Here’s a riddle for you.
What’s the difference between the word “good” and these words:
rude, generous, noble, fancy, subtle, sensitive, sketchy, magnanimous, raunchy, detestable
Can you see the answer?
Yes or no, hang on to that thought.
You ever hear people going on about how “obesity is not a moral failure”?
What do they mean by “moral failure”?
I’m a philosophy major (i.e., I got me a PhD in ethics and moral philosophy) and I have no idea what these people are saying when they say “being fat is (not) a moral failure”.
The way people say “moral” this and “moral” that makes no sense to me.
There’s two ways I can see it.
If it means that someone’s innermost wishes, desires, will, and intentions are reflected in their outer lives, well, yes, of course.
A person’s character reveals itself in their choices and actions. Choices and actions contribute to a person’s life, both its rewards and its failures.
“Moral” refers to the quality of a person’s inner being and how it works out in their lives through their actions.
The other way to see it:
The word “moral” is a mask worn over cruel bullying.
If they mean to make it out that a fat person, being morally imperfect, is therefore a worthless failure of a human being, well, no, and what a stupid thing to say.
Is it a moral failing to be fat?
In a way yes and in a way no.
Let’s go back to our riddle.
What’s the difference between “good” and all those other words like rude, noble, despicable, and do on?
“Good” is a sledgehammer word. It’s an abstract noun. You can’t point at it, touch it, see it, or taste it.
The other words all involve finer judgments about the details of a person and their situation. Calling a person rude is making a value judgment, and it’s also a description of how they’ve acted.
Any real living person will have many virtues and many vices. The “good” and “bad” in them comes by degree. It ain’t a function of “being moral” or “being good”.
Not one blessed soul on this planet is or ever could be perfectly good or evil. There are no saints and no devils among us mortals.
The question isn’t whether you are a “more moral” person for being in shape, or “less moral” for not. I can’t even make sense of that kind if talk.
We can talk, however, about the inability to properly control one’s appetites, or move enough as one ought to, or the motivations for not doing so. That talk will involve us in judgments of right and wrong.
Here’s how I see it.
This need to point the finger in blame, accusing others of mortal sins, is one of the most tiresome and exhausting parts of life today. I don’t care if it’s coming from an SSRI-addicted leftist or a Bible-thumping evangelical. Moral puritanism never got anyone anywhere, and it inevitably runs cover for the personal failings of the accuser.
That said, people are responsible for what they do or don’t do.
This fashion of treating people as nothing but products of genes, neurons, and environmental forces, interchangeable with the “artificial intelligence” [sic] computer models, has been disastrous.
It robs people of agency, the ability to act in meaningful ways.
Agency is what this is really all about.
Can you act in your life in such a way as to get more of what you want and less of what you don’t?
So many people now come off as barely-conscious animals snapping their jaws in fear and reacting from unthinking greed and lust.
See it from that angle and the behaviors that lead to obesity are indeed a moral failing. They are a deficit of inner being that belongs in a larger context of disordered feelings and desires which rob us of agency.
Like it or not, obesity is a lifestyle condition. It’s brought about by behaviors, repeated habitually, and it can be undone in the same way. Nobody is better off for being massively overweight and carrying excessive body-fat, and the failure to act in one’s best interest does mark an inner defect we can call “moral”.
But it ain’t the end of the world.
Taking responsibility may get you blame. But the other side of blame is the power to do otherwise. Rob people of responsibility and you rob them of agency. You tell them that they are helpless in the face of forces beyond their control and powerless to do anything positive with their lives.
No wonder they learn helplessness and give up in despair.
It’s a mistake to ignore how the environment contributes to this. Environment is more than physical surroundings. It’s the people, the culture, the ideas, what happens at 5 pm on Thursday, and on and on.
Ignore the contribution of the environment, treat individuals as miniature atoms of will and reasoning without regard for their real situation, and you badly misunderstand what a human being is and what moves them into action.
The truth, as it often is, is found in the space between the two bad extremes.
No mortal person has absolute freedom from their situation. But freedom never had to mean absolute power over nature.
I used to make a very long drive from Fort Lauderdale to my hometown in Alabama mostly by way of boring hauls on long stretches of interstate. The trip was a predestined journey which I could drive with a blindfold on. Every time I drove it, my free decisions and actions made it a uniquely different trip.
Freedom works with what it is given, be that your genetics or a Dunkin Donuts two minutes up the road on the drive to work. You can’t choose everything, but it is within our power to choose how we react to the environment, and to choose our environments.
That’s the only “moral” decision involved here. You gonna be fat, or you gonna do something about it?
On that note:
I’m throwing together a few courses in the Classroom over in the group. There’s already a few modules available in the Start Here course which may be of interest to you. I’m currently working on Dr. Matt’s Fat-torching Flywheel Formula which could be up in the next few days.
There’s no charge if you’re already in the group. If you aren’t in the group, there’s no fee to join for the time being. (That will change soon.)
If you want to kick me back good karma, share the link to that course with somebody who might benefit from it.
Matt Perryman