‘If I take EA thinking, ethics, and cause areas more seriously from now on, how can I cope with the guilt and shame of having been so ethically misguided in my previous life?’
or, another way to put this:
‘I worry that if I learn more about animal welfare, global poverty, and existential risks, then all of my previous meat-eating, consumerist status-seeking, and political virtue-signaling will make me feel like a bad person’
(This is a common ‘pain point’ among students when I teach my ‘Psychology of Effective Altruism’ class)
I might be missing the part of my brain that makes these concerns make sense, but this would roughly be my answer: Imagine that you and everyone in your household consume water with lead it in every day. You have the chance to learn if there is lead in the the water. If you learn that it does, you’ll feel very bad but also you’ll be able to change your source of water going forward. If you learn that it does not, you’ll no longer have this nagging doubt about the water quality. I think learning about EA is kind of like this. It will be right or wrong to eat animals regardless of whether you think about it, but only if you learn about it can you change for the better. The only truly shameful stance, at least to me, is to intentionally put your head in the sand.
My secondary approach would be to say that you can’t change your past but you can change your future. There is no use feeling guilt and shame about past mistakes if you’ve already fixed them going forward. Focus your time and attention on what you can control.
My two cents: I view EA as supererogatory, so I don’t feel bad about my previous lack of donations, but feel good about my current giving.
Changing the “moral baseline” does not really change decisions: seeing “not donating” as bad and “donating” as neutral leads to the same choices as seeing “not donating” as neutral and “donating” as good.
In principle, changing the moral baseline shouldn’t change decisions—if we were fully rational utility maximizers. But for typical humans with human psychology, moral baselines matter greatly, in terms of social signaling, self-signaling, self-esteem, self-image, mental health, etc.
I agree! That’s why I’m happy that I can set it wherever it helps me the most in practice (e.g. makes me feel the “optimal” amount of guilt, potentially 0)
Seems like a more complicated question than [I could] solve with a comment
Seems like something I’d try doing one on one, talking with (and/or about) a real person with a specific worry, before trying to solve it “at scale” for an entire class
I assume my understanding of the problem from these few lines will be wrong and my advice (which I still will write) will be misguided
Maybe record a lesson for us and we can watch it?
Tools I like, from the CFAR handbook, which I’d consider using for this situation:
IDC (maybe listen to that part afraid you’ll think of yourself as a bad person, maybe it is trying to protect you from something that matters. I wouldn’t just push that feeling away)
homunculus (imagine you’re waking up in your own body for the first time, in a brain that just discovered this EA stuff, and you check the memories of this body and discover it has been what you consider “bad” for all its life. You get to decide what to do from here, it’s just the starting position for your “game”, instead of starting from birth)
Yanatan—I like your homunculus-waking-up thought experiment. It might not resonate with all students, but everybody’s seen The Matrix, so it’ll probably resonate with many.
What has helped me most is this quote from Seneca:
Even this, the fact that it [the mind] perceives the failings it was unaware of in itself before, is evidence for a change for the better in one’s character.
That helped me feel a lot better about finding unnoticed flaws and problems in myself, which always felt like a step backwards before.
I also sometimes tell myself a slightly shortened Litany of Gendlin:
What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
If X and Y make me a bad person, then...I’m already being a bad person. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse, and ignoring it doesn’t make it disappear. Owning up to it is, in fact, a sign of moral progress—as bad as it feels, it means I’m actually a better person than I was previously.
If you haven’t come across it, a lot of EAs have found Nate Soares’ Replacing Guilt series useful for this. (I personally didn’t click with it but have lots of friends who did).
I like the way some of Joe Carlsmith’s essays touch on this.
I’d recommend to some EAs who are already struggling with these feelings (and know some who’ve really benefitted from it). (It’s not precisely aimed at this but I think it can be repurposed for a subset of people.)
Wouldn’t recommend to students recently exposed to EA who are worried about these feelings in future.
