How do you sleep at night?

The science and art of morality

We’ve all done things that we wish we hadn’t. It might be a lie that we told our partner, a rumour that we spread about our boss, an uncool move that we made on our colleague or unceremonious words hurled at a friend. These are still (relatively) pardonable acts. What about the ones that are not so easy to forgive?

The time we slapped our kid for asking us a question at the wrong time. The time we cheated on our spouse. The time we yelled at our aged parents for getting in our way. The time we isolated our sibling when they sought support. The time we abandoned our dog on a faraway street. The time we didn’t stand up for our friend when they were counting on us. The time we forced ourself on a drunk friend. The time we betrayed deep trust. The time we broke up with our girlfriend when she got diagnosed with cancer. The time we fired an employee who was the only earning member of his family. The time we were complicit in a crime. The time we stayed silent out of fear. 

How did we sleep at night afterwards? What gave us the courage to face the next day? What makes us feel worthy? Do we even feel worthy?

We all know what is right and wrong. Even before anybody taught us the concept of morality, we knew what was good and what was bad. That is why we used to check to see if anybody was watching before we threw away what mum packed for lunch. That is why we used to start crying as soon as we got caught, not even giving mum and dad a chance to scold us. That is why we kept our distance from shady looking uncles with weird smiles plastered on their faces. That is why we would feel scared to tell our mother about the way our tuition teacher touched us. That is why we would feel angry at our father when he hit our mother. That is why we divided our tiny chocolate into exactly two halves before sharing it with our friend. And later, after a few years, that is why we thought it was better to lie than hear lectures about what was good and what was bad from people. We didn’t do bad things because we didn’t know they were bad, we did them in spite of that knowledge.

Scientists have found that babies as young as 3 months old have a moral sense, the idea that some things are good and that others are bad. They call this moral nativism. As part of an experiment, babies were shown a puppet show. The show featured 2 puppets - one was a kind, helpful puppet while the second puppet was rude and mean. After the show, when given a choice to hang with one of these puppets, most babies preferred the kind and helpful one. This finding from a series of similar studies by Paul Bloom and colleagues at Yale struggled when other labs tried to replicate them. But the main contention was that effect sizes may be smaller than what were initially published. The core remained true, that babies have some sense no matter how rudimentary, that some things are good and others are not so good. Morality, for the large part, is an instinct. And the answer to why that is, like in most other things, lie in evolution. 

I.

Evolution selected for what now is called morality because it helped our social species survive. Killing feels immoral, because otherwise, our anger management issues would have driven us all to extinction. Or consider the guilt that we feel when we lie, most of us just can’t get over the feeling that we have done something wrong. Lying is understandably unfit for a social species to survive. If your wife is lying to you about the paternity of the child that you are raising together, you’re wasting your resources on somebody else’s genes. Or if your partner is having an affair and buying another woman expensive jewellery when your child has missed their doctor’s appointment for the second time, that’s a problem too. Stealing too, feels wrong. When we lived in tribes, stealing from each other would have disrupted harmony, caused trust issues and led to ingroup fighting. What better way to make sure that we know all of these rules than to encode it in our genes. Hurting our mother as we speed (or stroll) along the birth canal is probably one of our last unconscious sins before we are launched into the world of rights and wrongs. Maybe that’s why babies cry. And maybe that’s also why people look suspiciously at babies who don’t cry at birth, how can they not feel bad for putting another human through so much pain?

A few babies don’t seem to register this idea of right and wrong very well, they seem to lack the capacity for empathy, kindness etc. They are the ones who tend to grow up into psychopaths. 

Let’s talk about the other babies, the ones that chose the kind puppet, the good ones. Most of us reading this were probably those babies. 

How did we grow up to become like this then? How did we develop such a capacity to lie, manipulate, kill, wrong, cheat? How come we once thought it was okay to stone women for adultery? How come we once felt okay to kill our own child simply because it was a girl? How come some of us support Putin’s war on Ukraine? How come we want to lynch people for eating beef? 

II.

There is a short answer, a longer answer and a long answer.

The short answer is that we are hypocrites.

