Ethical Self-Growth without Ethical Self-Deception

One way we who care about living ethically deal with harmful behavior, and the painful and retributive emotions engendered by it, is to recognize that we do not want to return harm-for-harm and then attempt to replace our angry feelings with compassion or another more pro-social emotion. This is, in essence, embodied in the moral injunction to “love your enemy.”

But to what extent is this actually possible? And even if it is possible, is it genuine? Should we aspire to rise above retaliation or “returning evil for evil” by consciously substituting love for anger, or is there a deeper cognitive or emotional transformation available to us? Or, should we just stick with retribution and keep the old saw of an eye for an eye?

It was a Thanksgiving evening at a shelter in Manhattan and the other volunteer had brought in a big cake that looked like a comical turkey for dessert. The cake was so impressive that we did not want to cut it before the guests arrived (we refused to label the folks who came to the shelter as “homeless,” they were our guests). In a moment of astonishingly poor judgment, we left a large kitchen knife next to the cake so our guests could cut their own pieces.

That night a new arrival I’ll call Margaret arrived at our shelter. Each night, twelve guests arrived from a drop-in center, where they spent their days receiving counseling, healthcare support and assistance with housing and employment. We were volunteers, not social workers, who came and slept over one night per month and the guests were vetted to ensure that no one with a history of violence was sent to us or to any of the other faith-based shelters in the system.

The system of faith-based shelters, by the way, was established in the early 1980s in New York City due to the development of the homeless crisis in the U.S.. You might have thought that America always had a homeless crisis. No, our current crisis arose as a result of specific economic and social policies during the Reagan administration that pushed hundreds of thousands of people into precarity and onto the streets.

Faith communities – churches, synagogues, meeting houses etc. – stepped in, coordinating closely with the city to provide overnight shelter while drop-in centers managed daytime services. There were the city shelters (shunned by many) and the private “church” shelters, which everyone who needed a night shelter wanted to get into.

In the school gymnasium we used, we would set up 12 city-provided cots for the guests. There were two cots in private spaces for the nightly volunteers. Bedding was provided by the Department of Corrections and washed once a week at Rikers Island. Food, snacks and healthful beverages were provided through the generosity of the city government, the religious organization and/or volunteers. We ran 365 nights a year. They still run 365 nights a year.

So back to this Thanksgiving evening. Margaret struggled with the communal sleeping arrangement. Lights went out at 10 p.m., came back on at 6 a.m., and the gym held eleven other guests, most of whom were already sleep deprived and perhaps a little cranky due to their adverse circumstances. Margaret repeatedly woke people, and every half hour or so I found myself racing out of the kitchen to break up another verbal conflict.

At 3 a.m., I did what most guests feared – I called the drop-in center to ask for intervention. If a volunteer had to call the center about someone, this usually meant that the guest would have to literally sit in the drop-in center for a night, as it was a drop-in center and not a shelter and folks were not legally allowed to lie down and sleep there according to NY building codes.

But if the guest sat in a chair and fell asleep, this was, apparently, legally OK. Basically, if you got temporarily kicked out of a specific night shelter, you might have to sit a few nights in the center to teach you that you were not allowed to mess things up for others.

Well, someone wanted to rile Margaret up, perhaps to get her tossed from the system completely, so they told her that I had called the drop-in center (they overheard me talking to someone there). They overexaggerated what I had said. Margaret believed she was going to lose her “church bed” and be tossed back onto the streets or go to a city shelter.

I was, however, more upset with the center than Margaret and directed my ire not at Margaret but the center for not prepping her well enough – Margaret did not know this. I felt sympathy for her and criticized the drop-in center, to the drop-in center, for not helping her enough.

Margaret became irate and panicked at the thought of having gone through an application process and vetting and then getting tossed back into the streets on her first day. So, she grabbed the knife that was still on the table and came at me with it raised in the air, yelling obscenities, and vowing I would not get her thrown into the streets again without paying for it.

What to do, what to do, what to do? I didn’t know. I turned sideways to her because that’s what Jackie Chan always did when someone attacked him. I then raised my left hand in the air, as people usually do if someone wants to stab them. Actually, I feared for the worst at that time.

As she came into striking distance, a guest named David (I had established a good rapport with him) lunged at Margaret from the side, grabbing her upraised arm. This triggered assistance from other guests, and the other volunteer, who soon had taken the knife out of her hand.

Shaken and exhausted, I called the police. They arrived but Margaret had suddenly changed her tune. She kept saying, “Dan…why are you doing this to me? I love you! Please, come on, give me a hug!” The cops then said, “Sir, the lady in question seems to want to hug you.” I explained what happened, others corroborated and the cops went to talk to Margaret who kept saying things like, “What’s wrong with him?! I just want to hug him!”

