Lately, I’ve been thinking about the difference between not doing something bad, and actually doing something good, which sounds a lot like one of those obvious distinctions that everyone understands (at least, intellectually), yet somehow still manages to miss in practice (myself very much included, I should add, because I’m certainly not writing this from any kind of moral high ground).
There’s a gap between these two positions which is deceptively small on paper, yet unquantifiably vast in lived experience. For example, not harming someone is fundamentally passive; it requires only restraint, a moral holding pattern where one simply refrains from making things worse. But actually helping someone (supporting them, inspiring them, genuinely improving their situation) requires initiative. It requires effort. It necessitates a willingness to extend oneself beyond the comfortable boundaries of non-interference. And I think we seem to have collectively decided as humans, in some bizarre and Jungian unconscious agreement, that the former is sufficient, while the latter is optional (perhaps even admirable, but certainly not expected).
This thought reminded me of something I came across in gratitude research (because, of course, I went down that rabbit hole), which found that deliberately practicing gratitude (you know, the whole gratitude journal phenomenon) has minimal-to-no measurable effect on mental health; meanwhile, receiving gratitude from others has profound positive impacts. That’s fascinating, no? What it suggests is that we’re fundamentally hardwired to care for and help others rather than the individualistic self-optimisation placed on a cultural pedestal today. The act of doing good for others and having it recognised creates something so essential that we can’t manufacture it through introspection alone. That’s because we are not designed to simply exist in our own heads, congratulating ourselves for not being terrible people; we’re meant to actively participate in making things better for the people around us, and the absence of that participation (the choice to remain morally neutral) might actually be a kind of slow spiritual starvation (or psychological, emotional, whatever framework you’re operating on).
My spouse said something the other night that’s been rattling around in my head ever since. They mentioned that they appreciated how when I recognise something as morally wrong, I simply stop doing it rather than construct an elaborate rationalisation to continue (I’m uncertain of the veracity of this pronouncement). And this observation, which was probably meant as a compliment but has instead sent my spiralling into existential reflection, got me thinking about how it’s become normalised to live with these massive contradictions in ourselves, between what we claim to believe, and what we actually do. It’s not the contradictions per se that are the inherent problem (we’re human and so moral failings are inevitable), but it’s the intellectual dishonesty of refusing to acknowledge them. To bury one’s head in the sand.
The unreconciled gap reveals something about our modern human nature, I think. The initial moral compromise is almost expected, but the refusal to see it clearly is what corrupts us. We’ve—at least those of us grown in the westernised world—somehow decided that maintaining cognitive consistency between our values and our actions is naïve or unsophisticated, and that truly mature people understand that moral integrity is optional: everyone’s doing it, so what’s the big deal? But there’s a stark difference between genuine humility about moral complexity (which I firmly believe is necessary and wise) and merely avoiding accountability to your own convictions (or lack thereof) because accountability is uncomfortable.
What’s the actual benefit of this self-deception? I still don’t understand. Your conscience knows. The people around you often know. So, who exactly are you fooling? I suppose the culprit is that we’re trying to avoid pain, loss, or a wounded ego, the discomfort of admitting we’ve failed by our own standards (for those who still have them). But isn’t it ultimately more prudent, more sensible even, to simply acknowledge the failing and correct course? I’m not saying it’s easier—it’s definitely not easier—but avoiding the problem just creates more problems, and then what? We sit in the fire we lit and complain it’s hot?
This connects back, in a roundabout way, to that initial distinction between avoiding harm and actively pursuing good. Because I think we apply the same intellectual dishonesty to both: we tell ourselves that not being actively bad is sufficient (that it’s even goodness itself to not be bad) and that neutrality is a morally defensible position, when really we know, somewhere beneath all those rationalisations, that we’re capable of more, that we’re meant for more, that the boundary between mediocrity and genuine goodness lies precisely at the point where we stop merely refraining from negative actions and start consciously manifesting care, attention, and effort directed towards improving things for other people.
Some, if not most, of us have been living in the camp of “do no harm” for so long that we’ve almost forgotten what it looks like to “do good”.