Veganism: We adopt dishonest discourse to maintain unity between our moral beliefs and selfish goals
Whether or not our moral beliefs are manifested in our verbal discourse or behavior, hinges on their potency, and the competing potency of selfish goals which oppose them
Moral beliefs capture our attention fleetingly, not so much an advisory council to our daily rituals, rather, a quick skivvy of tomorrow’s front pages, a symbolic interval to our perpetual foraging, or a token half-time Super Bowl singalong.
Conversely, selfish goals tend to cram the playing field, consuming the best part of, and guiding our attention. As agents for our zingy pleasures, selfish goals conspire to lead and govern our behavior.
This may or may not be, due to our cultural norms, aiding and abetting our selfish goals, incorporating them into prominent features of our cultural landscape, while paying lip service to our moral beliefs, but resisting their practical integration.
Have our moral beliefs become a lethargic parody of their former selves? A blubbering regurgitation of nostalgic goodwill? Single-use ideas once uttered destined for barren moral clutter, orbiting our selfish goals like torn bits of Obi-Wan’s cape circling the Death star?
Perhaps, moral ideas were cooked-up by Silicon Valley to fade into oblivion, or self-destruct on cue, before having any chance of bending our cultural outlines.
Moral injustices within which we are culturally complicit can vanish from our world view in an instance, cocooned by our enduring selfish haze, never to re-penetrate our consciousness with the same vigor and much less still, as catalysts for scrutinizing the outcomes of our behavior.
Contemplation of our most agonizing moral misery can even seem to serve our selfish goals; a yearning for moral melancholy, fuel to fire-up an intoxicated evening of moral pontification, or as means to peacock one’s own moral concern credentials.
In the absence of a coherent set of mutually agreed moral truths our moral beliefs seem fragmented and often divide our public discourse.
This is not to say that moral truths cannot or do not exist, but rather that they too often appear volatile. Far from being reassuringly precise instruments, they feel clumsy.
Yet whatever we throw at them, no matter how bleakly we pity them with tales of hypocrisy and impotency, moral concerns remain our best or only source of restorative relief — in a sweltering, often conflicted, cultural panorama.
And when we consciously reflect on moral rights and wrongs, that is without paying heedence to the colossal pressure exerted on us by our selfish goals, we can be effortlessly impartial, empathetic and charitable.
So why do we struggle to agree on a moral framework that can dictate our collective moral discourse and behavior?
Is it the innate nature of moral beliefs to be patchy? Or can we explain away the rugged texture of our moral landscape by its awkward amalgamation with our selfish goals?
Selfish goals encourage dishonest moral discourse
Moral beliefs do not necessarily define how we think and behave, they indicate how we should think and behave.
In other words, expressing our allegiance to a moral belief should imply that our behavior is in compliance with that moral belief.
For example, the moral belief ‘killing chickens is wrong’ is not merely an expression of preference, rather, it strongly suggests that we do not engage in any behavior that necessitates the killing of chickens.
But, if it is the case that we are invigorated by our selfish goals to actually eat chickens, we may be reluctant to express moral beliefs regarding the well-being of chickens.
That is, where our selfish goals conflict with our moral beliefs we often modify our moral beliefs for no good reason, other than to avoid the potential negative social costs of not doing so.
The social costs in this case, would be having to explain the discrepancy between believing the statement ‘killing chickens is wrong’, but all the while eating chickens.
So, we modify our moral discourse because we are reluctant to incur the social costs of admitting that our moral beliefs are incompatible with our selfish goals.
We routinely generate a dishonest narrative so that our behavior appears to make sense. And in doing so we maintain a sense of unity between our moral beliefs and selfish goals.
It seems, while we may be against dishonesty in a public forum, we are often covertly for it, in ways that our selfish goals have sanctioned.
So, it is not our moral beliefs themselves that are wayward or erratic, but rather their public persona, how we express them, or not as the case may be.
Selfish goals legitimize non-compliance with moral beliefs
We do not always express dishonest moral beliefs. It is also common to express an honest moral belief, without ever feeling compelled to comply with it.
Think of the epic struggles we often face in order to act according to commonly held moral beliefs, ‘I should lose weight’, ‘I should be faithful’, ‘I should be honest’, and so on.
The fact that we can fail in our endeavor to comply with these moral beliefs does not necessarily mean that we negate their validity. We simply negate the validity of the notion of compliance as a prerequisite for holding a moral belief.
Indeed, it can be culturally acceptable to purposefully act according to selfish goals which clearly undermine our moral beliefs. Or, at least we often seem to downplay the gravity of any misalignment between our selfish goals and moral beliefs.
This cultural legitimization of non-compliance with moral beliefs exists because, implicitly or explicitly, we know that our ability to act in accordance with our moral beliefs is contingent on our selfish goals.
Manifestation of moral beliefs hinges on their potency
Instead of rigid ‘true’ or ‘false’ statements, moral beliefs and selfish goals are more precisely expressed as values of ‘potency’.
For example, it is not very precise to state whether I believe ‘killing chickens is wrong’. It is more precise to state, how wrong, I believe it is to kill chickens.
We might express levels of potency for moral beliefs as:
- ‘I believe killing chickens is very very wrong’
- ‘I believe killing chickens is very wrong’
- ‘I believe killing chickens is wrong’
Similarly, we can have a spectrum of potency for selfish goals:
- ‘I really really want to eat chicken’
- ‘I really want to eat chicken’
- ‘I want to eat chicken’
Expressed according to potency, we have a clearer understanding of the balance of power in the relationship between moral beliefs and selfish goals.
Clearly, it is possible to agree with the statement ‘I believe killing chickens is wrong’ yet also agree with the statement ‘I want to eat chicken’.
And, if a person’s selfish goal to eat chicken is more potent than their moral belief that doing so is wrong, then the former selfish goal, and not the latter moral belief, will govern their behavior.
So, whether or not our moral beliefs are actually manifested in our verbal discourse or behavior, hinges on their potency, and the competing potency of any selfish goals which may oppose them.