Eventually, the officers explained the situation to me. As I understood it, if arrested, she would likely be released by a night court judge who would send her to psychiatric observation or evaluation. They said Margaret was clearly unstable, but not unstable enough to be committed.

She would probably be released in the morning, potentially in a worse condition. It would be better, they argued, for the drop-in center to handle the situation. Having calmed down considerably, I concurred. They warned her firmly about approaching me for the rest of the night and left.

I later told the two elderly ladies who were the volunteer coordinators about what happened.

Sylvia: “How could you call the police on that poor woman!?”

Dan: “Well, Sylvia, she tried to kill me.”

Sylvia: “Oh come on Dan, this woman has psychological problems. She didn’t really want to kill you, you pushed her to do that by calling the drop-in center.”

Dan: “Sylvia, we’re trained to call the drop-in center in situations like these.”

Sylvia: “No Dan, you are a human being who can understand, forgive and forget. We expect volunteers to use their discretion.”

The other lady was more concerned for my soul.

Estelle: “Dan, you know many of our guests have psychological problems. Most have had very difficult lives. We vet our volunteers as well as our guests to make sure they have the temperament to take some negative behavior.”

Dan: “Like trying to stab me to death?”

Estelle: “My goodness you can be a drama queen, can’t you! Listen, here’s what you need to do. Forgive her. Right now, you feel resentment and want revenge. No, Dan, this is wrong. Replace the revenge in your heart with love and compassion. For your own good.”

Here is the philosophical problem as I see it and that I want to share with you:

A person tries to kill me. She is certainly mentally disturbed, perhaps by severe and prolonged trauma in her past, perhaps by brain chemistry, perhaps both. Objective moral observers, good people, people of high ethical standards and compassion, tell me to replace my desire for retribution with compassion. Should a person do this? Is it even possible to do this?

I would say it is possible to do this, but it would require some mental trickery. It would almost seem like a type of self-deception to me. I feel fear, anger and a desire for punishment and these emotions are judged socially undesirable by people I feel are thoughtful and educated and who are working for a better world. So I try to suppress my desire to return harm for harm and I try to generate a new, approved emotion in its place.

This feels, however, less like moral development and more like emotional compliance. I am feeling a certain emotion which is being judged as anti-social or non-progressive so I am encouraged to supplant this emotion with a self-generated emotion deemed to be pro-social and acceptable to an ex-school librarian and a borough-level politician.

Is this what moral evolution or self-development amounts to? Every time someone harms or insults me, am I to explain away their agency, deny their responsibility and manufacture compassion? Is that really what it means to love one’s enemies? Jesus does not say, “Explain away your outrage by diagnosing your attacker.” Jesus assumes that outrage itself can lose its grip or not even appear.

So there is another possibility. Perhaps the goal is not to replace retributive emotions once they arise, but to become the kind of person in whom they do not arise in the first place. This, I suspect, is what the more humane religious traditions are actually aiming at. When Jesus says, “Turn the other cheek,” he does not suggest a psychological workaround or a forced emotional substitution. He assumes a transformation of character so deep that retaliation no longer presents itself as a live option.

Another way to understand this is through the lens of Buddhist mindfulness. In Buddhism, the emphasis is not on suppressing or replacing harmful emotions after they arise, but on cultivating a mind in which such emotions simply do not arise. The Buddha teaches, for example, “Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts, happiness follows him like a shadow that never leaves him” (Dhammapada, verse 1).

Here, moral and emotional development is proactive: One trains one’s awareness, attention and intentions so that anger, hatred and resentment never take root. Similarly, the Satipatthana Sutta emphasizes that through consistent mindfulness and clear knowing of the present moment, unwholesome states do not arise.

In this light, the ethical ideal expressed by Jesus in “turn the other cheek” aligns closely with Buddhist practice: The goal is not to force oneself to feel compassion after being wronged, but to become the kind of person in whom retaliation and resentment no longer appear as viable options.

The problem of retribution versus compassion cannot be solved merely by emotional substitution. To command oneself to feel love where fear and anger naturally arise risks dishonesty, repression or moral theater. Genuine moral growth, if it is possible at all, must occur at a deeper level, at the level of perception, interpretation and character. We are to recognize and discern our emotions and responses and motives to the point where some of them, metaphorically, evaporate upon thorough inspection.

The religious ideal, then, is not the constant override of our emotions, but their gradual transformation. Through sustained reflection, discipline and perhaps suffering, some harmful emotions may weaken, lose their urgency or even disappear under scrutiny. Retribution fades not because it is forbidden, but because it no longer makes sense.