A recent article published in the prestigious journal Nature, based on a vast study including 12 million individuals across 60 countries, leads to the conclusion that almost everywhere in the world it is believed that morality is in decline. This will not surprise anyone, since there are countless brilliant minds throughout the centuries, from Horace to Valerius Cato via Juvenal, who already believed that things were better before, and that the men of the past held more virtuous way in the world than their contemporaries. There are many ways to explain this misconception, and this article does just that, rightly pointing out the influence of information exposure effects and recall biases. . The study is impressive by the size of the statistical sample studied, and because it sheds light on the existence of an invariant representation of our species.
I would like here to explore further the diffuse feelings that our perception of the moral state of the world insinuates in us. Because it is not only the feeling of moral decadence that affects us, it is, beyond that, a general discomfort: the impression of being constantly tormented by a swarm of guilt that does not sting us in depth. We easily get the impression that the world is sinking into abjection without us rising to the occasion. The theme of global warming – among many others – is an appropriate illustration of this somewhat shameful apathy. We are well aware that there is an essential issue here, and, at the same time, apart from a few concessions that we believe to be virtuous, we are not doing much. Rather than an anthropological moral fact as described in the article by Nature, it is possible to imagine that this situation is quite specific to the contemporary world. To give substance to this hypothesis, I want to summon the results of two experiments whose conclusions might seem contradictory at first glance, but which can complement each other to explain why the world has become morally uncomfortable.
Outrage Level Lowered
The first appeared in 2018 in the journal Science and shows, through a series of remarkable experiments, how our brain is able to lower its threshold of detection of what is morally unacceptable. Faced with a series of evolving ethical propositions where immoral statements became increasingly rare, the subjects of the experiment began to consider perfectly innocuous propositions as offensive. In other words, the more the environment improves from the point of view of respect for moral standards, the more the individuals who live there will be indignant at facts that would have been considered acceptable some time before. Thus, progress in the fight against discrimination is accompanied by the incessant discovery of new “reservoirs” of militant anger. The level of indignation indexing to a lower floor, the objects of exasperation multiply. In this way, one can persuade oneself to live in a globally immoral world.
At the same time, an article published in July 2023 in the journal Psychological Science shows, through a longitudinal study conducted on 607 volunteers, that by dint of being confronted with the statement of reprehensible acts, individuals become less and less indignant. The subjects of the experiment received, for example, information concerning the violence that a cosmetics company inflicted on animals. It’s not that they gradually found these acts acceptable, but the violence of their indignation was inversely proportional to the number of exposures… as if there were a form of habituation. Repetition seems to have a lasting effect on moral judgments by making them more lenient. It does not make the facts unreal, on the contrary: the more we are informed of wrongdoings, the more we are likely to believe them, but the less we will care.
It seems to me that the combined results of these two studies are less contradictory than one might imagine. They offer a model for understanding the situation of moral discomfort that we live in: the constant solicitation of our ethical judgment and the tormented apathy that accompanies it. I would venture to use a play on words full of meaning by saying that this is the “oxy-moral” situation of contemporary man.