Moral Compensation Stories

The trap of using "good" deeds to justify "bad" ones.

Good Deeds as “Credit”

When someone has performed many actions or deeds toward others that are regarded as “good,” they may be tempted to believe those actions constitute a kind of intangible capital.

Some people see doing good as building up “credit” – an intangible right that counter-balances the “bad” things you may do in the future.

This intangible capital can be seen as a form of credit – an “asset” – that legitimizes a certain number of selfish actions with negative repercussions for others.

The idea is that you can basically spend this “credit” by actually hurting others – and that hurting others would be okay, because you earned it by doing “good” actions or deeds to make up for it.

These selfish actions, which have negative repercussions for others, are considered “legitimate” in light of the many “good” actions previously performed. We feel entitled to act selfishly, causing harm to others, on the basis of past “good” deeds, as if this were a legitimate form of “moral compensation.”

It’s like a scale with “good” deeds on one side and “bad” deeds on the other. You believe that you are entitled to add things to the “bad” side – hurting people – because you believe you accumulated enough deeds on the “good” side to make up for it.

Treating People as Fungible

Within this framework, people are treated as fungible – interchangeable – so if I have helped ten people, I may think I can safely harm one, making a simple arithmetic calculation as if dealing with banknotes or other interchangeable objects.

If I hurt one person, I can make up for it by doing a good deed for any other person. From this perspective, people are treated as objects, not as individuals. This is fungibility applied to human beings – treating people as if one can be replaced by any other.

Seeing people as fungible – an inevitable consequence of “moral compensation” – or interchangeable means treating them as mere objects rather than individuals.

But people are not objects. Every person has his own subjective feelings. If you hurt one person and do a good deed for another, the first person doesn’t benefit. He is still hurt. Saving one person does not make up for killing a different person.

“Moral compensation” is a direct consequence of treating people as objects instead of individuals.

If you see people as interchangeable, then you must necessarily see them as objects, not as individuals. You can rationalize harm. You can separate the experience of suffering from the person who is suffering. Suffering and people become fungible. Individuals with their own subjectivity are reduced to “entries in a ledger” that can be balanced elsewhere.

The only way to do “moral compensation” is to see people as objects.

In “moral compensation,” each individual – rather than being seen as the bearer of individual subjectivity – is seen only as a fungible material object, to be added to or subtracted from other objects, interchangeable and indistinguishable at the individual and subjective level.

They are treated as quantities rather than as individuals.

If people were seen as individuals rather than objects, “moral compensation” would not happen.

It would be impossible to do “moral compensation” if people treated people as individuals, each of whom has his own subjectivity. When they are treated as interchangeable commodities, no more unique than one cup of sugar exchanged for another, “moral compensation” occurs.

Every time we treat people merely as quantities, engaging in “moral compensation,” we relegate them to the status of simple, fungible objects rather than seeing them as human beings.

Anyone who engages in “moral compensation” is always a selfish person, thinking only of themselves. “Good” deeds are performed solely for the sake of the “credit” accumulated in doing so and the possibility of using this “credit” in the future. This future “credit” may include both material benefits and the idea of securing a place in “heaven” after death. “Buying” a place in “heaven” is also an action motivated entirely by self-interest. Within this dynamic, others are seen merely as “objects” to be used for our own selfish ends, with no regard for their individuality.

If you engage in “moral compensation,” it is a symptom that you believe that everybody else is an object – which is the same as believing that you are the only person who exists: There is just you, no one else.

Other people become nothing more than interchangeable “units” in your personal “moral” accounting. They do not exist as individuals with their own subjectivity. They exist only for your justifications.