Israel, Hamas, And The Illusion Of Moral Reasoning

In 1989, during his graduate program at the University of Philadelphia, a psychologist named Jonathan Haidt decided to test a theory about moral reasoning.

First, he presented volunteers with a series of short stories describing problematic but technically victimless acts.

For example:

A family’s dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body, cooked it, and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this.

Or:

A woman is cleaning out her closet, and she finds her old American flag. She doesn’t want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.

And here’s one that still keeps me up at night:

A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.

In each case, Haidt asked the volunteers to decide whether the actions in these stories were morally wrong. But crucially, he asked them to explain their reasoning.

Haidt assumed that because there was no clear-cut victim, the volunteers would be forced to admit that the stories, while varying degrees of disgusting, weren’t morally wrong. But instead, he discovered that most volunteers formed their opinions without any reasoning at all, and then made up justifications after the fact.

So even while admitting that morality and food poisoning have nothing to do with each other, they argued that the dog-eating family was morally wrong because they might get sick.

While quietly overlooking the fact that the Ten Commandments are silent on plumbing issues, they insisted that the woman with the flag was immoral because the rags might clog her toilet.

And while Haidt was mercifully discreet about the arguments for and against…chicken stuffing, I’m guessing everyone was equally certain they made the right moral choice. Because, as Haidt explained, the justifications didn’t matter:

These subjects were reasoning. They were working quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions.

The arguments didn’t have to be persuasive or logical, the volunteers didn’t even need to believe them, they’d already made up their minds about how they felt. Why let reasoning or moral consistency get in the way?

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For the past twenty-two months, I’ve been trying to get answers to some moral questions of my own. And sadly, these stories do have victims.

For example:

A man from Long Island, New York, travels to the Middle East and steals a woman’s home. He is one of approximately 700,000 people who have used violence, intimidation and the threat of military force to terrorise and dispossess innocent people.

As Israeli-American anthropologist Jeff Halper points out, without some kind of moralising story to tell themselves, these people are just criminals stealing innocent people’s land.

But if they claim that the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the universe gave this piece of land to them and them alone, well, now it’s fine to travel halfway around the world and force people out of homes they’ve lived in for generations! Remember, the arguments don’t need to be persuasive or logical, you don’t even need to believe them.

Here’s another one:

In response to an undeniably awful terror attack, the fourth largest military in the world spends twenty-two months bombing, displacing and starving the two million civilians living in a tiny, blockaded enclave. This, even though their top advisers have been saying for over a year that there is no strategic value in doing so, and a senior military spokesman admitted long ago that their enemy “cannot be eliminated" with military force.

I know what you’re thinking: there’s no way to justify collective punishment because it’s a war crime. But luckily, you can always claim it’s the only way to make Hamas “release the hostages."

Yes, you’ll need to quietly overlook the fact that Hamas has already released 140 hostages during ceasefire deals. And as several people — including former Israeli hostages— have pointed out, the rest of them would have been released long ago if Benjamin Netanyahu hadn’t blocked or violated every other ceasefire deal brokered since October 7th.

You’ll also need to ignore the Israeli politicians from Bezalel Smotritch to Orit Strock to Netanyahu himself, who have stated explicitly that the self-admittedly impossible goal of destroying Hamas takes priority over safely returning the hostages (actually, Strock went further, arguing that “a government [that throws everything in the trash to save twenty-two or thirty-three hostages] has no right to exist”).

But don’t worry, I’m certain that relentlessly bombing the same twenty-five-by-five-mile strip of land where the remaining hostages are being held is the right moral and strategic choice.

And here’s one that should keep everyone up at night:

The majority of the Western world is financially and politically supporting a “war” in which report after report after report after report details drones and tanks and snipers deliberately shooting unarmed children in the head while they try to flee bombing or reach aid.

I’ll admit, this one is particularly hard to justify. You might be tempted to simply close your eyes and ears and scream “no, no, no,” every time someone mentions it.

But if you can handle the shame, you could always try claiming that “all the children [in Gaza] are Hamas.” You could try asking whether an unarmed thirteen-year-old girl did something to deserve an Israeli soldier emptying an entire magazine of automatic rounds into her. You could invent hypotheticals about suicide vest-wearing eight-year-old children who were “hellbent on killing you and your family.”

And when people point out that these children were only hellbent on collecting food for their families, who cares?! This isn’t about reasoning in search of truth, it’s about reasoning in support of your emotional reactions.

After all, if you’re still interested in defending this, you’ve already made up your mind. Why let reasoning or moral consistency get in your way?

We all like to think of ourselves as clear-eyed moral beings with flawless moral instincts, effortlessly moralising our way to optimal moral conclusions.

But sadly, that’s not the case.

Moral reasoning is flawed and biased and mostly based on ideas people drummed into us as children. It’s driven by feelings we rarely have to explain and even more rarely choose to examine. And on the occasions when we’re forced to examine them, our justifications are more about defending our feelings than trying to calibrate them.

That’s why it’s important to at least consider the possibility that we’re making moral mistakes, that the images of starving children and the confessions of the soldiers shooting at them should make us question ourselves, that the people criticising the crimes being committed in our name don’t hate us, they hate the crimes.

I don’t blame anybody for hating Hamas, I don’t blame the Jewish people who distrust a world that stood by as they were almost wiped out, I certainly don’t blame anyone for condemning the abduction, rape and murder of civilians, I blame people for shrugging their shoulders as Israel commits the same crimes at an order of magnitude greater scale.

I blame them for standing by as Israel spends twenty-two months wiping out the people of Gaza, crippling tens of thousands of children (Gaza now has the dubious distinction of being home to more child amputees than anywhere else in the world), and rendering 1.9 million more homeless, I blame them for blindly defending an unlimited amount of suffering as long as Israel is causing it.

Because recognising that you were wrong, or even that “your side” has gone too far, isn’t a sign of moral failure, it’s a sign that you understand what morality is for.

Morality exists to ensure that nobody is a victim of atrocities like these again. And, of course, to protect the honour of chickens.

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