Why moral certainty leads to ruin

It’s natural to seek confidence in our moral beliefs. But it’s only a short step from absolute moral certainty to intolerance and extremism.

Two and a half thousand years ago, travellers to the great temple of Apollo, home to the famous Delphic oracle, would have passed by three inscriptions engraved above its entrance. The first is one that Socrates adopted as his personal motto: “know thyself”. The second shared some oft neglected common sense: “all things in moderation”. But it’s the third that I think is most important today: “certainty leads to ruin”. 

This motto is doubly important when we think about moral certainty. While it’s natural for us to seek confidence in our moral beliefs, a surplus of certainty can drive us into toxic territory. Consider who is more dangerous: the person who has no moral compunctions at all; or the individual who has absolute moral certainty. 

The former – we might call them an ‘amoralist’ – wouldn’t care about ideas of right and wrong. They’d have no interest in the welfare of others. They might lack empathy and come across as callous or cruel. We can imagine them behaving purely in their own self-interest, even screwing other people over to benefit themselves. But it’s hard to imagine them going out of their way to punish someone if it’s not going to benefit them. 

On the other hand, the individual with absolute moral certainty – call them a ‘moral crusader’ – would be driven by their idea of right and wrong. Their moral fervour could bring them to see wrongdoers as being unrecoverably corrupted. They wouldn’t only seek to punish people who have crossed them, but anyone whom they deem to have violated their moral standards. We can imagine the moral crusader incurring a great cost to see their moral worldview realised. In the extreme, they even might be motivated kill innocent people – or themselves – to sate their moral outrage.  

The most violent extremists, terrorists, leaders of genocidal campaigns and perpetrators of acts like honour killings typically don’t lack moral fibre. In fact, it’s the opposite: they have too much. It’s precisely their sense of absolute moral certainty that makes them capable of such atrocities. 

This is something Hollywood struggles with. Many fictional villains are depicted as being narcissistic or psychopathic amoralists. But history’s (and fiction’s) greatest villains – from Hitler to Thanos – are moral crusaders, convinced of their own moral vision, and that those who oppose them are the true evildoers. 

But it’s not just extremists who are susceptible to becoming moral crusaders. The seeds of moral certainty lie within us all. And if we’re not careful, it can lead us to ruin.  

Moral colours

Say you see a youth in a hoodie knock over an old woman in a wheelchair and grab her purse. It’s likely that you’d immediately feel a strong sense of outrage. It didn’t arise because you cooly evaluated the situation, reasoned that stealing from a vulnerable person was wrong, then got outraged. In fact, the thought process is almost entirely the other way around. 

First, you see it through the lens of your moral worldview: the old woman in the wheelchair is vulnerable, the hooded youth is vicious, his act driven by greed. Those observations immediately spark outrage. It’s only then that your rational faculties kick in to render what happened in abstract terms using the language of morality, like saying “stealing from a vulnerable person is wrong”. 

Perception is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. They way you see the scene is already coloured by your moral lens. You’ve already projected your values onto what’s happening well before you’ve had a chance to think about it more deeply.  

But, in projecting our values onto the world, we’ve taken something that comes from inside of us and see as being a part of the world. It’s like when we slip from saying “I dislike broccoli” to saying “broccoli is bad”. The first is a subjective statement about our tastes; the second is an objective statement about the world. 

When we see something as being objective, we tend to think that everyone must see it in the same way. That makes it harder for us to imagine what the world looks like to someone else, such as someone who has a different set of interests or moral worldview.

One person may see a colonial era statue as representing achievement and pride; another sees it as representing injustice and shame. It also make us more likely to think that people who see things differently must be broken somehow, or that they’re morally corrupt. It’s only a short step from there to dehumanising them and robbing them of their moral status. 

In this chronically online age, we’re also under constant pressure to keep up with the litany of moral outrages that sweep social media. We’re exposed to moral crusaders touting their worldview, and many of us are quietly fearful of saying the wrong thing and attracting their – or their followers’ – ire. This drives us towards extremism and makes us less tolerant of different moral perspectives. 

Thankfully, the same mottos that guided the Greeks two and a half thousand years ago can bring wisdom to us today. “Know thyself” encourages us to understand and be critical of our own moral worldview, and appreciate that not everyone sees the world in the same way. “All things in moderation” invites us to find a middle path between the amoralist and the moral crusader (also, limit your time on social media). And “certainty leads to ruin” reminds us that it’s better to doubt something that’s true than it is to have absolute conviction in something that is false.  

Moral certainty might be natural, it might feel good, but if we don’t push back against it, it can turn us into the very monsters we ought to be battling against.

Explore the dangers of moral certainty in the session, Against Goodness with Jesse Bering, Joanna Bourke, Hanno Sauer and Sisonke Msimang on Sat 22 August at Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Tickets on sale now.