Analogies: Evil with a Clear Conscience

Very few people choose to do evil in the world, but much evil is done by those who think themselves good. Through a combination of self-justification and selective awareness we often perpetrate evil while keeping our conscience clean.

When we’re driving down the highway and want to cut over to the fast lane, the proper thing to do is to wait for a opening, and we all know that, but sometimes we choose to force our way in. We know it’s wrong, but we maintain internal rationalizations that excuse our poor behavior: everyone else does it, it’s not a big deal, that car I cut off shouldn’t be going so fast in the first place. The wrong we commit doesn’t stick to us, but our conscience doesn’t matter to the car we cut off and the rest of traffic which gets slowed down by the cumulative repetition of such actions.

But sometimes we try to do the right thing and yet ultimately encourage the same evil we tried to prevent. Once in the fast lane, maybe in an effort to ease our guilt, we slow down to let someone else cut in. That’s good, right? But what if that person had cut off several others to get in that position? Our rewarding their bad behavior only encourages it more. And if the car behind us was rushing to the hospital, the consequences of our actions are negative. But we feel our moral slate is clean because our intention was good, despite the outcome.

The real truth is that we could have, and should have, expected the outcome of our actions and made our moral choice based on realistic expectations instead of blind ignorance. If we had paid attention to the world around us we could have seen the car we let in weave their way through traffic and known our kind act would only encourage them. The car behind us flashed their lights, honked their horn, and waved a bloody bandage to get our attention, but we couldn’t be bothered to interpret such signs.

There are more good people than evil in the world, but that balance doesn’t make the world a better place. Our intentions are rather meaningless if they are not carried out with a good faith effort to divine the likely results. Our internal justifications to excuse our bad actions do not make them any more palatable to the victims. It’s not enough to consider ourselves good, it’s not enough to resist those who actively pursue evil; we must be the most vigilant with regard to ourselves and face the unfortunate truths that we are part of the evil that needs to be resisted.