I promised some people longer responses:
Thomas Cotter asks why people think “consistency” is an important moral value. After all, he says, the Nazis and Soviets were “consistent” with their evil beliefs. I’m not so sure of his examples - the Soviets massacred workers striking for better conditions, and the Nazis were so bad at race science that they banned IQ tests after Jews outscored Aryans - but I’m sure if he looked harder he could find some evil person who was superficially consistent with themselves.
Hen Mazzig on Twitter is suspicious that lots of people oppose the massacres in Gaza without having objected equally strenuously to various other things. Again, he’s bad at examples - most of the things he names are less bad than the massacres in Gaza - but I’m sure if he looked harder he could find some thing which was worse than Gaza and which not quite as many people had protested. Therefore, people who object to the massacres in Gaza must be motivated by anti-Semitism.
An r/TrueUnpopularOpinion poster argues that No One Actually Cares About Gaza; Your Anger Is Performative. They say that (almost) nobody can actually sustain strong emotions about the deaths of some hard-to-pin-down number of people they don’t know, and so probably people who claim to care are virtue-signaling or luxury-believing or one of those things.
Since 2/3 of these are about Gaza, we’ll start there. And since there’s so much virtue-signaling and luxury-believing going around these days, I assure you that what I am about to share is my absolute most honest and deepest opinion, the one I hold in my heart of hearts.
A few months ago, I read an article by an aid worker in Gaza recounting the horrors he’d seen. Among a long litany, one stood out. A little kid came into the hospital with a backpack. The doctors told him he had to put it down so they could treat him, and he refused. The doctors insisted. The kid fought back. Finally someone opened the bag. It was some body part fragments from the kid’s dead brother. He couldn’t bear to leave him, so he carried them everywhere he went.
I am a Real Man and therefore do not cry. But I confess to getting a little misty at this story, and I know exactly why. When my 1.5-year-old son wakes up early, the first words out of his mouth when I extract him from his crib are “Yaya? Yaya?” which is how he says his sister Lyra’s name. No matter how I distract him, he’ll keep saying “Yaya? Yaya?” and pointing at the door to her room until she wakes up, at which point he’ll get a big smile and run over to her. It’s impossible for me to read this story without imagining her body parts in the backpack and him saying “Yaya? Yaya?” in an increasingly distressed voice, over and over again, until the doctors drag him away.
So my absolute most honest and deepest opinion on the war in Gaza, the one I hold in my heart of hearts, is: I would kill everyone in the entire region, on both sides, if it would give that kid his brother back.
Probably this is why God doesn’t connect people’s heart-of-hearts directly to their motor cortex. Instead, He wisely intermediates other brain regions with names like “anterior cingulate gyrus” and “dorsolateral prefrontal area”, the places where rationality happens. When I use my anterior cingulate gyrus and dorsolateral prefrontal area, I have thoughts like these:
Probably there are many other people in that region who have stories which are objectively just as sad as that boy’s, but not precisely targeted to my personal heart-strings.
Probably there are many other people in that region who have stories which would tug on my heart-strings just as much if I knew about them, but nobody has written articles about them. Or someone did, but I didn’t read them.
Even if I could kill everyone in the region to get that kid his brother back (how? some kind of deal with the Devil?) probably some of those people who I killed would have brothers, and some of those people would meet aid workers who would write sad articles, and then I’d be sad about them.
If my country were being bombed, and my kids were being killed, and someone in another country had the capacity to affect the situation - even in the tiniest of ways - I would want that person doing the most sophisticated utility-maximization possible, not making semi-random bad decisions based on who got sympathetic articles written about them or tugged at their heart-strings the most.
If I were to get all Kantian about it, I would say it feels beneath my dignity as a rational being to let my opinion on important world affairs be determined by which journalist managed to get the most horrifying story in front of my eyeballs today - and maybe pivot to the opposite side tomorrow when someone else catches my attention.
Instead I try to have general principles. It’s bad to kill people. It’s bad to make people suffer. Then I add epicycle upon epicycle - is there a principle that countries which suffer terrorist attacks have the right to defend themselves? If no, then kids might lose their siblings in terrorist attacks that haven’t been disincentivized; if yes, that “defense” might produce “collateral damage”. Is there a principle that people who have had their land stolen can launch terrorist attacks to get it back? If yes, those terrorist attacks might kill kids’ siblings; if no, land-stealing might be so costless that rights become meaningless and the world devolves into constant colonial conflict, which seems like the sort of thing where lots of siblings might die. I won’t mention where I stand on these questions - partly because I don’t want to start WWIII in the comments, partly because I’m not that sure myself - but I want to defend considering them. But at the end of considering them, I should treat whatever answer I get not as an alternative to doing something about my grief at the few stories that really catch my attention, but as an apotheosis of that grief - a stronger, more rigorous version of that grief, better by its own values and more capable of achieving its own goals.
I already know how some of you are going to respond. You’ll say that caring about a kid in Gaza because they passingly resemble my own kids is a misfire, a chance coincidence of emotional circuits. I should simply care about my own kids directly. But even caring about my own kids is a shaky alliance between my heart of hearts and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. There are moments when I catch my kids smiling at me, and I know in my heart of hearts that I love them more than life itself and would do anything for them. There are also moments - usually when my son is throwing a tantrum - where I want to strangle him. Being a good parent involves this same process of deciding that a rational being shouldn’t be whirled back and forth by random emotions all the time - loving his kids one moment and strangling them the next. It’s transmuting transitory emotions into trustworthy principles like “I love my children all the time and want the best for them”. I could not love you so, my dear, loved I not Honor more.
(also, real evolution fans don’t even love their own children - they donate to sperm banks and let other people invest resources in raising them. All human values disappear if you zoom out too far or zoom in too far - so what? So don’t do that.)
So here is my response to all three of the people I said I owed responses to.
To Thomas: consistency matters because it’s how morality forms in the first place. Everybody has some moral impulses. Those become principles only under the influence of a desire for consistency and for the dignity of a rational being. Hitler was a vegetarian, so he must have had some aversion to cruelty. That plus a dollar will buy you a soda a desire for consistency can prevent you from being history’s greatest villain.
To Hen: absent a level of perfect angelic rationality that no one has, we will never complete the process of generalization. Part of us will remain undignified slaves to whatever we hear heart-wrenching media stories about, whatever reminds us of people we know, and whatever sparks enough controversy to keep our attention. I can be sad about 9-11 even if I forgot to condemn a terrorist attack in Ougadogou two weeks earlier; I can be sad about the Holocaust even if I've never cried equally hard reading a book about the Taiping Rebellion, I can see my own kids in Columbine victims even if I have failed to see them in children affected by hookworm in Uganda. I’m not even sure I want to become a perfectly rational angelic being who has generalized every principle to the maximum extent - it sounds scarily inhuman. But to the extent that I do generalize, I would like to at least consider generalizing in the direction of more empathy (this one kid tugs at my heart - maybe I should also care about the war in Sudan!) rather than always in the direction of callousness (I didn’t notice the war in Sudan when it was happening - perhaps I’m not allowed to care about this kid either).
To the anonymous Redditor: no, I can’t actually feel emotions about everyone in Gaza, and I’m not sure anyone else can either. This doesn’t mean concern must be virtue signaling or luxury beliefs. It just means that it requires principle rather than raw emotion. One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. But if you’re interested in having the dignity of a rational animal (a perfectly acceptable hobby! no worse than trying to get good at Fortnite or whatever!) then eventually you notice that a million is made out of a million ones and try to act accordingly.
