What happens when we stop thinking of people as people and start thinking of them as statistics? In an increasingly online world — where many interact with people online more than in real life — the subjective experience of others is being forgotten. In this piece, Nicholas Smyth argues that the internet and other modern trends have created a new, modern dysfunction. The antidote is to re-emphasise the subjective experience of others.

Writing from California in 1916, Alexander Berkman offered this observation:

There is double the pathos for us in the death of one little New York waif from hunger than there is in a million deaths from famine in China. It is not … that a feeling of national kinship with the waif impresses us the more sincerely with his plight. It is merely that the mind is unable to grasp suffering in the gross. Suffering is so intimately personal a thing that it must be explained through the personal equation.

Here, Berkman put his finger on an important fact: the ethical significance of actions and events changes dramatically depending on which of two perspectives we take on them. In what follows, I’m going to try to convince you that this distinction—between the personal and impersonal perspectives—is both central to ethical life and crucial for understanding a distinctively modern form of dysfunction.

Let’s begin with the personal perspective. From this perspective, we engage with the lives of particular people. In the case of the New York waif, we grieve for the victim and for their loved ones. Or, in the case of the landlord whose policies starved the poor kid to death, we feel indignation and rage. Either way, we remain focused on an identifiable person with a unique identity and history, and our ethical responses are sensitive to those particularities. 

SUGGESTED READING Musk's town square will be chaos By Eleonora Maria Mazzoli But it is psychologically impossible to engage in this personal way with a million deaths. And we should be very glad that this is impossible for us, because any human being who actually internalized that much sorrow would go insane. It would be worse than any psychological torture ever devised.

So, in the face of a million deaths, we inhabit a different perspective: we register, in a much cooler fashion, that a million deaths occurred, and while we may think that this is indeed a bad thing, this sense of “badness” remains very abstract and calculating. Moreover, because no particular person is considered, this judgment remains impartial. We do not assign more importance to the suffering of any given person. All are treated equally, as members of a very large mathematical set. 

This is the impersonal perspective, and it has played a powerful role in modern life and in modern moral philosophy. Classical utilitarians, for example, ask us to maximize happiness for everyone we can possibly affect through our actions. And they are correspondingly suspicious of the personal perspective, which (they claim) introduces bias and irrationality into our ethical calculations.

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You need to put at least a hypothetical face to the suffering, or it remains a statistic.

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Now, through this impersonal lens, the idea of a million deaths remains just that: an idea. No particular person’s identity or history is considered, and thus, none of the usual sympathetic emotions are engaged. You might think that you feel horror or revulsion at the mere idea of a million deaths, but arguably, you do not. Deep emotional resonances only arrive once you try to picture some of the victims or their families. You need to put at least a hypothetical face to the suffering, or it remains a statistic.

With a few exceptions, most moral philosophers today would agree that proper ethical judgment involves situationally balancing these two perspectives. For example, it is true that one can become too wrapped up in the particular people that one knows and loves, and that certain tendencies towards prejudice and discrimination can be traced to an overzealous focus on the personal perspective. 

However, purely impersonal moral decision-making can also be problematic. At certain moments in one’s life, it is clearly permissible or even admirable to prioritize the well-being of those we love, even if we can create more well-being for a few strangers. I read to my child every night; I could be reading to the disadvantaged kids down the street, but I am clearly not required to do so. But this thought violates the impartiality at the heart of the impersonal perspective.

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In ascending to a more impersonal perspective, it is always you doing the climbing, and you bring your own personal history and psychology up that hill. There is no such thing as purely impersonal ethical thinking.