The longer answer is we are moral, but we are also tribal seekers of social status and sometimes these tendencies are in conflict.

In the long answer, I’ll tell you why. There are a few angles here. 

We’ve talked about this in the context of procrastination but let’s talk about it again - our brains like to do 0 work but want high rewards as though they have done a lot of work. This desire to get the reward without bearing the cost also shows in our moral sense. We like to appear moral without being moral.

This explains why we cheat easily but confess slowly (or never). We want to be able to sleep with an attractive young man or woman but not want to deal with the drama that will follow when we’re caught. So we avoid getting caught, cheat in secret and all along keep getting the respect of our spouse and neighbours for being a faithful and committed partner. Or take the case of many young liberals today. They will hate Bezos on social media and order slippers from Amazon. To their friends and political ingroups, they appear politically aligned but following through on the hate on Bezos would mean having to walk or drive to the mall yourself, try on different kinds of slippers, choose one, open your wallet, give your money or card, walk or drive back home and if at all you are in doubt about your choice, then you have to go through the whole ordeal again while returning the item. It is a lot of work and why would you do that when you can order slippers with the click of a button and tweet about Bezos’ filthy riches simultaneously?

Now, to be fair to us, we don’t enjoy being moral hypocrites. Very few of us start off that way. An actual moral hypocrite would be for example, a paedophile who befriends a young girl with malicious intent. Most of us are not this way. Yet we all morally err. What makes us do this?

No matter what we say or do, we are our favourites. Our own interests come above all, and that’s not a bad thing. We have mouths to feed and bills to pay. In fact, sometimes selfishness can look like selflessness. Robert Trivers called this reciprocal altruism. When we help others, of course we are doing a good thing and putting someone else’s interests above our own. We are in that process also increasing our chances of being helped by them or other admiring witnesses. Greedy, angry, jealous people often lose out on the many benefits that generous, kind, benevolent people gain. Helping each other out is ultimately good for us. And this does not make us insidious manipulators by any stretch of the imagination. Doing good, like I said, is often an instinct. And it is an instinct because being nice works out in the long term. Anyway, coming back to the point I was making, none of us are moral hypocrites by choice. We start off wanting to be moral and then at some point, cross over to the side of hypocrisy. What’s the tipping point?

Daniel Batson, a social psychologist, calls this overpowered integrity. That is, at some point in this whole business of wanting to be moral, the cost of doing something nice to someone else comes at a greater cost to self and at this point, sacrificing your integrity (even if you feel bad about it) is what people end up doing. Lying is wrong. But if being truthful to your parents about failing Maths would get you beaten black and blue, you’d rather lie. You want to confess to your wife about your affair but in doing so, if you risk both divorce and the end of your affair, you’d rather live in guilt than confess. Stealing is unacceptable behaviour. But if you haven’t had a grain of rice in days and are having a hard time listening to the cries of your hungry children every night, you’d rather be called a thief. 

Now some of you could be reading this and thinking, - That’s not me! I would never cheat on my partner no matter what. Or I’d rather die than steal. Or I don’t lie because I like to hold my head high. My response to you is that you already either have done something like this and if not, you are probably going to do something like this in the future.

Studies show that even people who rank themselves high on morality (in fact especially them) struggle to escape the clutches of overpowered integrity when there is great cost to self.

Okay so that was one angle. What’s the other? As rigid as our moralities are, they are also astonishingly flexible and adaptable. We advocate for peace and then go wage wars. We support Greta and go board our flights. We clap for Shapiro but book an appointment with the gynaecologist the minute we miss our period. We endorse brotherhood but refuse to let our daughter marry a Muslim. We say that we love all our children equally but only our sons inherit our wealth. Morality is partial to its ingroups. If it is for our own brother, we are willing to kill (probably because your brother shares 50% of your genes, the murdered-to-be mostly shares close to none). 

Morality is also influenced by culture. There’s data to show that aristocrats preferred boy babies because they helped concentrate wealth (since inheritances were passed on to only boys back then) and so thought it was morally acceptable to kill female babies. But in cases of poor families, females meant a chance to “marry up” so there were fewer female infanticides among the working classes. 

