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Recently over lunch, a colleague expressed outrage about the BJP politician who broke a horse’s leg in Uttarakhand. The colleague did this while he was finishing off a plateful of mutton biryani. Isn’t it hypocrisy? How is it okay to harm a goat, but not a horse. Should I call such people out?
Ramnath Subbaraman
Dear Indignant Vegetarian,
If your goal is to change his mind, pointing out the hypocrisy is unlikely to help. If you are like most people, you tend to assume that the moral stand a person takes is based on reason. Thus, you would think, because your colleague is against harming a horse, he should also be against harming a goat. But, people's morality is based on emotion, a feeling that something is right and something is wrong. “The first principle of moral psychology,” says Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, "is ‘intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second’.” In two of his books — The Righteous Mind and Happiness Hypothesis — he uses the image of an elephant to depict the relationship between its automatic processes such as emotion or intuition and its rider-controlled processes such as “reasoning why”. The elephant sways, and the rider sways along with it. Our emotions react, and we justify our emotions with reason.
The key is that the triggering emotion is not always compassion. Yes, it's an important emotion which stops us from causing pain to others and nudges us to help others. But not the only one. The trigger could also be a sense of reverence or disgust — feelings shaped by our environment. And our dietary habits are driven by these. A person who grew up in an environment that considers cows holy might not touch beef but would feast on chicken. A person might pat his pet dog while eating mutton, without any conflict at all. Our brains are designed that way. Different parts of our brains light up for different emotions. And we use our faculty of reason to justify those feelings. It's called rationalisation.
We often mistakenly attribute our moral stand to wrong emotions, and therefore wrong principles. Take me, for example. Like you, I am a vegetarian. When asked why I am one, I have responded more than once that it's because I don’t like to cause harm to animals. But, when I think about it, I remember I have never said no to cake. Even if it contains eggs, and even though I know how bad poultry are treated. When I was young, I used to take cod liver oil capsules regularly even though I knew cod was a fish. I continue to drink milk even after reading PETA reports on dairy farming in India. I have a pair of leather shoes, a leather belt and a leather wallet. I kill insects at home, which was built at a place that must have been a forest once, a home to any number of animals and birds. I would be hard-pressed to justify my dietary habits based on the 'harm' principle.
It's unlikely that your colleague would acknowledge this. But the fact is, hypocrisy is in all of us. “Hypocrisy”, writes evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban in his book Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite , “is part of the modular design. We condemn because our moralistic modules are designed to constrain others but there is nothing that keeps our behaviour consistent with our condemnation. And we can get by with a great deal of inconsistency because it’s not always easy for others to notice it.”
You know what's interesting? Your beef with your colleague has got probably a lot less to do with animal welfare, and a lot more to do with politics. If you are a vegetarian because you care for animals, wouldn't you feel happy that your colleague is speaking against a man who beat up a horse, instead of accusing him of hypocrisy? By the same measure, if your colleague really cares about horses, would he not know this is hardly the first time a horse is made to suffer by a man? The debate is not really about animal welfare; it's about politics. In fact, I would stick my neck out and say you think the present government is good, and your colleague doesn't think so. That's one of your identities. You feel you belong to that group.
Social psychologist Henri Tajfel has argued that we humans have an inherent tendency to identify ourselves with a group — an “ingroup”, in sociology lingo. And once we identify ourselves, we tend to be biased towards “ingroups” and biased against “outgroups”. It's easy to see why you felt your colleague’s hypocrisy is a bigger deal for you than the issue of animal welfare. Haidt writes in The Righteous Mind : “In moral and political matters we are often groupish, rather than selfish. We deploy our reasoning skills to support our team, and to demonstrate commitment to our team.”
Let me come back to your question. If your goal is to change your colleague's mind, it's not going to help. However, if you want to have a good argument, go for it.
