The controversial value of sacrifice

How much must we forgo?

Rules nearly always tell us what not to do. Whether it’s classroom rules, the law, or the biblical Ten Commandments, we’re in a constant state of prohibition. No talking during exams, no illegal substances, thou shalt not kill.

And there’s good reason for that. We, like all animals, are born with instinctive impulses that drive us toward silly or dangerous behaviors that, when unchecked, we’ll often indulge to excess.

While we’re pretty good most of the time, our nasty, instinctive tendencies still outnumber us: dishonesty, gluttony, envy, violence, revenge-seeking — the list goes on. There appear to be deep-rooted reasons for each of these that spring out of a long and turbulent evolutionary past — but most people admit that we should ideally be rooting them out whenever we can.

Fortunately, one of the crowning few ways we’ve managed to distinguish ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom is in our ability to curb these unwanted impulses on both the individual and the societal level.

We’ve evolved large and powerful prefrontal cortices that curtail some of our least dignified impulses and provide us just enough willpower to do the right thing instead. We’ve organized into governments, many of which are democratic in nature, relying on the will of the people to consent to a social contract of sorts. In exchange for protection and a host of other state-provided goods, we give up a portion of our otherwise full-fledged, inalienable freedom.

In other words, we’re very used to forgoing one appealing thing in the name of some much larger, more promising thing.

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Why are we so keen on giving things up?

This brings us to humanity’s intriguing, counter-intuitive, and relatively common practice of sacrifice — or the idea that we must, at times, do without to achieve some other, nobler end.

History is full of examples of sacrifice, from the gory to the mundane. In honor of religious faithfulness, people have foregone food, sex, part of their income, animals, even other humans. They’ve fasted, abstained, given up large swaths of time for sacred rituals and prayer. They’ve said no to otherwise desirable things because they believed something much more valuable awaited them. And the secular world has no shortage of sacrifices, either. People will deny themselves all sorts of delights and privileges in the hopes of a greater return.

And yet, despite the ubiquity of sacrifice in human society, we often hate doing it. Despite the enormous benefits of living under a decently run government, we hate shelling out for it. We hate giving up sweets, even though we would likely live longer and have more stunning physiques if we did. We’re no stranger to sin despite the paradise we’ve been told we’ll find if we avoid it.

Sacrifice, for all its merit, appears to run quite counter to our nature — which is precisely what gives it its value. And not just ordinary social value that wins friends or grants fame, like being attractive or talented, but that most precious of currencies: moral value.

We are a moralizing species, with deeply engrained ideas about right and wrong — sometimes rational, and often not. While moral codes fluctuate based on culture, religion, age, and a host of other variables, nearly all of us seem to have been endowed with a handful of more-or-less consistent principles. And, shockingly, many of these hard-coded beliefs seem to emerge in infancy.

There are a great deal of behaviors that don’t set off our morality alarm, but among those select few that do, we’re particularly sensitive to sacrificial behavior — or, more frequently, the lack thereof.

For example, we’re especially quick to condemn one group in particular: cheaters. Think of your classic kid in school who cheats on a test or a husband who cheats on his unwitting wife. We bristle at these cheaters not merely because they’ve broken explicit rules and norms, but because their wrongdoing contravenes our deeply held moral values of sacrifice, deprivation, and self-abnegation.

We’re much more drawn to those who deny themselves than to those who indulge their every whim. Giving up the fulfillment of an immediate want or need can be painful, upsetting, alienating, lonely, dangerous. The type of person who successfully carries it out has jumped through the hoops to earn our moral praise.

On the other hand, indulgence is commonplace — it’s what we all want to do, just about all the time. You don’t have to look far to find it. So-called “discipline” is much rarer, much more prized. When we encounter someone who forgoes their needling desires, we’re often mesmerized. You trained for how long for that marathon?!

