Moral Sensitivity: When Speaking Up Makes You the Problem

Moral sensitivity means noticing the ethical weight of a situation more quickly and more penetratingly than most people do. For some, it also means that witnessing injustice hurts more. Perhaps you saw somebody being spoken to with contempt disguised as banter, or someone who cannot afford to complain being treated badly. You cannot help but see it, and hours later, sometimes days later, you are still churning it over, while most of the people around you either did not see it or dropped it long ago.

Values you hold dear, perhaps too dear, have been violated, whether it is fairness, honesty, kindness, or the ordinary decency people owe each other. The unease of having seen something wrong and being unable to do anything about it lodges in you and will not settle until something is done.

You see who is being treated as though they matter less. You see hypocrisy in the gap between what somebody says and what they do when it costs them. Other people see it too, or they half see it, or they see it and immediately choose to unsee it. Maybe it is always safer to look away, to agree with the version of reality that everybody has already agreed on.

What you eventually realise is that when people witness injustice, or discrepancy, or something rotten in the way a place is run, within a second or two they talk themselves out of it. They probably justify it by saying it is not their business, that they are not sure enough of what they witnessed, that they need the job. So they look away and then rearrange their memory. You are not able to do that. You would not consider yourself the courageous or righteous one. It is simply that moral sensitivity works on you the way it does, so that however hard you try you cannot unsee things, and the gap between your values and what is in front of you will not leave you alone until you have said something.

All of that is painful on its own, and what hurts more is looking around the room and finding that nobody else seems to want to speak up. The pain of being a morally sensitive person is not just caused by the wrongdoing you see. It is caused by the silence of everyone else who saw it, and by what happens to you when you are the one who breaks that silence.

When you were younger and not aware of your heightened moral sensitivity, you thought everybody worked the way you did. You assumed that people minded about fairness, that they saw what you saw, that they were as bothered as you were.

You may even have assumed people would thank you for pointing out what needed changing, because surely everybody in the room enjoyed the relief. It took years for you to realise that when you do speak up, you will get framed as the problematic one.

Moral sensitivity is not only a matter of intellectual judgement. Rage against immorality finds its way into your body. There is heat in the face, tightness in the chest, the throat closing slightly, a jolt of something that is not quite anger and not quite fear. Your body tells you that something you care about has been violated before you have had any say in the matter. 

That is how your moral sensitivity makes you the canary in the coal mine. Miners took the bird down with them because the gas would reach it long before any of them felt anything, and its collapse was the warning that got everybody else out alive. Perhaps you are that canary. Moral sensitivity is a warning system that says something is wrong.

You may also be one of those people who cannot look at a situation without also seeing what it “could have been”. You can call it idealism, or perfectionism, vision, or a stubborn belief in what human beings are capable of. You can see excruciatingly vividly how the meeting would have gone if the one in power had been honest. You know what your family would have been if one responsible adult had spoken up. Once you have seen the better version, you cannot erase the vision from your mind. All you can see is the gap between what you know is possible and what people were willing to do.

People have come to rely on you. Once a group has learned that you are the one who would be the spokesperson, the changemaker, nobody else has to spend any awareness or energy being the guardian of justice, because they already know you will mention it. Everybody else gets to relax into the knowledge that the difficult thing will be said, and they become a little more comfortable with saying nothing each time it happens. That way, they carry no risk at all, and they get the improvement anyway.

Moral sensitivity turns out to be a resource other people can use without ever acknowledging that they are using it. But you cannot name it because none of this is arranged deliberately. Nobody in the room has cast you in that role, or collectively decided that you will be the designated conscience.

After a while of being the canary, the role turns on you. You are the one who made the fuss. You become framed as the sensitive one, the intense one, the one who cannot leave things alone.

What is worse is that after enough repetitions you start to internalise the accusation. You wonder whether they were right, whether you are too sensitive, too pedantic, too much trouble to have around. What was moral sensitivity begins to look like a defect of character. You begin editing yourself before you speak, running your own perception past an internal committee to check whether it is proportionate.

People assume that the compulsion to say something is a preference, that you are choosing to have high standards, to be difficult, to be dissatisfied with the world. Even your therapist does not always get it. They try to work with you on relinquishing unrealistic standards, and you sit there unable to explain that what they are calling a high standard does not feel like a standard at all. It feels like the minimum standard, what people do when they have basic human decency. It is not that you require people to be exceptional. It is that you cannot pretend not to have noticed when they are not even being ordinarily decent.

Being a canary is deeply lonely. You can have a partner, colleagues, a full house, and still feel deeply alone in this world as the canary. With moral sensitivity, what is missing is not physical company. What is missing is one person who sees what you see and is willing to say it out loud. Reality is meant to be a thing people hold between them. But your version of reality is never confirmed. When something affects you greatly, there is no one to confirm it and say ‘Yes, that happened; I saw it too’. The resentment and aloneness you hold, if unexpressed, can accumulate and fester into cynicism, even nihilism.

It is very hard not to grow resentful and disillusioned with a world where most people choose to turn a blind eye, and where the ones who let you do all the work then attack you for it. You take the hit, and they take the benefit. You know quite well why they stay quiet. They may have come to be fearful of the consequences; they have responsibilities they cannot afford to risk, they have no appetite for a fight; and most of them have been punished before for saying something and learned from it. All of that is true, but none of it makes any difference to how you feel being so completely alone in this world.  

 

Moral Sensitivity: Grief and Rage

Perhaps, under the anger and the rage against injustice, there is grief.

You are mourning the version of things that would have existed if people had behaved the way they were capable of behaving. Perhaps the rage is what keeps the sense of possibility open.

If you were to take away the rage and just fully reconcile with how little people change, and with the likelihood that you will not see your ideal realised in this lifetime, a deep sadness would set in, and possibly something closer to despair. So in a way, the rage keeps you safe from the despair. It has been holding you a certain distance from the darkest layer of human nature.

We cannot ask you to not see, to not feel, to turn a blind eye. But we also know that carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders is not sustainable, and that the guilt of not being able to do more is eating you up and serving no one. What we may be able to change is how much of it you carry. We cannot change how much you do see, the only thing under your control is where you spend yourself.

Some of that is a matter of judgement about what your speaking can actually reach. You cannot teach a student who has left the room. You cannot change a person who has no intention of being changed. Believing deeply in what somebody could become does not give you the power to make them become it here and now.

Nobody can attempt to fix every wrong they see in the world and also have a life. Choosing which things to take up is not a betrayal of anything you believe; it is wisdom.

Reconciling with how things are, and being discerning about where you put your energy, does not have to lapse into nihilism.  You can grieve what people are and still want better from them. You can stop expecting the world to come round and go on refusing to be a part of corruption. The sadness does not take the integrity from you, but sinking into honest sadness could mean you stop fighting reality.

Even with all of that, I hope you do not stop being fully who you are, and never chastise yourself for it. Your integrity is a gift, and it may well be part of your life’s work. Instead of resenting yourself for being the truth-teller, I hope you can hold on to the beauty of being you, even when it is hard.

And if you stay the course, perhaps one day you will find your own kind. If you stop being who you are, how will anybody recognise themselves in you, and how will you recognise yourself in them.

You may go on being misunderstood, and the gratitude for your truth telling may go on being missing. What you can always hold on to is that you honoured your own knowledge of what you saw and what you did about it, and you know you have not betrayed who you are.