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Circular Morality

Circular morality describes a particular type of false virtuousness. We claim this false virtuousness — which may assume the appearance of generosity, humaneness, or some other desirable quality — by intervening helpfully in misfortune (or threat of misfortune) of which we are the cause, and through which we have acquired the means to be helpful. In other words, we undo damage that we are responsible for, and we do so specifically by exploiting an opportunity arising from that damaging circumstance.

Though similar in many respects to “spin” — the technique of redefining bad outcomes as favorable ones — circular morality is characterized by an internal mechanism of distraction and misdirection, rather than by a twisting of facts. This misdirection occurs when the simple ethical importance of our “righting a wrong” causes others to look away from, or block out, larger and more pervasive conditions leading to that wrong. The modest scale of rectifying an immediate problem seems, then, to take on a greater symbolic value, representing some natural inner probity that would, if real, belie everything known about the conditions in which the wrong occurred. So convincing is this misdirection that, not only do our victims venerate us for our intervention, they fail to identify us as the source of their jeopardy.

Hypothetical Examples

• A landowning oppressor takes possession of the crop grown and harvested by his tenants; a derisory income he pays them allows them to buy back small amounts of that crop, saving them from starvation. The oppressor, having himself created the conditions of potential starvation, partly mitigates those conditions, and in doing so acquires the virtue — notional rather than real — of benevolence.
• An armed guerrilla force instigates violence within a peaceful community; it then restores order by crushing all opposition, assuming elevated moral status for having rectified the very instability of which it has been the cause.
• You have acquired an iatrogenic infection (i.e. hospital-caused) while hospitalized. You are then cured of this infection by the hospital that caused it, leaving you not only healthy once more but grateful that you were in a hospital at the time.

Real-World Examples

• When in 2016 a presidential candidate declared that as a great beneficiary of unfair tax loopholes he was uniquely in a position to fix them, this candidate was engaging in circular morality. “I know our complex tax laws better than anyone who has ever run for president and am the only one who can fix them,” the candidate tweeted. Specifically, he had located the source of his claimed virtue in the very inequity for which such virtue was now necessary.
• Nestlé S.A., which has a history of diverting or commandeering natural sources of fresh drinking water, magnanimously donates bottled war to downstream users whose wells Nestle has cause to dry up.

In each of the above example, the means of rescue (or help or alleviation) is essentially generated in the calamity (or threat thereof) that the rescuing entity has caused.

Thus, in its formal mechanisms circular morality may exhibit the following features:

1. Not only must we must be in a unique position to intervene morally, we will attain that unique position by being instrumental to (i.e. literally the cause of or in some manner benefitting from) the event that necessitates moral intervention in the first place.
2. The opportunity to correct a misdeed, or reverse misfortune for which we bare some responsibility, arises directly from that misdeed or misfortune.
3. Our improved moral status, perceived rather than legitimate, accrues from undoing damage that — intentionally or not — has resulted in our unique position to undo this damage.
4. Our improved moral status will be verifiable only as the undoing of damage, or threat of damage, caused by ourselves.
5. Ideally, improved moral status will be unwittingly granted us by the very victims whose dire circumstances that we, their saviors, created. As if to say: “Thank you for saving us from the calamity that we wouldn’t have needed saving from had you not created it.”

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The phrase first appeared in 2015 — as the title of an essay — in an ongoing blog called “The Loser Thinks.” Its anonymous author describes a real traffic accident occurring in the 1980s. The driver at fault seemed to imply that his possession of a carphone — then an extravagant rarity — with which to call for help somehow absolved his causing the accident. To the victims of his negligence the man announced, “You’re in luck! — I have a car-phone, I’ll call for help.” In a second illustration of the principle of circular morality the author refers to a news story about actor and amateur pilot Harrison Ford, an incident in which Ford crash-landed his prop plane but “saved several lives” by not crashing in a heavily populated area. Those lives, explains the author, hadn’t needed saving until Harrison Ford’s airplane placed them in jeopardy.