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In addition, we should note that defenders of the impersonal perspective have often been very unclear as to where it comes from. It is often just called, without much further explanation, “the faculty of reason”. Yet, curiously, when you gather ten defenders of impartial ethics together in a seminar room, they will all passionately defend ten different, conflicting ethical systems. Here, we should heed the wisdom of Adam Smith, who saw that we construct our own “impartial spectator” out of particular, more personal experiences. Someone who was never moved by the tears of a grieving person would likely never learn that a million deaths matter at all.  Smith understood something very important: that in ascending to a more impersonal perspective, it is always you doing the climbing, and you bring your own personal history and psychology up that hill.  There is no such thing as purely impersonal ethical thinking.    

Yet, the impersonal perspective remains ethically important. Malaria nets, vaccines, and famine aid have relieved unfathomable amounts of agony around the world, even as those responsible have remained resolutely focused on the number of lives to be improved, rather than on the history or identity of any particular person.

Moreover, some of us inhabit important social roles which require us to take the impersonal perspective. A hospital administrator would be paralyzed by indecision if she really tried to directly empathize with everyone affected by her decisions. To do her job, she has to suspend her direct empathetic responses and just run the numbers, as the utilitarian requires. As do most CEOs, elected officials, and government workers.

So, it is clear enough that a good person knows when to view their decisions personally and when to view them impersonally. The hospital administrator will have to know that it’s important to think impersonally at work, but not at home with her family. Otherwise, she risks becoming like George Banks in Disney’s adaptation of Mary Poppins, who gleefully sings:

A British bank is run with precision
A British home requires nothing less!

As a result of taking this strange approach to home life, Banks has become oblivious to the particular character and experiences of the people in his household. A major sign of this is that he routinely refers to them using highly general categories. The children are not Jane or Michael, they are “the breed”, the “heirs" to King George’s “dominion” of 1910, and everyone else in the home is a “subject”.

SUGGESTED READING The danger of ethics without empathy By Heidi L. Maibom Now, wouldn’t it be just a little disturbing if the modern world contained a variety of powerful forces that are making us a little more like George Banks every day? If we were relentlessly encouraged to adopt the impersonal perspective on one another, and to bring this managerial attitude into our lives? In fact, I think that this is exactly what is happening.

To begin, notice that modern mass societies face a historically unique kind of problem: the well-being of each person, and of their community, is intimately bound up with the actions of hundreds of millions of strangers. Because of this much-discussed global interconnectedness, we depend vitally on what millions of others do every day. 

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But in a mass society, we are individually powerless to even address such people, let alone ensure compliance or proper moral education. We can only think of them impersonally, as a badly behaving number.

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In earlier human contexts, your flourishing depended almost entirely on the actions of those around you, and so you could hope to personally address anyone who was making trouble for you and those you love. But in a mass society, we are individually powerless to even address such people, let alone ensure compliance or proper moral education. We can only think of them impersonally, as a badly behaving number.

This introduces a unique kind of anxiety into our lives, a sense of dread at the thought that we flourish, live, and die at the whim of a colossal, unruly quantity. We begin to see that number as something that simply must be managed, controlled, nudged, or funneled toward the correct courses of action. This desire for control probably reached its world-historical peak during the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions sat at home terrified that the people around them wouldn’t conform to various requirements and recommendations. 

But as individuals, we lacked the power to enact this conformity, as we always do in the face of such a colossal quantity. We need a certain power that we do not and cannot have. There is hardly a better recipe for anxiety.

We moderns have developed multiple strategies to relieve it. One is the habitual expression of misanthropy, or cynicism about “people”. About how stupid, malicious, or evil they are, either in general or perhaps as members of a huge, neatly labeled group.

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Various online platforms promise us a “voice” in what they absurdly call the “online community”. They falsely promise us a way of projecting this desire to address and control our fellow citizens out into the world.

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We also relieve the anxiety with fantasies of impersonal control. Various online platforms promise us a “voice” in what they absurdly call the “online community”. They falsely promise us a way of projecting this desire to address and control our fellow citizens out into the world. I may well be engaging in that fantasy right now.

