can eliminate evil, but by the same logic, good can never be eliminated either. He writes:

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.

Thus, even if one feels that they are irredeemably wicked, they still have a spark of good left in them. And so, they also possess a capacity to enact that good.

'The Garden of Earthly Delights' - Heironymus Bosch (c.1500)

Acting morally is the only way to affirm your free will

When you are suffering, it is easy to think you are the victim of circumstance, and that any evil you commit is not your fault. Such a perspective is always a failure to affirm your own free will. When you do this, you submit yourself as nothing more than a machine following its programming. this is because you failed to choose the path of inner freedom, deciding to let your environment mould you instead. Frankl states this more eloquently than I ever could:

And there are always choices to make. Everyday, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you became a plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become moulded in the form of a typical inmate.

Conclusion

A secular reason to act morally, is something that is going to be increasingly needed in an increasingly secular world. As traditions start to change, the moral foundation of society will be upset and need to be replaced. I hope that what I’ve written in this article will convince you of the absolute need to have strong moral convictions, even if you’re not religious. I also strongly recommend reading both Man’s Search for Meaning and The Gulag Archipelago for more context behind what I’ve written here. But to end, I’d like to finish with the following quote by Frankl.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

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