{"id":156054,"date":"2025-09-14T11:19:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-14T11:19:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/156054\/"},"modified":"2025-09-14T11:19:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-14T11:19:07","slug":"moral-scrupulosity-how-to-be-a-good-person-without-ruining-your-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/156054\/","title":{"rendered":"Moral scrupulosity: How to be a good person \u2014 without ruining your life"},"content":{"rendered":"

Your Mileage May Vary<\/a> is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It\u2019s based on value pluralism<\/a> \u2014 the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form<\/a>. Here\u2019s this week\u2019s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:<\/p>\n

The Jewish High Holidays are coming up, and that includes Yom Kippur. It\u2019s a holiday that encourages people to reflect on their behavior and make amends. That\u2019s all well and good, but I\u2019m someone who struggles with scrupulosity \u2014 constantly worrying about my morality and if I\u2019m doing The Most Possible Good\u2122.<\/p>\n

In practice this is far more paralyzing than motivating. Fixating on the ethical implications of all possible decisions makes it harder to take any action, and I\u2019ve lost hours scouring my memories of my past behavior for immorality like a football player watching footage of their games to analyze what they could do differently. Guilt simply isn\u2019t serving me, but I worry that saying to hell with all that means I\u2019ll stop striving to be a better person and become morally complacent.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve observed Yom Kippur for decades, and don\u2019t want to simply avoid the day. But the holiday is a moral scrupulosity trigger. How do you think I should approach this? I want to stop feeling guilty for letting guilt get in my own way.<\/p>\n

Have you ever heard the story about what happened when God decided to give the Bible<\/a> to flesh-and-blood human beings? According to the ancient rabbis, the angels hated the idea. They argued that humans were deeply flawed mortals who didn\u2019t deserve such a holy scripture; only angels could be worthy of it, so it should stay up in heaven.<\/p>\n

It fell to Moses to rebut the angels\u2019 argument. He asked them: What do you angels need the Bible for? The Bible says not to murder, not to commit adultery, not to steal \u2014 do you have jealousy or other emotions that could lead you to do those things? The Bible says to honor your father and mother \u2014 but you don\u2019t have parents, so how could you ever do that? And the Bible says to sanctify the Sabbath \u2014 but you never do any work, so how could you even honor the Sabbath by resting?<\/p>\n

The angels saw that Moses was right. Angels are really great at one thing: being perfect. But perfect creatures are static. They don\u2019t experience painful challenges, they don\u2019t grow, and they don\u2019t make choices that add beauty to the world. We humans do those things. God gives the Bible to humans not to make them into angels \u2014 but to make them better at being the unique thing they are: human animals, with feelings, flaws, and all, that can learn to use their capabilities in more beautiful ways.<\/p>\n

Have a question you want me to answer in the next Your Mileage May Vary column?<\/p>\n

I think there\u2019s a lot of wisdom in this story. And I want you to notice how far it is from demanding that humans do \u201cThe Most Possible Good\u2122.\u201d That language suggests a maximizing ethical theory like utilitarianism, which says that we have to do the action that produces the greatest good for the greatest number. In other words, we have to optimize.<\/p>\n

Moral optimization may be possible for angels, but not for humans<\/a>. We each hold multiple values, and sometimes those values are in tension with each other, forcing us to strike a balance as best we can. We\u2019re not omniscient beings who can know with certainty how best to strike the balance.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, sometimes different kinds of moral good straight-up conflict with each other. Think of a woman who faces a trade-off: She wants to become a nun but also wants to become a mother. She can\u2019t balance between those options \u2014 she has to choose. And what\u2019s the better choice? We can\u2019t say because the options are incommensurable. There\u2019s no single yardstick by which to measure them so we can\u2019t compare them to find out which is greater.<\/p>\n

Given that this complexity is baked into the human condition, it\u2019s impossible to be a perfect optimizing machine. And the more you try to force yourself to be that, the harder it\u2019ll be for you to actually help others, because you\u2019ll just be so burned out. As you\u2019ve already discovered, the optimizing mindset is exhausting \u2014 you end up expending a lot of precious mental resources that you could be spending on something else. It can even lead to paralysis. And a lot of the time, there\u2019s no knowably best decision.<\/p>\n

So instead of trying to optimize everything, you can adopt a goal that\u2019s humbler but more realistic: to live in line with your values as best you can.<\/p>\n

I know that can feel scary. Optimizing makes being human feel less risky. It provides a sense of control, and therefore a sense of safety. The unspoken premise is that if you optimize, you\u2019ll never have to ask yourself: How could I screw up that badly?<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s another way to feel safe. It\u2019s about leaning into the fact that we are imperfect and vulnerable creatures and that even when we\u2019re trying our hardest there will be some things that we do not do optimally.<\/p>\n