If you grew up in a village in India, up until 20-25 years ago, it was considered immoral for a girl to walk around in a mini skirt. In the West, you may wait for weeks to dig into a Wagyu beef steak at a fine dine restaurant but in parts of India, even today, you could be killed for doing anything to a cow other than worship it. 

III. So how do we sleep at night?

Some of us don’t.

Many of us accumulate bags under our eyes, fat under our asses and get a second neck when we do something that we think that we shouldn’t have. Others become anorexic, forego food and work when ridden with guilt for doing something wrong. A psychiatrist-turned-psychotherapist professor of mine told us once that one of the first questions he asks women who seem to have suddenly dropped a lot of weight with no obvious reason is if they have done anything that they consider taboo. 

Evolution has made sure that we suffer for immorality. Sacrificing our integrity even when with substantial reason still comes at great cost to both physical and mental health. Men and women both struggle professionally when they are dealing with stressful events such as a divorce where there are often “immoral” issues of neglect, cheating, avoidance, hurt and other transgressions involved. Giving false testimony or laundering money can result in high amounts of anxiety both while committing the act and afterwards if or when you’re caught for it.

The relationship between morality and wellbeing have been discussed and studied since natural philosophy. When we do things that are generally deemed as “good”, we feel good about ourselves. Empirical evidence that causally links morality to individual wellbeing is so far weak. This does not mean that links don’t exist. Donating to charity, staying faithful to your partner, caring for your parents, adopting a stray, giving up meat, are all actions that can lead to much individual happiness and societal stability.

Subscribing to moral behaviour also minimises reputational risk. We like to be liked, and staying moral is helpful to be liked. Moral norms also enable better cooperation within groups. Individuals aligned on a common set of ideals to strive towards tend to deviate less from them. This can make even ordinary parts of our lives such as living in an apartment building or being a club member less frictious and even enjoyable.

Going where your moral compass leads you is generally a good idea. The issue arises when we find it difficult to circumvent our moral instinct in the appropriate situations. When emotional, morality can lose objectivity. Moral outrage towards another political group many times arises from a misplaced sense of righteousness and can increase strife within the community. It can also lower individual wellbeing. The pronounced depressive affect that is observed in liberal teens over conservatives in recent years is one example of this. Another example is how many conservative Hindu groups in India view Muslims. The 1992 riots that led to mass destruction and killings stemmed from a place of erroneous virtue. It’s possible that terrorists consider themselves highly moral - what could be more moral than defending your motherland even if it comes at the cost of your own and other’s lives? Honour killings which happen in India is another example.

Coming back to your poor sleep.

If you’re beating yourself up over a past transgression, it can be helpful to remember that our morals are not our own. We do sometimes fall prey to doing “wrong” things. It’s okay, this stuff happens. The reason that our brains make us feel so bad about it is so that we don’t do it again. Why our brain prefers that we do not do wrong things goes millions of years back. Evolution can’t afford to let us keep slipping, so it makes us feel bad everytime we slip. And generally speaking, it’s probably good for us that we occasionally feel guilty or bad. We realise what our values are and what is important for our wellbeing.

If you pride yourself on being a strong rule follower, good on you for staying on the correct evolutionary track. Don’t be afraid to break a rule or two occasionally though, that’s going to be okay too, it may even be fun as long as you don’t set out to hurt anybody. Rules are meant to help us live happy lives, cooperate with each other and generally feel good about ourselves. They’re meant to invoke some fear, yes, but you don’t have to be so afraid of them because like I just explained, the rules of our society are mostly genetically engineered. They’re good to keep around but they are also meant to be circumvented when needed. If somebody asks you to hold a gun at somebody just because they look different from you, that means their morals are skewed and the rule system broken.

Basically, morality is a funny little thing. Largely you would be better off following what it says but your moral sense is not above questioning. When it helps you feel good at no clear cost to anyone else, view it as a good addition to your life but if it starts stressing you out, remember that some of this moral/immoral stuff is not in your control. If you’ve done something that is not letting you sleep at night, that’s probably not very good and you may need to figure some stuff out, do a little course correction.