The lines have gotten particularly blurry in our modern world, which has provided a cornucopia of technological innovations that often rule out the need for sacrifice. Traditionally, weight loss has been a labor of sacrifice — but now many turn to medication or surgery to shed unwanted weight in a quicker, less willpower-bound way. Women were once forced to endure the excruciating pain of childbirth without any sort of relief. Now, those who don’t select pain relief make up the minority.

In both of these cases, there seems to be a divide between those who went through the process “naturally” and those who didn’t. The internet is full of hateful comments from those who lost weight through diet and exercise about those who took a drug — or about those who had an epidural during labor from those whose labor was drug-free.

In this technological era, the dimension of “cheating” has obviously expanded quite dramatically. The concept is so morally fraught that it’s difficult to discuss examples without suggesting someone has earned something that another hasn’t.

But the divide isn’t really about which path is more “natural.” It’s about which path involves sacrifice and which doesn’t; it’s about the moral value we assign to deprivation and self-denial. Calendar-based fasting isn’t particularly natural, but it’s often admired with holy reverence. Ultimately, we’re drawn to self-abnegation — and unimpressed by its opposite.

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Sacrifice for its own sake

This leads us to what I find to be a very interesting question:

Is the moral value of a sacrifice dependent on its outcome?

If someone uses a drug to lose weight, they’ve still achieved the desired outcome of losing weight. If someone donates a large sum to charity but earns enough that the donation hardly makes a dent in their finances, they still donated to charity. Must the action itself involve a sacrifice to earn our praise? If we can achieve the same end without sacrificing much, is that end inherently less worthy?

On the arguably more interesting flip side, do we even care if a sacrifice actually achieves anything? Or do we simply like it for its own sake? The answer is a little bit of both.

We, as humans, care deeply about our reputations — which simply means that we care a lot about what people think of us. As a result, our reputation depends less on the actual outcomes of our behavior and more on social perceptions of our behavior. A business’s product can be objectively unimpressive, but add a few stunning testimonials from high-profile figures or a successful reputation management strategy, and its value can soar.

In this way, we don’t deal in deliverables — we deal in perceptions. Steven Pinker explains in his book Enlightenment Now:

By conflating profligacy with evil and asceticism with virtue, the moral sense can sanctify pointless displays of sacrifice. According to studies I’ve done…people esteem others according to how much time or money they forfeit in their altruistic acts rather than by how much good they accomplish.

Much of the public chatter about mitigating climate change involves voluntary sacrifices like recycling, reducing food miles, unplugging chargers, and so on…But however virtuous these displays may feel, they are a distraction from the gargantuan challenge facing us.

For most of us, the good is secondary to the sacrifice, which leaves us in situations where people are harshly criticized for losing weight with medical assistance or inordinately praised for refusing to buy airline tickets. We’re more interested in how much you’re willing to forgo than how much you’ve actually achieved.

And yet, we aren’t so easily fooled. There must actually be a sacrifice for us to admire — you have to actually put your money where your mouth is. We might not care about the outcome, but we care quite a bit about how much you’ve given up.

We roll our eyes at social media virtue signaling not because it achieves nothing, but because it risks nothing. We don’t actually care whether your Instagram post saves the planet or ends racism — we care whether it cost you something to do it. Were you posting to your largely homogeneous friend group, knowing that they would simply scroll past in solemn agreement? Then the action meant nothing. It has no teeth. Again, not because of its meager results, but because of its lack of sacrifice.

For the moral value of an action to count under this strange, draconian system, we have to perceive it as deep and gritty. We have to watch you almost give up and then double down. And only then might you emerge as the glimmering figure of the hero. The one who denies their own self-importance and takes the admirably arduous route of looking out for the other. Heroism depends on sacrifice, requiring one to forgo an easy or comfortable life for the sake of another individual, not merely their own future satisfaction. The hero embodies the gold standard of sacrifice, driven by that most unbelievable of human qualities: altruism.

It’s here that we come to realize that the human moral sense is a work in progress — easily dazzled by the hallmark self-restraint that makes our species what it is, disgusted by its absence among the cheats, and rightfully awed by the handful who make it their life’s work.

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