Many are critical of humanity's failings, and some even argue it would be better if we did not exist. Philosopher of misanthropy Ian James Kidd offers an exposition of stances in philosophy that offer sharp critiques of humanity’s moral failings. In a time of uncertainty, environmental harm, animal cruelty, and social injustice, Kidd explores various ways of dealing with humanity’s malevolence without losing hope.
Condemnation.
Humankind is, according to many critics, in a dreadful moral condition. Environmentalists connect our greed, short-termism, and rapaciousness to the ‘climate crisis’, despoilation of environments and the destructiveness that motivates worried talk of ‘the end of nature’. Animal activists decry the ‘crime of stupefying proportions’ perpetrate against animals. Factory farms, laboratories, hunting, and other human practices kill or displace billions of animals. Cruelty, indifference, cold willingness to exploit creatures ‘at our mercy’, and the reductive perception of animals as resources – as ‘meat on legs’, say – are just some of the vices manifest in the practices and institutions of ‘carnist’ societies.
Social critics attack the injustice, inequality, and corruption of political and economic arrangements. An inspection of the social world reveals malice, short-termism and stupidity sustaining systems that brutalise and immiserate millions of people daily. Existentialists such as Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Marcel lament the inauthenticity and ‘bad faith’ of those of us – most of us – who surrender to the imperatives of mass society. Most of us are guilty of an array of existential failings – evasions of responsibility, self-serving narratives, conceits, and what Iris Murdoch called the ‘self-aggrandising and consoling wishes and dreams’ we create to distract us from reality.
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Arrogance and dogmatism, indifference to truth as an ideal, and intellectual laziness – and also ‘vices of the heart’ such as cold-heartedness, emotional rigidity ... such vices seem to be permanent features of human life.
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For those without such specific concerns, one can also point to the many ‘ordinary vices’ – as Michel de Montaigne called them – displayed in our everyday talk and behaviour. Many are familiar moral failings – such as the contemptuousness, envy, jealousy, hypocrisy, and selfishness that distort our relations with others. Or the self-righteousness and sense of self-superiority that flows from moral zealotry. There are also ‘vices of the mind’ – such as arrogance and dogmatism, indifference to truth as an ideal, and intellectual laziness – and also ‘vices of the heart’ such as cold-heartedness, emotional rigidity, and failures of compassionate attention to other people and creatures. Such vices seem to be permanent features of human life. Two and a half millennia ago, the Buddha described many vices and ‘defilements’ – greed, self-delusion, covetousness, moral laziness, lasciviousness, to name but a few. Reading his lists, it is depressing to realise none of them has disappeared from human life. In fact, most of them seem to be flourishing.
Being a misanthrope.
22nd January 2025
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