We also relieve this anxiety by projecting it onto political figures. That is, we passionately support national politicians who might use policy to shunt the population in the right direction. Some of us hope for a kind of strongman who will knock some sense into the noncompliant. Others hope that our preferred political party will create rules and laws that force others to behave. The anxiety induced by taking the impersonal perspective on your fellow citizens is thus relieved by the thought of a powerful central authority which will somehow make those fellow citizens do as they ought.

When you see totalitarian or quasi-totalitarian policies emerging from any area of the political spectrum, it is often because that impersonal anxiety has driven people to look for an institution or a figurehead which can corral the problematic masses into the right pen. And there is a sense in which we cannot fault anyone for this. After all, we really are as vulnerable and powerless as we think we are, and what else is a modern person supposed to do with this sense of impotence?  Start another Substack?

Nonetheless, these forms of anxiety relief are ethically toxic in three ways. First, they make us forget about human rights. In seeing others as a faceless mass to be controlled, we forget that they may have the right to act in this suboptimal way. So, for example, maybe it would be impersonally best if everyone followed certain health recommendations to the letter. But in any non-totalitarian society, people sometimes have the right to act in ways that are not impersonally best. As Isaiah Berlin argued, freedom cannot just be the freedom to act in some pre-approved, socially optimal way.

Second, we become used to a certain kind of cultural imperialism. Our conception of what is impersonally best—influenced by our own personal history and enculturation—is only one amongst many.  What happens when this conception conflicts with other cultures or ways of life? The history of imperialism tells us exactly what happens: we continue to think of such cultures as an unruly quantity, and we refuse to engage in a more personal way with their particular reasons and values.

Third, we get used to dehumanizing others, to seeing them purely as a category or a quantity that causes an undesirable effect. A proper social history of the COVID-19 pandemic would have to include the fact that this dehumanization became almost second nature to many of us. As if the disease itself wasn’t bad enough, it also encouraged the habitual reduction of fellow citizens to disease vectors or to targets of that spiteful misanthropy: bloody anti-maskers. Stupid pro-vaxxers.

This sort of attitude poisons our ordinary interactions with people we know: when we perceive that a friend or family member might be one of those people, we lash out at that person (or, more often, we just cut them out of our lives) without inquiring into their own particular, personal reasons. For one gloriously enjoyable moment we become that managerial CEO, delivering that decisive message to our condemned employee: you’re fired.

I’m willing to bet that you, dear reader, have been on the receiving end of this: a friend or family member or colleague suddenly refers to you as a member of an allegedly problematic category rather than just speaking to you personally about how they think you’ve gone off course. That sense of unease you feel is the sense of a human relationship being destroyed.

As should now be clear, the increasing dominance of impersonal anxiety is not just making us ethically worse—it is a kind of sickness, an inhuman, alienated mode of existence. This is because human beings, with a few very rare exceptions, are only mentally healthy when they can regularly adopt the personal perspective on their fellow human beings. That is, when they can engage in a more direct way with the lives, feelings, hopes, fears, and plans of unique, particular others. This interaction need not always be positive, and it contains its own potential for dysfunction, but it is not psychologically optional, particularly if we are interested in such things as love and friendship. And it is entirely missing from a life devoted to national politics, or from a life spent on various online platforms, which absorb your “voice” into a featureless cacophony.

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Let us never make the error of thinking that the only way to improve our world is to improve the world.

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At the end of Mary Poppins, when George Banks finally comes to his senses, he uses the first names of his children for the first time in the film. He addresses them directly, as particular individuals, before rushing them off to fly a kite together. We all know that this is ethical flourishing, that it is a significant personal and moral improvement. Yet, when the film is over, we all re-emerge into a world that relentlessly encourages us to avoid this form of flourishing. So let us try to remember that every person in that large mathematical set has a name, and let us never make the error of thinking that the only way to improve our world is to improve the world.

Nicholas Smyth is an associate professor of philosophy at Fordham University.  He is thinking about starting a Substack.