Doing the Right Thing

What’s in it for Me?

Photo by Khadeeja Yasser on Unsplash

Objectively we know that no person or object stands alone or apart. We and everything else are merely a strand in a web of interrelated events and objects. Natural science tells us as much. Our intuition tells as much.

But our experience is somewhat different because our consciousness is, or at least appears to be, individual, centred and private. What I experience seems to be unique to me, and it must therefore be the case that each separate mind and brain is the seat of an individual consciousness too.

This makes morality and moral decisions problematical. Objectively, you are just as important as me. All human beings are unique and equal. But I don’t necessarily treat other human beings in that way. Rather, I reserve a special treatment for me, for this consciousness, for the individual that I feel myself to be. Only I know myself from the inside, and this knowledge is the source of a deep attachment to whatever it is that I appear to be.

Is then morality and moral action possible? We are often told to tell the truth, to help others, to treat others as we would ourselves wish to be treated. This is the message of most religious traditions too. But if I have an eradicable sense of being something special, of being ‘me’, of being unique, do I really have an obligation to follow these precepts?

One thing we should not neglect in this dilemma is the role of compassion. In its literal sense ‘com-passion’ or ‘suffering with’ is a natural phenomenon with which we, that is our bodies and brains, are endowed. When I see the suffering of others I suffer myself. Most healthy individuals possess what have been termed ‘mirror’ neurons, brain structures and processes whereby what they see out there in the world, and in the other people who inhabit it, are to a degree felt within their own experience.

Compassion is a natural endowment and it contributes much to our sense of not wanting to hurt others. Most of us would not knowingly or deliberately cause harm to another. But in practice compassion seems to have limits. It helps us stop doing certain harmful actions but alone it does relatively little to encourage us to minimise the suffering that is caused by others or indeed meted out by others to themselves.

Compassion means that I suffer too, I suffer with, but it does not necessarily prevent me from looking away from the suffering of others; indeed, by doing so I minimise the suffering that I feel. I don’t want to watch that news story; I turn off the television and think of something else. Even so, compassion remains a powerful trigger for moral action, for helping others, even though in practice we often turn away from it as too difficult to contemplate, too effortful or too painful.

Perhaps this is why within many of the Buddhist traditions emphasis is placed on that moment when the Buddha, having attained awakening, pointed his right hand toward the ground and is said to have experienced the suffering of the whole world. I often think of this image as the most terrifying experience that any human being could have. Imagine having it today, where there are almost eight billion of us that suffer (not to mention the billions of animals and other sentient creatures that suffer too). But I guess that is what makes it such a powerful statement of the Buddha’s intent to rescue all sentient beings.

Some Buddhists see this powerful surge of emotion, and the compassion it induced, as sufficient to bring the Buddha out of a state of bliss, of Nirvana, and begin to enter into practical action that might mitigate the suffering of others.

This is inspiring stuff, but can we, mere mortals, emulate it? Some would respond by saying that the Buddha was mortal, yet he achieved it. But for most of us the problem seems to lie in our individuated consciousness, the sense we have of being a self, something separate from, but directed at, the world. Of course, I can weaken this sense of selfhood through meditation and mindfulness. But how many of us can truly say that we value the experiences of others, of other bodies and minds, as much as we value the experience of the one that lies here, the one that lies closest of all? The experiences of this body as witnessed from the inside?

One way of thinking about this is to consider the distinction between fantasy and morality. Fantasy may take the form of day-dreaming, of wishing harm on one’s enemies, of wishing one’s life to be different. Such fantasies are about preserving and serving the self; that is their sole object (and therein we might add is their selective purpose). But they have obvious limitations. Fantasy doesn’t see the world as it really is; and indeed, if the Buddha is right it doesn’t even see anything real when it looks inward because the self is itself an illusory or fantasy object. So, fantasy might be comforting, but it is not telling you anything about the world as it really is or helping you to engage with anyone or anything other than your illusory self. It is simply selfish and self-serving. But still we all do it.

Yet if we value the world and our relationship with it, and if we want to better understand and engage with that world, we can exercise a more ‘moral’ perspective by treating that world, and the other sentient creatures it contains (creatures which are like each one of us in having unique experiences), as valuable (ultimately, as valuable as we feel ourselves to be).

From this perspective we can better see that ‘doing good’ is often a more rational alternative to ‘doing what feels good’. More ‘rational’ in the sense that it is more likely to tell us, and allow us to experience, what is objectively real (or to get as near to reality as finite creatures like us can ever be) and thereby allow us to understand and articulate the full range of human qualities with which we are endowed. Such a perspective helps to take us out of the shell which is the self. It helps us to take part in a dialogue with others that seeks to change the world for the better.

So, by following moral principles and by exercising compassion you are more likely to broaden your understanding and appreciation of that world, and engage with it. Of course, we can always fall into the trap of fantasising or pretending that we are ‘good’. But we can also be alert for that danger. Few of us are likely to have ‘perfect’ intentions or entirely selfless motivations. We must all, to a degree, ‘fake it until we make it’. But the effort is likely be more rewarding than a life led solely with the ‘me’ as its centre.

So, what do you get do doing the right thing? In one sense ‘you’ get nothing. Indeed, you reduce the claims and the centripetal pull of the self. But in another, more important sense, you might have moved yourself a fraction further on along that trajectory from ‘me’ to ‘not-me’. You might have better enabled yourself to see the world, everything that is not you, in a slightly more authentic manner, and to engage with it in a more authentic way. A way which puts what is there outside in the world nearer to the centre of your horizon. And nearer to the heart that feels.