Why You Shouldn’t Outsource Your Morality
To get started, this is a critique of Moral Pedagogy and the resulting moral dependency trap*. I will be outlining a distinction between First-Order Moral Responsibilities (the genuine, internal duties) and Second-Order Moral Responsibilities (the false, outsourced duties) and arguing the Autonomy vs. Heteronomy dichotomy.
If that sounded like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, I agree. That’s a lot of big words and undefined concepts, and I’m going to shoot it to you straight, in real English, so we’re all on the same page. But for those of you who choose to feed this ranting through an AI to see if old John P. is full of bullshit – first of all, I am; and secondly, hopefully that stupid machine will actually understand that this is a targeted, rhetorical article aimed at a specific lay audience.
That way, it won’t irrationally claim I violated a bunch of my own rules of bias and fallacies.
On With The Show
In the plainest terms I can come up with:
I believe there are real ethical responsibilities, and there are false ones. And the majority of people have them reversed. I believe the real responsibility is that of the individual to learn and decide their own ethics and morality and then apply them to the best of their ability in all things. Whereas, most people believe that your responsibility is to outsource these things to a higher authority, such as a church or government.
There is, of course, a practical concern – which is that when you don’t know anything you have to trust someone to teach you.
And that’s where the entire system is failing, because instead of teaching people how to avoid bias and fallacies in their thinking, we teach them a set of rules to memorize. So instead of teaching people how to fish, we just give them some fish. This makes people entirely dependent on their provider, rather than being able to provide for themselves. (Hence, the *Moral Dependency Trap.)
Points of Order:
On the personal responsibility to define morals, my beliefs are merely a continuation of Philosophers like:
- Jean-Paul Sartre who argued that the individual is responsible for defining their own morality.
- Nietzsche who rejected “herd morality” in favor of creating one’s own values.
- Immanuel Kant who argued that you must use your rationality to determine what’s right.
The Moral Teaching Critique: Fishing vs. Giving Fish
I think the analogy concerning learning to fish versus receiving fish is a good way to frame the critique of how morality is typically taught and enforced.
- Giving the Fish (Heteronomy/Rules): This involves handing down a fixed set of rules, doctrines, or prescriptions (the “fish”). This method is fast, offers immediate cognitive relief from uncertainty, and serves the institutional goal of control and predictability. The “good life” is reduced to obedience.
- The Flaw: It develops no skill, requires no critical engagement, and creates Moral Learned Helplessness.
- When a novel situation or ethical dilemma arises that is not explicitly covered by the rulebook, the individual is paralyzed or defaults to an external source, reinforcing dependency.
- Teaching to Fish (Autonomy/Methodology): This involves teaching the methodology of ethical reasoning – how to analyze, discern, challenge, and construct one’s own ethical framework (how to “fish”). This process includes:
- Critical Thinking: Identifying logical fallacies, cognitive biases, and self-deception.
- Philosophical Literacy: Understanding the mechanics of Deontology, Consequentialism, and Virtue Ethics.
- Historical Validation: Empirically testing proposed maxims against their historical outcomes.
- The Outcome: The individual develops Moral Resilience and Self-Efficacy, capable of legislating for themselves in any circumstance, fulfilling the true First-Order Moral Responsibility.
The Reversal of Ethical Responsibilities
I believe most people generally have their ethics switched around in daily life. For example, if a church directs men to think of women as beneath them, but an individual thinks, “I really believe men and women are equal”, there is a little disconnect. But when he then turns around and publicly acknowledges that men are indeed set above women, because “the Bible says so”, he’s choosing to accept an external moral value rather than follow his own internal moral compass.
I find that morally indefensible. It’s like saying, “Sorry! I think women are equal, but Jesus doesn’t”.
The Real Responsibility (The Way It SHOULD Be)
Our first and most important moral job is this: Use our own minds to decide what’s right, then actually live by it. This responsibility is personal, but the way we apply it should work for everyone, not just us.
Duty to Reason
You’re responsible for thinking things through for yourself, using facts and logic. That means:
- Question your own biases.
- Check what history and science actually show.
- Aim for beliefs that fit together and make sense.
Duty to Autonomy
You’re responsible for staying in charge of your own morals. That means:
- Don’t just copy whatever a group, church, party, or leader says.
- Decide your values consciously.
- Treat yourself as the one who writes your own moral rules.
Duty to Action
You’re responsible for living by the principles you’ve tested and accepted. That means:
- Try to act in line with your own ethics in the real world,
- Own the results of your choices, good or bad,
- And practice Radical Personal Accountability for what you do and what you allow.
The False Responsibility (The Way It Usually IS)
The common, but mistaken, idea about morality is this: Our main job is to obey and believe, not to think. I call this the Duty of Obedience and Faith.
Duty to Conformity
You are told that being moral means:
- Pushing aside your own thinking and conscience.
- Obeying a church, a leader, a book, or a tradition.
- Letting something outside you make the final call on what is right or wrong.
Duty to Preserve
You are told that you must:
- Protect the institution and its rules.
- Treat its survival and reputation as more important than real human well-being.
- Ignore or attack facts that contradict its teachings.
The Real Effect
This setup lets people feel “good” or “moral” just because they follow the rules. They hand off the hard work of morality, like learning, questioning, and self-examination, to an outside system. The problem isn’t that the system exists, but that it replaces a way of knowing based on reason and evidence with one based on faith and loyalty.
So We Reach the Logical Conclusion: The Dependency Trap
The logical conclusion of this flawed thought process is the Moral Dependency Trap, which is philosophically and socially harmful. The results are as follows:
Stalled Moral Growth – When people hand off their moral responsibility to an outside authority, their ethics stop developing. The group’s rules harden and freeze. They don’t adapt to:
- New scientific discoveries.
- Changing social realities.
- Or the real-world harm caused by their own beliefs and policies.
Easy Path to Extremism – If you rely on someone else to do your thinking, you lose the tools to tell when that person or group has gone off the rails. In a rules-only system:
- Charismatic or authoritarian leaders can twist the rules to serve their own agenda.
- People follow along because they never learned how to question.
If you never learned how to “catch your own moral fish,” you’ll eat whatever is handed to you, even if it is poisoned.
Intellectual Cowardice – This setup encourages people to stay in a kind of mental childhood.
- Needing someone else to think for you.
- Being afraid to use your own understanding without a guide.
I believe a person’s highest moral duty is to grow out of that state, to stop hiding behind authorities, and to take full responsibility for their own thinking.
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