A Pandemic of Moral Dysfunction

Imagine if the suffering of yesterday were consistently used as a reason to improve tomorrow. If every experience of deprivation, injustice or unnecessary hardship contributed to a collective determination that future generations should not have to endure the same conditions. Human progress would become an expression of accumulated human experience, empathy and conscious reflection. However, an opposing pattern is frequently visible in public discourse. Individuals often invoke their own experiences of hardship not to advocate for better conditions, but to question why others should be entitled to them. Statements such as “I had to go through that, so why shouldn’t they?” or “We managed without those things, and we turned out fine” illustrate a peculiar psychological contradiction. The very experiences that might reasonably motivate the prevention of suffering are instead used to justify its continuation.

Two individuals can experience comparable adversity and arrive at fundamentally different conclusions. One might think, “I suffered, therefore nobody else should have to.” Another might conclude, “I suffered, therefore everybody else should have to.” This raises the question: what determines whether suffering becomes a catalyst for compassion and social progress, or a justification for perpetuating the conditions that caused it? A potentially significant explanation lies in the interaction between empathy, conscious awareness, metacognition, social conditioning and the meaning individuals assign to their own adversity.

One relevant explanation emerges from Leon Festinger’s 1957 theory of cognitive dissonance, particularly the concept of effort justification, subsequently investigated experimentally by Aronson and Mills in 1959. Cognitive dissonance describes the psychological discomfort that can arise when individuals hold conflicting beliefs or encounter information that challenges their existing understanding of themselves and their experiences.

If someone has endured considerable hardship, acknowledging that the hardship may have been unnecessary can threaten the meaning (and potentially even their identity) that they have constructed around their experiences. Consider an individual who spent decades working excessive hours, sacrificing personal relationships and struggling financially. If subsequent generations begin advocating for shorter working weeks, improved employment protections and better living conditions, the individual may interpret these developments in polarizing ways. They might welcome the improvements, recognising that others could avoid the sacrifices they were forced to make. Alternatively, they might resent the improvements, interpreting them as advantages that younger generations have not earned. The second response may function as a psychological defence. If suffering was necessary, character-building or morally valuable, then the individual’s sacrifices retain a particular significance. If those same conditions were avoidable, however, the person may be confronted with the uncomfortable possibility that much of what they endured served no necessary purpose. This offers a plausible mechanism through which the psychological need to preserve the meaning of past experiences can influence attitudes towards the welfare of others. The critical distinction is between recognising that something valuable was learned through adversity and concluding that the adversity itself was valuable or necessary.

Hardship can become incorporated into personal identity, particularly when survival is repeatedly associated with strength, discipline, independence or moral worth. An individual who endured deprivation may interpret their survival as evidence that deprivation produces resilience. Their experience becomes more than an autobiographical event; it becomes a standard against which the character and deservingness of others are evaluated. The underlying reasoning is deceptively simple: suffering made me stronger; therefore, removing suffering will make others weak. However, surviving adversity does not establish that adversity was necessary for personal development, nor does it demonstrate that the individual would not have developed equally valuable capacities under more supportive conditions.

Hardship also introduces survivorship bias. Those who endured harmful conditions and survived may become the most visible representatives of those experiences, while individuals who experienced lasting psychological, physical or socioeconomic harm are comparatively overlooked. The statement “I went through/did X/Y/Z and I/it turned out fine” cannot establish that the endurance was harmless, beneficial or necessary. It establishes only that the speaker survived and presently interprets their experience in that way.

This distinction is particularly important in discussions surrounding childhood adversity, education, poverty, employment and social welfare. When hardship is treated as a moral credential, reducing hardship can become confused with reducing opportunities for character development. Challenge and suffering are not synonymous. Competence, perseverance and resilience can develop through meaningful challenges accompanied by appropriate support, autonomy and security. Unnecessary deprivation is not a prerequisite for human development.