I no longer think of myself as “a good person” or “a bad person”, which may have something to do with my leaning towards moral anti-realism. I recognize that I did bad things in the past and even now, but refuse to label myself “morally bad” because of them; similarly, I refuse to label myself “morally good” because of my good deeds.
Despite this, sometimes I still feel like I’m a bad person. When this happens, I tell myself: “I may have been a bad person, so what? Nobody should stop me from doing good, even if I’m the worst person in the world. So accept that you have been bad, and move on to do good stuff.” (note that the “so what” here doesn’t mean I’m okay with being bad; just that being bad has no implication on what I should do from now on)
It doesn’t mean it’s okay to do bad things. I ask myself to do good things and not to do bad things, not because this makes me a better person, but because the things themselves are good or bad.
The past doesn’t matter (except in teaching you lessons), because it is already set in stone. The past is a constant term in your (metaphorical) objective function; go optimize for the rest (i.e. the present and the future).
I think You Don’t Need To Justify Everything is a somewhat less related post (than others that have been shared in this thread already) that is nevertheless on point (and great).
I think it’s okay to feel guilty, shame, remorse, rage, or even hopeless about our past “mistakes”. These are normal emotions, and we can’t or rather shouldn’t purposely avoid or even bury them. It’s analogous to someone being dumped by a beloved partner and feeling like the whole world is crumbling. No matter how much we try to comfort such a person, he/or she will feel heartbroken.
In fact, feeling bad about our past is a great sign of personal development because it means we realize our mistakes! We can’t improve ourselves if we don’t even know what we did wrong in the first place. Hence, we should burn these memories hard into our minds and apologize to ourselves for making such mistakes. Then we should promise to ourselves (or even better, make concrete plans) to prevent repeating the same mistakes or to repair the damages (e.g., eat less or no meat, be more prudent in spending or donate more to EA causes, etc.)
Nobody is born a saint, so keep learning and growing into a better person :)
‘If I take EA thinking, ethics, and cause areas more seriously from now on, how can I cope with the guilt and shame of having been so ethically misguided in my previous life?’
or, another way to put this:
‘I worry that if I learn more about animal welfare, global poverty, and existential risks, then all of my previous meat-eating, consumerist status-seeking, and political virtue-signaling will make me feel like a bad person’
(This is a common ‘pain point’ among students when I teach my ‘Psychology of Effective Altruism’ class)
I might be missing the part of my brain that makes these concerns make sense, but this would roughly be my answer: Imagine that you and everyone in your household consume water with lead it in every day. You have the chance to learn if there is lead in the the water. If you learn that it does, you’ll feel very bad but also you’ll be able to change your source of water going forward. If you learn that it does not, you’ll no longer have this nagging doubt about the water quality. I think learning about EA is kind of like this. It will be right or wrong to eat animals regardless of whether you think about it, but only if you learn about it can you change for the better. The only truly shameful stance, at least to me, is to intentionally put your head in the sand.
My secondary approach would be to say that you can’t change your past but you can change your future. There is no use feeling guilt and shame about past mistakes if you’ve already fixed them going forward. Focus your time and attention on what you can control.
My two cents: I view EA as supererogatory, so I don’t feel bad about my previous lack of donations, but feel good about my current giving.
Changing the “moral baseline” does not really change decisions: seeing “not donating” as bad and “donating” as neutral leads to the same choices as seeing “not donating” as neutral and “donating” as good.
In principle, changing the moral baseline shouldn’t change decisions—if we were fully rational utility maximizers. But for typical humans with human psychology, moral baselines matter greatly, in terms of social signaling, self-signaling, self-esteem, self-image, mental health, etc.
I agree! That’s why I’m happy that I can set it wherever it helps me the most in practice (e.g. makes me feel the “optimal” amount of guilt, potentially 0)
Meta:
Seems like a more complicated question than [I could] solve with a comment
Seems like something I’d try doing one on one, talking with (and/or about) a real person with a specific worry, before trying to solve it “at scale” for an entire class
I assume my understanding of the problem from these few lines will be wrong and my advice (which I still will write) will be misguided
Maybe record a lesson for us and we can watch it?
