If you think you are not ignorant, i.e. you think you understand the world quite well, then you don‘t know about the vastness of things you don‘t understand. Ergo you are ignorant. If you are wise - in the sense that you know that you know only very little of what could be known - you are aware of the fact that you are ignorant, but - of course - still ignorant.
But guiltiness requires that you understand why you do the things you do and what the long term consequences of your actions will be. Both of these conditions are only satisfied to a negligibly small degree.
The motivations for our actions are shaped by an evolutionary process over many millions of years. We have (almost) no records about this vast past and accordingly understanding ourselves is extremely difficult.
And, due to the extreme complexity of the dynamics of the universe, predictions about the future are only reliable for very very short timespans. If you drop a glass it will likely shatter a second later. But to predict tomorrow's stock market prices is already almost impossible.
The goals effective altruists are pursuing - to gain control over a distant future to avoid suffering, are simply objectively impossible to achieve.
And even in the unlikely case that the conditions stated above seem to be satisfied, you should be also able to construct feasible alternative actions, in case you know for sure that your initial plans will do harm. This is often very difficult, because we are restricted in many ways by social norms of the society we live in (which we also understand only very poorly).
As a result: we are always too ignorant to be guilty.
Therefore, killing me right now with your axe would not make you guilty? Precisely! Maybe in a thousand years some scientists would prove that exactly this seemingly brutal act actually saved thousands of lives by preventing a tornado forming in Siberia [1]. Or maybe I was anyway planning to suicide and you made it much easier for me. Or I would die a painful death from cancer very soon anyway. So killing me might be even a great thing to do. But - of course - maybe also not [2]. For your decision it does not matter much, because you cannot possibly know.
So there is no need to be ashamed for harming me. But - and this is important - you should in this case still be ashamed: for stupidly hurting yourself. Because the miserable feeling you have while killing me (and possibly many years afterwards) is for sure real. And It cannot be made undone, it’s a sure damage. Into eternity. And it was clearly a result of your decision.
I know what you are thinking now: „If everybody starts to do what she/he wants, because nobody feels guilty anymore for their evil actions, the world will drown in brutal bloody violence and chaos“.
But surprisingly this is not true. In fact, pretty much the contrary would happen in this case.
Why does this last statement feel so obviously absurd? This simply cannot be true! Or?
If a government would tell people that from now on everybody can do whatever he/she wants, the outcome would indeed be most likely disastrous (I think there are even some popular movies based on this idea).
But: what people think they need to do to improve their situation is not what they would really like to do. In this sense, they would not do what they truly want to do.
How could this happen and why are we not even aware of it?
Our desires are, contrary to popular belief, not static (as it's probably the case for most animals). Our behavior is heavily dependent on our personal history of experiences which in turn depends on the environment we live in (nature, society etc.). And we have somehow managed to create a world which requires us to choose actions we don’t like to do all the time. Therefore, people are not evil or savage by nature, but the abundance of evilness we observe today is actually our own creation.
The fact that the frequency of evil behavior seems to increase continuously, shows that this kind of behavior cannot be explained as the result of static human behavior: there must be a process creating it.
Nobody can be blamed for this. It was a very long and unconscious process. And, again surprisingly, the reason for the huge mess we are in today was the development of (some) consciousness and advanced rational thinking in humans many thousand years ago. We started to distrust our built-in „strategic computer“ (which guided us well for millennia by making us desire the achievement of certain goals like drinking, eating, mating, hunting and often being lazy). We started to believe that - by overriding this machine with discipline and diligence - we could improve our lives.
Unfortunately, this ideas did - in the long run - not have the effects we hoped for, but ended in a collective disaster.
In some of the following blog posts I will try to bring a bit more clarity to this idea and explore various aspects of it in more detail. And hopefully prove my point. Slowly, post by post. Please be patient and stay tuned.
[1] There are no tornadoes in Siberia today, but this might change in a thousand years
[2] I have no plans to suicide and I also only very rarely cause storms. I hope.
So you might want to leave your axe at home.
Bild: Alexas_Fotos / Pixabay (thank you!) (Yes, it's a cat picture. So finally the internet has one too)
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