Many intense people have a high level of moral sensitivity. I wrote about this elsewhere before, but basically, they see something cruel or careless and cannot just move on from it the way other people seem to. They often lie awake thinking about whether they are doing enough, whether what they are doing even counts, and whether there is any point in trying when the world does not seem to care whether they try or not. They hold themselves to standards that others think are too high, and when they fall short, they feel extremely guilty. They try to honour their values, but then they watch the news and have to hold themselves back from despair. After long enough, they start to wonder whether the whole thing is a trap they built for themselves.
In this conversation, I want us to see what we can learn from a moral philosopher who has spent his career working out how ordinary humans like us can try to do good even when it seems pointless at times.
Travis Rieder teaches bioethics at Johns Hopkins and wrote a book called Catastrophe Ethics.
He holds that some people are purists; once they find out they are part of something harmful, they get themselves out of it. Others are nihilists, and they think that when the problem is this big, nothing they do counts, so there is nothing they owe anybody. Travis has watched many students come in as purists, wear themselves out, and leave as nihilists.
We started with a humorous exchange about our relationships with plant milks. Travis drank almond milk for years and felt good about it. Then a colleague who models the climate laughed at him and told him that one almond takes about twelve litres of water, that nearly all of them are grown in California, and that California is short of water. He says he never sorted it out for himself and mostly stopped worrying about milk. What he takes from it is that nobody manages to be pure about everything. He points out that you can be careful about what you eat while typing on a laptop that runs on cobalt dug out of the Congo by people held in conditions close to slavery.
Now when he meets somebody who does not worry about the climate as much as he does, he does not decide they are a worse person, and he assumes they are fighting somewhere else.
We also talk about the role of religion in all of this. Travis raises a question Socrates asked, which is whether a thing is right because God commands it or whether God commands it because it is right (Plato, Euthyphro). Travis says that if God could have commanded torture and that would have made torture right, the commands are not worth much, and if God commands things because they are already right, then you can work out what is right without him. Travis himself left the church he grew up in because it was homophobic, and he was more sure about that than he was about anything his pastor told him.
Travis’s thesis is that you have no duty to cut your carbon footprint, but you have good reasons to.
He also says you should never feel completely comfortable. If there is something easy you could be doing and you are not doing it, you are ignoring a real reason. But he also says that everybody is doing shitty things, including the people working hardest at this. Ultimately, you still have to decide what to spend your time and your money on, and you have to be able to say why you chose that.
What he leaves us with is this: sit down every so often and work out where our time and our money and our energy should go, because that is what gives our lives meaning, and if we believe none of it counts, we lose that. Let’s keep recycling even if you suspect your building tips it all into one bin, because it costs us almost nothing and we are one small part of something a lot of us are doing together.
About Travis
Travis Rieder is a bioethicist and moral philosopher at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. A motorcycle accident in 2015 left him with a crushed foot and a long relationship with opioid painkillers, which became the subject of his TED Talk and his first book, In Pain. His second book, Catastrophe Ethics, is about how ordinary people can try to live decently when the problems are too big for any one person to solve.
Travis’s site: https://www.travisrieder.com/
Imi Lo is a psychotherapist and consultant who has dedicated her career to helping emotionally and intellectually intense people turn their depth into strength. She has written three books with Hachette: Emotional Sensitivity and Intensity, The Gift of Intensity, and The Gift of Empathy.
Imi has over fifteen years of clinical experience, including roles with Médecins Sans Frontières and the NHS (UK), and holds three master's degrees in Mental Health, Buddhist Studies, and Global Cultures. Her training includes art therapy, philosophical counselling, Jungian psychology, mentalization-based treatment, EMDR, Schema Therapy, mindfulness-based and trauma-informed modalities, and she works integratively with psychodynamic, philosophical, and creative methods.
You can contact Imi for a one-to-one session tailored to your specific needs.