The Myth of the Moral Actor: A Journal of Applied Philosophy for the No-Self

We often find ourselves trapped in a frantic attempt to fix a life that was never broken, because we start from the assumption that there is someone here to do the fixing. We look at the world and see a vast expanse of separate objects, and in the center of it all, we imagine a "me"—a conscious presence that is somehow independent, a pilot steering a body-mind through a sea of choices. But who is this pilot? If we look closely at the mechanics of a single day, we see that decisions happen just like the weather happens. We might spend twenty days debating whether to take a vaccine or walk a certain path, weighing every logical consequence, but then one morning we simply wake up and the decision has made itself. We are "Astrazeneca-ed" by life, not by a choice we made, but by a movement of the totality that required no permission from a separate self. This realization is often a source of great friction for those who inhabit the world of the intellectual or the aesthetic. We want to believe in the weight of our own agency. We want to believe that our refined tastes or our philosophical inquiries are the result of a "me" getting better or becoming more aware. Yet, when we look at the flow of events, we see that the body-mind is simply a node in an infinite web of cause and effect. Even the most extreme human actions—those we label as "evil" or "monstrous"—are part of an impersonal flow. We talk about responsibility as if it were a solid thing, but in the absolute, there is no separate entity to be responsible. We might see a "serial killer" or a historical figure like Hitler and feel the need to categorize them as "bad" to feel safe, yet these are just movements of the totality. We can restrain a harmful person just as we would move out of the way of an empty boat drifting toward us in the fog. To get angry at the empty boat is a waste of energy; to get angry at the "person" is to ignore that the boat is, and always has been, empty. In the realm of what we might call a journal of applied philosophy, we must confront the fact that our sense of guilt and our "voice of conscience" are themselves biological adaptations—functions of a species trying to survive. We developed these feelings to keep from destroying one another, much like how certain primates have evolved social structures to preserve the group. They are functional, yes, but they do not point to a "what you already are" that is making moral decisions. The sense of being a responsible actor is something that appears and disappears like a thought or a sensation of hunger. It is part of the "predicting code" of the mind, a way to simplify a reality that is far too complex for the organism to grasp. We are like waves in the ocean. A wave might think it is moving across the water, achieving a destination at the shore, but the wave is nothing but the ocean's movement. There is no "wave-ness" separate from the water.