How Justification Help Us Act Immorally

            AARON HASS, Ph.D. 

        As we saw with the conservative columnist, our moral  judgment is tossed about by our needs and desires. We find ways to rationalize issues that are most personally difficult. So, too, our moral outrage picks and chooses its targets. We decide which subjects war-rant  our  focus  and define our sense of moral rectitude accordingly. However, we often deny our impulse to act morally by denying any personal responsibility to alleviate the suffering at hand. Our conscience is assuaged by our vague sense that others will provide assistance because the needs is so apparent.  If necessary to justify our inaction, we may go further and deny any urgency or deservedness in the first place.

        We all know there are children who go to bad hungry, impoverished, and diseased. Yet  we allow this suffering to continue while we pursue comparatively frivolous (and often expensive) goals. To an outside observer, we would seem indifferent, even cynical, about the misery of others. But to ourselves, we must maintain a self-perception of benevolence.

        So we cling to a belief in what psychologists call "the just World Hypothesis." In order to make sense of the environment  and avoid the anxiety-producing perception that the world operates on a random basis, we believe that people get what they deserve. I want to believe  that bad things happen to bad people and that, because I am basically a good person, misfortune will not befall me as it does to those less deserving. When we read about the rape of a woman in a parking lot we think, "She shouldn't walked alone to her car at night."

When someone else is hurt, it threatens us . We therefore believe that the hurt individual is a faulty person and deserves his misfortune. When anyone runs into difficulties because of his own irresponsibility or recklessness, it's up to the person to bail himself out. We say "we tend to believe that people that they deserve, that phrase provides a double does of justification for withholding help or sympathy to someone  who we say is unworthy of it in the first place.

We are particularly egregious in our misplaced attributions when w personally harm another and have no concern about making amends. It is in those situations that we dismiss  any consideration of our own malevolence and simply blame the victim.