Of course, we should still try to live in line with our values. But in those moments when we fall short, we shouldn\u2019t berate ourselves, thinking, \u201cI sinned!\u201d In Hebrew, the word we typically translate as \u201cto sin\u201d (lachto) actually means \u201cto miss the mark.\u201d It\u2019s the same word we\u2019d use to describe someone with a bow and arrow who\u2019s targeting the bullseye but misses it slightly. This is a useful image, because it reminds us just how normal it is to miss the mark. Just as the archer\u2019s arrow is buffeted around by the wind, we\u2019re buffeted around by all the physical and psychological conditions acting upon us \u2014 naturally we won\u2019t always hit the bullseye! And when we do miss the mark, we deserve compassion.<\/p>\n

I know what you\u2019re thinking: What if adopting this mindset means you\u2019ll become morally complacent and let yourself off the hook too easily? This is one of the most common objections to practicing self-compassion. But research shows it\u2019s not well-founded<\/a>. In fact, psychologists have found that more self-compassionate people are better able to acknowledge when they\u2019ve made a mistake. They\u2019re more likely to want to apologize and make amends to others when they mess up. And they try to do better the next time around. Why? Because, to them, mistakes don\u2019t feel so psychologically damning. That allows them to take more \u2014 not less \u2014 responsibility for their actions.<\/p>\n

Yom Kippur can feel terrifying when any mistake you\u2019ve made over the past year seems damning. But according to the ancient rabbis, Yom Kippur is not meant to be a somber day \u2014 it\u2019s one of the happiest days of the year<\/a>! After all, it was on Yom Kippur that Moses descended from Mount Sinai carrying the second set of tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments, ready to gift them to the people.<\/p>\n

You probably know what happened to the first set of tablets: Moses shattered them after seeing the Israelites engaged in idol worship. What\u2019s less known is that, according to one rabbinic story, God\u2019s response to the shattering of those tablets was to actually congratulate Moses<\/a>. Why did God think breaking them was the right move? And what was different about the second set?<\/p>\n

While the first tablets had been fashioned by God and God alone, the second tablets were a human-divine collaboration: Moses carved the stone and God inscribed the words. And while the first tablets contained only the words of the Ten Commandments \u2014 a black-and-white, rule-based morality \u2014 the rabbis tell us that the second tablets contained within them all the stories and interpretations that Jewish sages would later develop.<\/p>\n

In other words, God recognized that you can\u2019t just give humans a list of moral rules and call it a day. Maybe that would work for angels, who live in a simplified, disembodied world, but our ethical life is just too messy and multifaceted to be captured by any single set of universally binding moral principles. Yet God chose people over angels anyway, inviting us into the collaboration and embracing our humanness rather than rejecting it.<\/p>\n

So, to the rabbis, Yom Kippur was a happy day because they fully expected that God would accept and embrace messy humans.<\/p>\n

Please, don\u2019t try to be more zealous than God.<\/p>\n

When you\u2019re taking action, by all means, aim your arrows as true as you can \u2014 try to hit the bullseye, the place that captures as much of what you value as possible. But once you\u2019ve released the arrow from your bow, let it be.<\/p>\n

If it turns out that you missed the mark, that you acted suboptimally, I put it to you that that is okay. You are not an angel. You are not a perfect optimizing machine. You do not have access to a magical mathematical formula that can consider countless incommensurable variables and spit out the very best move with certainty. You are human and you do the best you can with what you\u2019ve got.<\/p>\n

The wisdom of these millennia-old stories is that that\u2019s good enough for God. Let it be good enough for you, too.<\/p>\n

Bonus: What I\u2019m reading<\/p>\n

Writing this column reminded me of The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook<\/a>, written by the psychologists Kristin Neff and Chris Germer. It really helped me develop a self-compassion practice, which has in turn helped me get a grip on my own scrupulosity. I also strongly recommend the eight-week self-compassion course run out of Neff and Germer\u2019s nonprofit, the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion<\/a>.I\u2019ve always associated the philosopher Thomas Nagel with questions about consciousness, but this week I learned that he\u2019s also super interested in questions about religion. In a great essay called \u201cSecular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament<\/a>,\u201d Nagel asks: What, if anything, does secular philosophy have to put in the place of religion? More specifically, can it answer the question: What is the underlying nature of the universe, and how can the human individual live in harmony with it? In this Aeon essay<\/a>, philosopher Elad Uzan argues that AI will not be able to solve ethics for us, despite what some people hope<\/a>. Drawing on the mathematician Kurt G\u00f6del\u2019s famous incompleteness theorems, Uzan writes, \u201cjust as mathematics will always contain truths that lie beyond formal proof, morality will always contain complexities that defy algorithmic resolution.\u201d <\/p>\n

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Swati Sharma<\/p>\n

Vox Editor-in-Chief<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":156055,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[3005,182,181,507,29584,97,271,259,2229,74,95359],"class_list":{"0":"post-156054","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-advice","9":"tag-ai","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-future-perfect","13":"tag-health","14":"tag-life","15":"tag-mental-health","16":"tag-religion","17":"tag-technology","18":"tag-your-mileage-may-vary"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156054\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/156055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}