How Moral Growth Might Destroy You.

Until it doesn’t.

Hello and welcome to wild:philosophy - essays about life-ing and philosophical health for personal & planetary health..

Before I begin today’s essay: I got to talk to

Mark McCartney

last week about the good life. You can watch and listen to our conversation here.

Also, we kicked-off the first PhilosophyGym - a space for collective sense-making as regenerative practice - with Grokkist. The doors remain open: drop in whenever inspiration strikes (no perfect timing required).

Now, part of me wants to gush about how flawlessly it all unfolded, how every question sparked revelations of profound depth, how it changed everyone’s lifes forever and how I floated through the session like Socrates on a cloud. But: it was gloriously messy. I didn’t get through with what I had planned (ah, the irony), I was insecure many times how to facilitate and I was very nervous (which usually, I am not - a reminder that growth lives on the edge of discomfort).

What did make it outstanding though was the people who joined. I am always mind-blown by the wonderful, extremely intelligent, curious, open-minded trickster people that are drawn to such events.

So, if you feel like hanging out and getting to know such people, there is enough of that to make up for any bumps in the process itself.

With that whole-hearted invitation, let’s get to … something different. Today’s essay is about the tension between our expanding moral concerns and the practical need to focus on actionable influence, exploring how through a cosmic concern we pass a threshold that fosters humility, awe, and ethical grounding.

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Many of us feel that sense that the world’s complexities are pressing in, demanding our attention, often exceeding our perceived capacity to respond. We are able to care deeply about things far beyond our immediate survival, and this is a capacity that seems to be both: a burden and a glory.

Our Circles of Concern: From Moral Ideal to Overwhelming Burden

The businessman and speaker Stephen Covey is famous for his concept of the Circle of Concern versus the Circle of Influence and the Circle of Control. The first, can be expanse and encompass everything that tugs at our thoughts and emotions - from personal anxieties to global crises. The latter, represents where our direct actions can yield tangible results. And the third is about what we can actually control. Covey, quite pragmatically, urged us to focus our energies primarily within our Circle of Influence, lest we exhaust ourselves in a state of agitated impotence.

Circle of Concern

At the same time, developmental psychology, especially the work by Lawrence Kohlberg encourages us to expand our Circle of Concern. Kohlberg’s stages of moral development propose that individuals - and perhaps, by extension, societies - tend to progress from a self-centred calculus of rewards and punishments towards a broader embrace of societal norms and, eventually, to a post-conventional stage guided by universal ethical principles. Here, the concern widens to encompass justice, human rights, and the well-being of all humanity, ideally even all life. The moral development moves from the parochial to the universal. If we really grow up, then we gradually extent our empathy and responsibility. Philosophers throughout history have wrestled with this. The Stoics, for instance, with their concept of oikeiôsis, spoke of a process of "appropriation" or "making one's own," starting with the self and gradually extending to family, community, humanity, and ultimately the entire cosmos, seeing it all as interconnected and worthy of our care.

As I have written before , saying that we develop morally when our Circle of Concern expands is a questionable idea. Concern is not Care. While care requires action, concern can comfortably remain an idea in our heads.

“What does caring mean when we go about thinking and living interdependently with beings other than human, in “more than human” worlds? Can we think of care as an obligation that traverses the nature / culture bifurcation without simply reinstating the binaries and moralism of anthropocentric ethics? How can engaging with care help us to think of ethical “obligations” in human - decentered cosmologies?” María Puig de la Bellacasa

And also, while we might intellectually assent to the moral claims of distant suffering or the urgency of planetary health, we often find ourselves hamstrung. Economic realities, the inertia of systems, the sheer weight of social expectations, or simply the bewildering complexity of translating abstract concern into meaningful, sustainable change can leave us feeling stuck. Indeed, the full apprehension of global problems, viewed through this widened moral lens, can paradoxically induce a sense of helplessness or ethical fatigue, making decisive action feel even more impossible.

When Concern Transcends the Human Scale

There is, though, a further dimension to this expansion of concern that I believe is worth touching upon, as it pushes us to the very limits of our current modes of understanding and engages with questions that have preoccupied philosophers for … I think their existence. I have found, both in my own reflections and in conversations with others grappling with immense questions, that when we extend our concern from the global towards what one might tentatively call a cosmic concern, we cross a threshold.