A further explanation can be found in the 1994 system justification theory, developed by John Jost and Mahzarin Banaji. The theory examines why individuals may defend existing social arrangements, even arrangements that disadvantage them. One proposed mechanism is that perceiving the social world as legitimate, stable and reasonably predictable can satisfy psychological needs for certainty, order and security. For those that have experienced poverty, discrimination or institutional neglect, recognising that these experiences were influenced by preventable structural conditions can be deeply unsettling. If hardship is understood as an inevitable feature of life, it may appear comprehensible. If it is recognised as partly the consequence of social, economic or political decisions, questions of responsibility and preventability become unavoidable. Defending the conditions under which one suffered may therefore help preserve an established worldview, even when that worldview legitimises harmful arrangements. This creates self-reinforcing process - individuals adapt to adverse circumstances, construct meaning around their survival and subsequently defend the very conditions to which they were required to adapt.

People also challenge unjust systems, and attitudes towards institutions depend on numerous factors, including personal circumstances, political beliefs, social identity and perceived opportunities for change. Empathy is central to understanding why comparable experiences of adversity produce different attitudes towards the suffering of others. However, empathy is not a single psychological process. Affective empathy concerns emotional responsiveness to another person’s experience. Cognitive empathy involves understanding another person’s perspective or mental state. Empathic concern, closely related to compassion, involves an other-oriented concern for their welfare. These capacities can interact, but they are not interchangeable. An individual may recognise another person’s suffering without experiencing a corresponding emotional response. Another may experience emotional distress without understanding the person’s circumstances accurately. Someone may also be strongly committed to preventing harm without sharing the emotional experience of the person affected. Consequently, the crucial question may be whether empathic understanding is activated, accurately directed and translated into compassionate judgement or action. This introduces the possibility that empathy operates as a moderating factor in the relationship between experienced adversity and attitudes towards future suffering. Individuals with greater empathic concern may be more inclined to interpret their experiences as reasons to prevent comparable harm, while other psychological processes may interfere with this response.

Notably, the opposite of compassionate action is not necessarily sadism. Sadism involves deriving pleasure or gratification from another person’s suffering. Someone who believes that others should endure the same hardships they experienced may instead be motivated by resentment, perceived unfairness, moral disengagement, social conformity or a belief that suffering produces beneficial outcomes. The outward acceptance of suffering does not, by itself, establish the absence of empathy.

Conscious awareness introduces another potentially decisive dimension. An individual may possess considerable empathic capacity but fail to recognise another person’s suffering accurately, particularly when that suffering is interpreted through deeply established assumptions. The relevant processes include a wider conscious recognition of another person’s circumstances, awareness of one’s own emotional and cognitive responses, and the ability to examine the assumptions through which those circumstances are interpreted.

Metacognition, broadly understood as the capacity to monitor and reflect upon one’s own thinking, is also particularly relevant. Consider someone who experienced financial deprivation and subsequently observes a younger person receiving economic assistance. They may recognise the younger person’s difficulties but interpret the assistance as unfair because comparable support was unavailable to them. Their autobiographical experience becomes the reference point for evaluating somebody else’s needs. The individual may consciously recognise that another person is struggling while remaining unaware of how their own experiences shape their judgement of whether that struggle should be alleviated. Recognising suffering is not equivalent to recognising the assumptions through which suffering is interpreted.

A person may possess empathy, understand that someone is experiencing hardship and nevertheless believe that hardship should continue because they have never critically examined their own beliefs about its necessity. Conscious reflection therefore influences whether empathic responses are expressed compassionately or overridden by learned expectations.

Increasing metacognitive awareness could therefore alter attitudes towards suffering without necessarily changing an individual’s underlying empathic capacity. Such a possibility requires empirical investigation, but it provides an important distinction between the ability to empathise and the ability to recognise when one’s own assumptions are obstructing compassionate judgement.

Moral dysfunction can be described as a disruption in the integration of empathic awareness, conscious perception and moral judgement. An individual may recognise another person's suffering, understand its consequences and nevertheless consider its continuation justified through internalised beliefs about fairness, necessity or deservingness. Within this framework, moral dysfunction describes a disconnect between recognising preventable harm and critically evaluating the moral assumptions that legitimise its continuation. This disconnect may be substantially reinforced through social conditioning, particularly where endurance and/or suffering has been normalised or assigned moral value across generations. Societies may therefore transmit more than adverse conditions themselves - they may also transmit the interpretative frameworks that discourage people from questioning those conditions.

