Post by Admin on Oct 10, 2020 17:43:51 GMT
Why won’t the sin wash away? When thinking ethically goes awry
psyche.co/ideas/why-wont-the-sin-wash-away-when-thinking-ethically-goes-awry
Is thinking about ethics pathological? When a person rewashes her hands despite knowing that they’re already clean, it’s pathological. Is it similarly pathological to ruminate about what we should do?
Some people literally do have ‘moral OCD’, or ‘scrupulosity’, named after the scrupulous small concerns that can plague a person. This is a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder that focuses on moral or religious issues. Obsessive-compulsive disorder can take on many forms, but it is most visible by its meticulous and rigid compulsions, such as hand-washing and lock-checking. What makes it a disorder is that the compulsive behaviours are caused by an underlying anxiety. Intrusive, unwelcome thoughts or ‘obsessions’ provoke the person’s anxiety, which leads to the ‘compulsions’ that the person performs in order to reduce her anxiety.
Imagine that nagging feeling of having left the stove on as you leave the house, but instead it’s an unshakable thought that you might have touched a germ-covered surface and could now be spreading those germs everywhere. You don’t know what you touched, but the worry that your hands are unclean feels like your brain’s way of telling you that you did.
You wash, but the feeling that your hands might still be dirty goes away only briefly. Your worry does go away, however, if you wash in a particular way, or a certain number of times. This then becomes a ritual, one that you can even perform to keep the worry from arising. You still recognise that it’s highly unlikely that your hands are dirty after just a normal wash, but you rationalise your elaborate actions by thinking that it’s possible you could infect – even kill! – someone with the germs from your possibly dirty hands, and isn’t it worth washing a few more times to reduce that risk?
Anxiety is normal. A little anxiety when walking out of the house or into an important meeting is the brain’s way of staying focused and alert for possible danger. The brain of someone with an anxiety disorder, however, signals danger despite reassurance that there is no danger worth worrying about. Because the anxious signal remains, the person explains it to herself in a couple of ways. She focuses on dangers that are not easily reassured: how can I know that my hands are completely clean? No easy reassurance will challenge that anxiety. And she justifies why someone should be anxious: it’s possible to infect others.
Moral OCD shares these features with OCD in general. Since scrupulosity is most often studied in religious cases, these behaviours and thoughts commonly take on a religious cast: a Catholic, for example, confesses minuscule or imagined sins to multiple priests throughout the day, unwilling to accept absolution from any of them because she feels that no priest understood the gravity of her sins. But religious and secular people alike worry, and they understand their worries to be about hurting themselves or others in physical, emotional or even less tangible ways.
Cases of scrupulosity share a common core of traits. First, a person with scrupulosity has chronic doubt. She constantly feels that she is sinning or disappointing God even without knowing how. And she feels she has to do something to resolve that intolerable uncertainty. Second, she has perfectionist standards and impossibly high ideals, at least for herself, which make it easier to doubt that she has reached them. Third, she takes even her passing thoughts to be morally significant. If she has an unwelcome thought of inappropriately touching a child, for example, she reacts as if she has actually committed a sin, not just imagined it. Finally, she takes herself to be singularly responsible by her own actions for many things that happen in the world that are not under her control.
What does this look like in practice? A person with scrupulosity could spend hours a day praying, worrying that he must get his prayers exactly right or his family could be hurt. He wonders with each prayer if he had the right intention or whether some sinful impulse had crept in, so he repeats until it feels right. Or a person worries that a stray comment to a stranger might have led that person to sin, so she spends days tracking down that person to clarify her innocuous comment. Or a person insists on greeting everyone she sees in order to ‘love thy neighbour’, circling back to catch people she missed. Or a person checks and rechecks receipts to make sure he didn’t inadvertently steal from a business by underpaying.
psyche.co/ideas/why-wont-the-sin-wash-away-when-thinking-ethically-goes-awry
Is thinking about ethics pathological? When a person rewashes her hands despite knowing that they’re already clean, it’s pathological. Is it similarly pathological to ruminate about what we should do?
Some people literally do have ‘moral OCD’, or ‘scrupulosity’, named after the scrupulous small concerns that can plague a person. This is a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder that focuses on moral or religious issues. Obsessive-compulsive disorder can take on many forms, but it is most visible by its meticulous and rigid compulsions, such as hand-washing and lock-checking. What makes it a disorder is that the compulsive behaviours are caused by an underlying anxiety. Intrusive, unwelcome thoughts or ‘obsessions’ provoke the person’s anxiety, which leads to the ‘compulsions’ that the person performs in order to reduce her anxiety.
Imagine that nagging feeling of having left the stove on as you leave the house, but instead it’s an unshakable thought that you might have touched a germ-covered surface and could now be spreading those germs everywhere. You don’t know what you touched, but the worry that your hands are unclean feels like your brain’s way of telling you that you did.
You wash, but the feeling that your hands might still be dirty goes away only briefly. Your worry does go away, however, if you wash in a particular way, or a certain number of times. This then becomes a ritual, one that you can even perform to keep the worry from arising. You still recognise that it’s highly unlikely that your hands are dirty after just a normal wash, but you rationalise your elaborate actions by thinking that it’s possible you could infect – even kill! – someone with the germs from your possibly dirty hands, and isn’t it worth washing a few more times to reduce that risk?
Anxiety is normal. A little anxiety when walking out of the house or into an important meeting is the brain’s way of staying focused and alert for possible danger. The brain of someone with an anxiety disorder, however, signals danger despite reassurance that there is no danger worth worrying about. Because the anxious signal remains, the person explains it to herself in a couple of ways. She focuses on dangers that are not easily reassured: how can I know that my hands are completely clean? No easy reassurance will challenge that anxiety. And she justifies why someone should be anxious: it’s possible to infect others.
Moral OCD shares these features with OCD in general. Since scrupulosity is most often studied in religious cases, these behaviours and thoughts commonly take on a religious cast: a Catholic, for example, confesses minuscule or imagined sins to multiple priests throughout the day, unwilling to accept absolution from any of them because she feels that no priest understood the gravity of her sins. But religious and secular people alike worry, and they understand their worries to be about hurting themselves or others in physical, emotional or even less tangible ways.
Cases of scrupulosity share a common core of traits. First, a person with scrupulosity has chronic doubt. She constantly feels that she is sinning or disappointing God even without knowing how. And she feels she has to do something to resolve that intolerable uncertainty. Second, she has perfectionist standards and impossibly high ideals, at least for herself, which make it easier to doubt that she has reached them. Third, she takes even her passing thoughts to be morally significant. If she has an unwelcome thought of inappropriately touching a child, for example, she reacts as if she has actually committed a sin, not just imagined it. Finally, she takes herself to be singularly responsible by her own actions for many things that happen in the world that are not under her control.
What does this look like in practice? A person with scrupulosity could spend hours a day praying, worrying that he must get his prayers exactly right or his family could be hurt. He wonders with each prayer if he had the right intention or whether some sinful impulse had crept in, so he repeats until it feels right. Or a person worries that a stray comment to a stranger might have led that person to sin, so she spends days tracking down that person to clarify her innocuous comment. Or a person insists on greeting everyone she sees in order to ‘love thy neighbour’, circling back to catch people she missed. Or a person checks and rechecks receipts to make sure he didn’t inadvertently steal from a business by underpaying.