A POINT
Given that morality often functions like a treadmill — where harm and corruption never truly disappear but continually resurface — it seems that we’re less concerned with eliminating evil than with containing it. In doing so, we end up cooperating with it to some extent. If that’s the case, then it’s fair to say that we aren’t really creatures who put morality first.
ANALYSIS
There’s a strong - if not definitive - case to be made that humans don’t actually put morality first, even though we often like to think we do. Let’s unpack.
Many philosophers and sociologists have noticed that morality functions less like a ladder toward perfection or a strong level of virtue and more like a treadmill — a constant balancing act to prevent decay, corruption, and cruelty from taking over, rather than a project that can ever be “completed.”
In that view:
Evil and harm aren’t eradicated; they’re managed, quarantined, redirected, or normalized into tolerable forms.
Societies - Inc religions - cooperate with evil when it’s useful, necessary,
or simply invisible to them (think of economic exploitation, systemic
inequality, or environmental harm).
Moral progress is often partial, reactive, and uneven — we move forward in some
areas while regressing in others.
If that’s true, then morality isn’t the primary principle that drives human
behavior. It’s more like a secondary regulator — something we use to maintain
cohesion, manage conflict, and justify action after the fact. What tends to come
first are survival, power, comfort, belonging, and status — and morality then
evolves to rationalize and stabilize those drives.
We are not creatures that put morality first. We’re adaptive, not purely moral.
We construct moral systems to live together and make our coexistence tolerable,
but those systems always exist in tension with pragmatic, self-interested, and
tribal instincts. We don’t eliminate evil; we negotiate with it and evildoers —
and morality may be less about purity and more about management. Or the
appearance of management.
WHAT OF POTENTIAL EVIL?
Possibilities don’t really count full stop. They have no actuality — they are only imagined extensions of what could be, not what is. The world operates on what happens, not what might happen. A possible event has no force, no shape, no consequence until it crosses into reality. You can’t touch it, measure it, or be affected by it; it doesn’t exist except as thought. Possibilities may inform planning or imagination, but they don’t count in any concrete way — they don’t alter the present, bear evidence, or create obligations. They are shadows of what could be, not facts of what is. The further away a possibility lies, the weaker even its predictive or emotional relevance becomes. In essence, possibility is potential energy without manifestation — meaningful only when and if it becomes real.
Just because it is possible that an evil might come does not mean it counts just because it is a moral possibility. The impulse we have to treat possible future harms as somehow counting is a lie and based on fear. In fact a lie is a moral defect and to reinforce it with fear is another. So oddly, trying to make moral possibilities count depends on doing bad right now.
If the present is all that truly matters and possibilities hold no moral weight, then expecting future evil becomes a kind of quiet permission for it. By treating wrongdoing as inevitable, we prepare for it instead of preventing it, building tolerance rather than resistance. In doing so, we help shape the very conditions we claim merely to foresee — our anticipation becomes participation. To expect evil is, in part, to make room for it.
Here are several reasons why possibilities — especially distant ones — might be seen as having little or no moral weight:
Uncertainty increases with time: The further into the future we project, the less certain outcomes become, weakening any moral obligation to act on them.
Limited foresight: Humans can’t reliably predict complex consequences, so assigning moral weight to possibilities risks basing ethics on speculation rather than fact.
Moral immediacy: Ethics often depends on present suffering or clear causation — if harm isn’t happening now, our sense of duty weakens.
Responsibility proximity: Moral responsibility tends to correlate with temporal and causal proximity; the closer the potential harm, the stronger the moral pull.
Practical constraints: We have finite attention and resources, so morality naturally prioritizes near-term and tangible concerns over distant hypotheticals.
Emotional distance: Empathy diminishes with time and abstraction — future harms feel less real, so they carry less psychological or moral urgency.
Moral fatigue and paralysis: Constantly weighting distant possibilities can lead to inaction or despair, undermining effective moral behavior in the present.
Social validation: Shared moral norms focus on immediate harm because it’s visible and collectively verifiable; distant evils lack the same consensus.
Point:
If morality functions to anticipate potential wrongdoing rather than eliminate existing evil, it acts as a predictive system, not a purifying one.
Morality as Risk Management: Ethical systems serve to manage possible or foreseeable harm before it occurs, not to perfect human nature.
Social Function: Laws, norms, and taboos exist because corruption and cruelty are predictable outcomes of human behavior.
Paradox: By organizing around the expectation of wrongdoing, society normalizes it as inevitable and helps ensure it will come about.
Conclusion: Morality doesn’t transcend evil — it stabilizes life by accommodating and managing our potential for harm.
GOD
If God’s law is truly a reflection of His character, and that law defines perfect goodness, then to love God with all one’s heart should mean to align fully with moral truth. But humans demonstrably don’t put God and/or morality first; our drives are survival, comfort, belonging, and power. That raises a serious problem: how can finite, self-interested creatures fulfill a command that seems absolute?
The saying “God never asks the impossible” is often meant to reassure that divine commands are just, not cruel — that what is asked is within human reach with God’s help. But from a philosophical standpoint, if morality reflects God’s nature and we do not live according to it, then either:
1 God’s law exceeds our natural capacity (and divine grace is required to bridge the gap), or
2 Putting God first means something deeper than moral perfection — perhaps a recognition of dependence, humility, and continual turning toward what we fail to reach. In that sense, the command to love God with all one’s heart isn’t about achieving a moral ideal by willpower but about orienting desire — wanting the good even when we can’t fully live it. So while we don’t put morality first in action, we might still put God first in aspiration — acknowledging that our failure to embody His law is part of why we need Him.
1 is very unsatisfactory. A person could say that their love for God is down to their natural capacity - so we have no business patronizing them by assuming it is grace. If it is grace, we have no way of verifying that. They have no right to patronise us by asking us to agree with them if they say it is grace. They do not know what grace is or what it means. They do not know how it can make them love God properly when it is naturally impossible - so they do not really know if their love is real.
2 is very patronising. If we fall short all the time, how sincere is our aspiration? We do not even know what fully being good would look like!
While it is true that the command calls us to desire to be as good as God wants us to be even if we are not, it is not a licence for saying that we can always violate him and should make do with the desire to not violate. There is no relationship there.
APPENDIX: Innocence Outsourced: Faith and the Hidden Weight of Indirect Malice
Many of us subconsciously cooperate with evil not by committing it ourselves, but by containing it—allowing it to exist at a distance, mediated through others, systems, or circumstances. Outsourcing malice lets us feel morally clean while still participating in harm indirectly. In effect, we become enablers of wrongdoing, quietly maintaining it in a “safe” corner of reality. Prayer, good works, or acts of charity often arise as compensatory measures, an attempt to balance the ledger against the evil we tolerate or delegate. In this way, much of human morality is a negotiation: we contain and outsource what we cannot—or will not—directly confront, and then try to redeem ourselves for that very containment.
Many people devote themselves to prayer and good works, consciously or unconsciously as a way to counterbalance the malice they outsource or project onto others. In what might be called “Evil by Proxy,” individuals may avoid direct cruelty, yet allow harm to occur through intermediaries—people, circumstances, or even intentions—while maintaining the illusion of innocence. Acts of kindness, ritual, or devotion can function as a psychic or moral accounting, an attempt to cleanse themselves of the underhanded viciousness they release indirectly. Whether this compensation is effective or merely a placebo, it reflects a human desire to reconcile a sense of moral self with the darker impulses one refuses to confront directly.