How can groups of good people do bad things? How can people with kind hearts and “good souls” perpetuate harm? This will be no mystery to most thinking people in the 21st century—behaving kindly to those around you does not mitigate the harm that the systems that you uphold and/or benefit from cause. According to Iris Marion Brown, most modern injustices are structural rather than malicious. As Hannah Arendt famously demonstrated in her “banality of evil” argument, seemingly “good” and “normal” people can cause tremendous harm when they are embedded in bad systems. This is because modern bureaucratic systems enable ordinary, respectable, conscientious people to participate in horrible atrocities without personally having sadistic intent.
Arendt was part of a cadre of thinkers who realized that modernity demands more complex ethical systems than traditional moral systems can provide us. This is because, as Hans Jonas argues in The Imperative of Responsibility, traditional moral systems emerged to address simple, interpersonal relationships in a world where most individuals had relatively little power beyond their immediate spatial and temporal surroundings. For most of history, most people’s actions were local, with short-lived effects. Under those conditions, ethical systems—from Aristotle to Kant—focused on how individuals should treat other individuals in the present. Technology and globalization change all of that. Today, our actions occur within vast, globalized systems, with profound implications for faraway peoples, non-human species, and the biosphere itself. The way we live our everyday lives—especially in the “developed” world—is necessitating harmful labor practices, devastating local ecosystems, fueling resource wars, and permanently altering the climate. Traditional moral frameworks are wholly inadequate for navigating these systemic, aggregating, and mediated harms. What we need instead, Jonas argues, is an ethical system that is committed to taking responsibility for the distant consequences of our actions—one that is far more about systems than interpersonal dynamics. As Jonas puts it, we must “act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life on Earth.”
This is tricky, because there is no intuitive or inbuilt hedonistic feedback mechanism associated with behaving responsibly in this way. As Zygmunt Bauman argued in Modernity and the Holocaust, humans evolved moral intuitions for face-to-face relationships. In most cases, it feels good to treat people well interpersonally, and it feels bad to treat them poorly—mostly because we can be present to directly witness the impact of our actions. But, since modern society distributes action across vast systems, we do not feel the pain of the child laborers who mine our rare earth minerals or the future generations who will live in a damaged biosphere. Nor will we feel the joy of a distant person who is freed from toil or a future person who gets to enjoy a life on a bountiful planet. This, Bauman thinks, is at the heart of the widening gap between the scale of our power and the scale of our moral perception.
A fascinating outcome of this is that our culture grows increasingly paranoid, as harm continues to circulate without many clear villains. We witness the rise of populisms (on the right, left and center) that point fingers at groups of people and blame our problems on them. We cultivate progressively implausible definitions of malicious intent, while ignoring the everyday sources of structural harm. We search for those who are “guilty,” rather than pausing to ask: “how are we collectively producing this outcome?”
Meanwhile, we see many people retreating into what we might call (after Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s concept of “folk politics,” which critiques political approaches that rely on immediacy, localized action, and "human-scale" organizing, while often lacking the institutional strategies required for large-scale systemic change), “folk morality”: focusing on interpersonal relationships and being a “good person”—and, conversely, judging those who fail to do this. The point is not to reject everyday ethical behavior (it matters a lot!); the point is that the virtues of being a good person tend to be hoarded by privileged classes and individuals (see Catherine Liu’s writings on the professional-managerial class’s relationship to wellness culture here), and that it can also obscure or even perpetuate systemic harms. As Joan Tronto writes about the limitations of care ethics, when we focus on the wellbeing of our own children, families, neighborhoods and communities, this can prioritize care and resources away from those who really need them. Our drive to secure safety, abundance, order and convenience for our own families and communities can be a driver of political, economic and ecological exploitation elsewhere and elsewhen. Even interpersonally, a strong sense of ingroup belonging can actually drive or motivate outgroup exclusion. These are many of the ways that folk morality can actually drive harm.
Slavoj Žižek claims that the western, liberal obsession with personal virtue is motivated by the fact that structural questions are harder to confront—that it is actually worse to be a “good” person than to feel the discomfort of coming into friction with a society whose fundamental ways of living and relating are harmful. Here, personal goodness can function as an alibi.
There is some debate to be had about whether what we need is a more advanced approach for individuals and groups to gain and evaluate moral self-understanding, or whether we simply require institutions that facilitate positive outcomes without the need for everyday people to update their own moral compasses to account for spatially- and temporally-distant consequences. In either case, the calibrating question that guides the ultimate outcome should be Hans Jonas’s: “Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life on Earth.”