Beliefs about suffering and endurance are shaped through family relationships, education, cultural narratives, institutions and broader social expectations and conditioning. Statements such as “life isn’t fair”, “nobody helped me”, “people need to toughen up” or “struggle builds character” can become internalised frameworks for interpreting adversity. These beliefs are not necessarily expressions of cruelty. Some may originate in genuine attempts to prepare others for difficult circumstances. However, when generalised uncritically, they can normalise preventable suffering and discourage attempts to alleviate it. This raises the possibility of socially conditioned inhibition of compassionate responses.

An individual might experience concern for someone else’s welfare while simultaneously believing that intervention would weaken the person, reward dependency or violate an established understanding of fairness. Empathy and learned beliefs may therefore produce competing motivations.

Albert Bandura’s work on moral disengagement provides a related theoretical framework. Moral disengagement describes processes through which individuals justify harmful conduct, minimise its consequences or distance themselves from moral responsibility. Moral justification and the minimisation of harm are particularly relevant where suffering is framed as necessary for someone else’s eventual benefit. Nevertheless, endorsing hardship as character-building is not automatically an instance of moral disengagement. The concept becomes relevant when such beliefs function to excuse or facilitate harm.

The intergenerational dimension becomes particularly apparent in family environments. A parent who experienced physical punishment during childhood may reproduce the same practices, reasoning that they survived and therefore their children will benefit from similar treatment. Another parent with comparable experiences may consciously reject physical punishment precisely because they remember its consequences. The difference cannot be attributed to childhood experience alone.

Research into intergenerational adversity indicates that harmful patterns can be transmitted across generations, but that transmission is neither universal nor inevitable. Supportive relationships, reflective capacities, social environments and access to alternative models of behaviour can all influence subsequent outcomes. What may be transmitted is not simply behaviour, but the meaning attached to behaviour. When harmful experiences are retrospectively interpreted as necessary, beneficial or morally appropriate, their repetition becomes easier to justify. Conversely, recognising that one survived despite harmful experiences, rather than because of them, creates the possibility of interrupting the pattern.

This distinction may be especially important in understanding why some individuals actively seek to improve the circumstances of future generations while others resist changes that would reduce the hardships they once experienced.

Another relevant psychological mechanism concerns how individuals evaluate fairness. Consider two people who grew up experiencing economic insecurity. Both subsequently encounter policies designed to improve housing access, employment conditions or educational opportunities for younger generations. One may interpret these policies in terms of collective progress: future generations have an opportunity to avoid hardships that were previously widespread. The other may evaluate them through personal comparison: younger generations are receiving benefits that were unavailable to them. The first interpretation evaluates whether present conditions adequately support human welfare. The second evaluates whether the distribution of hardship and opportunity is equivalent across generations. These different reference points can produce opposing conclusions about fairness.

The 1954 social comparison theory research is useful, in which Leon Festinger explores relative deprivation and provides useful frameworks for investigating differential responses. A person may resent another’s improved circumstances not because those improvements cause them direct harm, but because they highlight inequalities between their own past experiences and the opportunities available to others. The result can be a peculiar reversal of the purpose of progress. Rather than regarding improvements as evidence that society has learned from previous hardship, improvements become perceived injustices because earlier generations did not receive them. In effect, fairness becomes associated with the equal distribution of suffering rather than the progressive reduction of avoidable harm.

Human beings possess an extraordinary capacity to adapt to difficult circumstances. Yet adaptation should not be confused with evidence that those circumstances were desirable.

Perhaps the most consequential psychological distinction lies in whether individuals can separate the value of their own survival from the perceived necessity of the conditions they survived. Those who make this distinction can acknowledge their achievements without requiring others to repeat their suffering. Their experiences can inform compassion, institutional improvement and the prevention of avoidable harm. Those who do not may interpret improvements in human welfare as challenges to their identity, their understanding of fairness or the meaning of their past.

Empathy, conscious awareness and metacognitive reflection may help explain why these different interpretations emerge. Their interactions with social conditioning, identity and moral beliefs is likely to be more important than any single characteristic. The broader implication is that human progress depends not only on recognising suffering, but also on questioning the beliefs that allow suffering to become normalised and reproduced.

Yesterday’s suffering can become tomorrow’s inheritance - or it can become the knowledge through which tomorrow is improved. The fact that humanity has endured something is not, in itself, a justification for requiring humanity to endure it again.

Francisco de Goya (1799). The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (El sueño de la razón produce monstruos). Etching and aquatint, from Los Caprichos, Plate 43. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Public domain (CC0)

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