There are many vegetarian people I know, who don’t hesitate to kill mosquitoes or cockroaches. Isn’t that strange? Vegetarianism is all about not killing other living beings. And they have no problem killing mosquitoes or cockroaches? I am not here to discuss whether it is right or wrong to kill insects, that is a separate debate and I don’t want to get into it in this article. I am more interested in this behaviour where, in a person’s subjective morality, doing something is bad; but they themselves do it in some other way, or in some other context, and have no regret about it? In fact some people even encourage other people to do it. I have seen people totally panicking on the sight of a cockroach, jumping around and telling everyone to just get rid of it. I was intrigued by this behaviour and decided to think a little on it. Here’s my opinion.
I feel that a lot of our ethics are based on the aesthetics of the things in our environment that we are interacting with. Think about it. Killing a cockroach is heroic for some people and killing a butterfly is absolutely insensitive for the same people, just because a cockroach is not so pleasing aesthically, and a butterfly is. Those people might be completely against eating meat, but completely in favour of mass killing of all cockroaches in the world. Why so? This is not just with vegetarians. I have seen a very similar behaviour with non-vegetarians as well. There are many non-vegetarians I know who don’t prefer to see a chicken being killed, because it is not exactly aesthetically pleasing. But they will happily munch on the food prepared using the same exact chicken’s body parts.
This doesn’t just apply to food. It applies to people. People who have good looks, have a good accent, use a good perfume usually get treated well by other people. Ugly people, whether we like it or not, have a clear disadvantage in multiple aspects of life. If you notice, we all have some or the other areas in our lives where we behave in a very similar biased way, without even noticing. The vegetarians who are killing cockroaches don’t even know that they are going against their own ethics. Isn’t it strange? I certainly think so, and I find it fascinating.
I think the reason for this is that we don’t really put a lot of thought in such trivial matters. Since we don’t put a lot of thought, our lizard brain is the one incharge of so many of our ethics and morals. If you don’t know what our lizard is brain is, it is explained in great detail in the book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. If you don’t want to read the whole book and want a good summary, here’s a great video from Future IQ’s youtube channel. To summarize, our brain has 2 parts, the lizard brain and the human brain. The lizard brain is for all the quick tasks which are almost involuntary (not exactly involuntary) and the human brain is for tasks that require some thinking. So for example, when you are learning to drive a car, initially you are thinking a lot, you have to use your human brain, but once you drive it multiple times, it kind of gets hard wired into your system and your limbs automatically work towards driving the car, you don’t have to think much about it. That is your lizard brain.
Many of us use our lizard brain to conclude things very quickly even on subjects like ethics. Sometimes because we are reluctant to change a strong bias that we have, sometimes just because we don’t care or don’t have time to think about it. For a lot of people, seeing a cockroach triggers a kind of survival instinct in them and their lizard brain takes control. Many a times, I feel, this could also be due to the kind of upbringing we had, the environment we live in, the content we consume, etc. A really common example in India would be the biases that Hindus and Muslims have against each other, or in the US, the biases that blacks and whites have against each other. Obviously, I am not going to go into the communal or political angle of it. I am here just to discuss the psychological aspects of it.
So what’s the point of all of this? I feel that although judgement based on aesthetics or instincts is useful in many cases, we shouldn’t dwell upon it all the time. We must recognize that we all have such biases (known or unknown) in our mind and be open to change them if need be. We should try to be aware of the presence of these biases within us and also try to remove them. That can be done by introspection, you can check out a previous blog I wrote about introspection.
If you like this one, be sure to check out the other ones, I will meet you next time!