Tools I like, from the CFAR handbook, which I’d consider using for this situation:
IDC (maybe listen to that part afraid you’ll think of yourself as a bad person, maybe it is trying to protect you from something that matters. I wouldn’t just push that feeling away)
homunculus (imagine you’re waking up in your own body for the first time, in a brain that just discovered this EA stuff, and you check the memories of this body and discover it has been what you consider “bad” for all its life. You get to decide what to do from here, it’s just the starting position for your “game”, instead of starting from birth)
Yanatan—I like your homunculus-waking-up thought experiment. It might not resonate with all students, but everybody’s seen The Matrix, so it’ll probably resonate with many.
What has helped me most is this quote from Seneca:
Even this, the fact that it [the mind] perceives the failings it was unaware of in itself before, is evidence for a change for the better in one’s character.
That helped me feel a lot better about finding unnoticed flaws and problems in myself, which always felt like a step backwards before.
I also sometimes tell myself a slightly shortened Litany of Gendlin:
What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
If X and Y make me a bad person, then...I’m already being a bad person. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse, and ignoring it doesn’t make it disappear. Owning up to it is, in fact, a sign of moral progress—as bad as it feels, it means I’m actually a better person than I was previously.
If you haven’t come across it, a lot of EAs have found Nate Soares’ Replacing Guilt series useful for this. (I personally didn’t click with it but have lots of friends who did).
I like the way some of Joe Carlsmith’s essays touch on this.
Wholehearted Choice and Morality as Taxes.
Care and Demandingness.
Much narrower recommendation for nearby problems is Overcoming Perfectionism (~a CBT workbook).
I’d recommend to some EAs who are already struggling with these feelings (and know some who’ve really benefitted from it). (It’s not precisely aimed at this but I think it can be repurposed for a subset of people.)
Wouldn’t recommend to students recently exposed to EA who are worried about these feelings in future.
My personal approach:
I no longer think of myself as “a good person” or “a bad person”, which may have something to do with my leaning towards moral anti-realism. I recognize that I did bad things in the past and even now, but refuse to label myself “morally bad” because of them; similarly, I refuse to label myself “morally good” because of my good deeds.
Despite this, sometimes I still feel like I’m a bad person. When this happens, I tell myself: “I may have been a bad person, so what? Nobody should stop me from doing good, even if I’m the worst person in the world. So accept that you have been bad, and move on to do good stuff.” (note that the “so what” here doesn’t mean I’m okay with being bad; just that being bad has no implication on what I should do from now on)
It doesn’t mean it’s okay to do bad things. I ask myself to do good things and not to do bad things, not because this makes me a better person, but because the things themselves are good or bad.
The past doesn’t matter (except in teaching you lessons), because it is already set in stone. The past is a constant term in your (metaphorical) objective function; go optimize for the rest (i.e. the present and the future).
I think You Don’t Need To Justify Everything is a somewhat less related post (than others that have been shared in this thread already) that is nevertheless on point (and great).
I think it’s okay to feel guilty, shame, remorse, rage, or even hopeless about our past “mistakes”. These are normal emotions, and we can’t or rather shouldn’t purposely avoid or even bury them. It’s analogous to someone being dumped by a beloved partner and feeling like the whole world is crumbling. No matter how much we try to comfort such a person, he/or she will feel heartbroken.
In fact, feeling bad about our past is a great sign of personal development because it means we realize our mistakes! We can’t improve ourselves if we don’t even know what we did wrong in the first place. Hence, we should burn these memories hard into our minds and apologize to ourselves for making such mistakes. Then we should promise to ourselves (or even better, make concrete plans) to prevent repeating the same mistakes or to repair the damages (e.g., eat less or no meat, be more prudent in spending or donate more to EA causes, etc.)
Nobody is born a saint, so keep learning and growing into a better person :)
Kiu—I agree. It reminds me of the old quote from Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810):
“If you won’t be better tomorrow than you were today, then what do you need tomorrow for?”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nachman_of_Breslov