“This new form of relationship is predicated on seeking to embody the force of Divine Eros itself in all aspects of our lives, not only with those chosen few souls we take as special. This means you can no longer leave Eros at the door when you go to work, go shopping, engage with social media, or join a protest. It means the end of the substitute gratifications and distorted expressions of erotic energies that drive so much of today’s cultural industries. It means that no one or few are taken as special and set apart. Instead, all are taken as unique, and no one is ever placed outside the circle of concern, tolerance, and compassion.” Zak Stein

When our circle of care extends beyond the terrestrial, beyond the immediate fate of humanity and Earth's biosphere, to encompass the vastness of the cosmos itself - the billions of galaxies, the unfathomable stretches of time, the sheer, unyielding mystery of existence - the nature of our questions, and indeed our own sense of self, undergoes an almost vertiginous shift. A concern for the global, while immense, still largely operates within a framework of identifiable problems (climate change, inequality, resource depletion) for which we can to a great extent, at least in principle, conceive of human-(and more-than-human-) scale solutions, however difficult. We are still though, in essence, discussing how to better organise human affairs on this planet.

However, once our awareness - and our concern, or ideally our care - opens to the cosmic scale, a different order of questioning arises. We are no longer merely addressing socio-political, economic, or even ecological challenges within a known, albeit complex, system. Instead, we are on the precipice of the ultimate unknown, confronting questions that are, in their essence, metaphysical.

• What is the fundamental nature of the universe? Is it, as some materialists might argue, merely matter in motion, governed by impersonal laws, or does it possess, as thinkers from Plato to Whitehead, to more recently Bobby Azarian, have suggested, an underlying order, intelligence, information or a creative impulse?

• Is there an underlying purpose or meaning to the vast, creative, and often destructive unfolding – a telos, as Aristotle might have termed it – or are we, as some existentialists like Camus suggested, to find meaning in a universe indifferent to our quest for it?

• What is the nature of consciousness itself? Is it a mere epiphenomenon of complex neurochemistry, or could it be, as Bernado Kastrup for example proposes, a more fundamental property of reality?

• And where do we, as fleeting, ephemeral beings, fit? Are we, as Pico della Mirandola claimed, capable of shaping our own nature, or are we, as Carl Sagan so beautifully put it, "starstuff pondering the stars"?

These questions can’t be answered by policy papers, technological innovations, or traditional scientific inquiry in its current empirical form alone, though science certainly provides important data and constraints. (I never advocate to let go of science).

Once we cross the threshold from the global to the cosmic, we begin to ask questions that lean towards the metaphysical, we will automatically be confronted with our philosophies and might rethink our ontological (who are we), epistemological (how do we know what we know), and ethical (what’s right and wrong) assumptions, because we suddenly operate on a scale that transcends any immediate human utility.

Suddenly, any familiar anchors of human-centric concerns begin to recede, and we are left to question the mystery of existence itself.

“Clearly, what is desperately needed today is an account of the universe that is both in accord with our scientific understanding of it and also psychologically fulfilling. That is, we need a new mythological rendering of the cosmos, one that is right both objectively and subjectively. As ever, this is the task for poets and artists, not scientists, for it must speak to the heart, not just the head. It must be beautiful, not simply correct.” Sadie Alwyn Moon

Finding Solid Ground in Infinity

Photo by Thomas Lipke on Unsplash

While this shift can be disorienting, I found that it offers a sense of relief and hope compared to the Circle of Concern that “merely” encompasses the global, which - with collapse seeming likely - can lead to existential unease. In contrast, if I am concerned with the cosmic, I might ask how even the collapse might fit into the whole and while there is a risk to bypass the real physical challenges right in front of us, it gives us something to hold onto, even when things turn sour.

I guess this is what religions have been offering all along - a cosmic view.

The cosmic is deeply awe-inspiring and fosters a sense of humility and wonder. All I can know on that scale is to know that I know nothing (Socrates).

It would be easy, to dismiss such cosmic care as irrelevant navel-gazing when faced with the pressing urgencies of the metacrisis. Why bother with the fate of galaxies when our own planet is in chaos?

Yet, paradoxically, this cosmic perspective, while perhaps seeming distant, might be essential for cultivating the humility, awe, and expanded sense of kinship that could underpin a transformative response to our planetary predicament.

• Firstly, it relativizes our anxieties without negating them. Seeing our human struggles against the backdrop of cosmic time can, strangely, offer a measure of solace and perspective, not by diminishing the importance of our actions, but by freeing us from the illusion that we are the sole arbiters of destiny.

• Secondly, it can foster a deeper ethics. If we see ourselves not as isolated masters of a dead planet but as participants in a vast, interconnected, and perhaps even living cosmos, our responsibilities shift. The philosopher Hans Jonas, in his Imperative of Responsibility, argued for an ethics commensurate with our technological power, an ethics for the future. A cosmic perspective might push this further, towards an ethics of care for existence itself.

• Thirdly, it invites a return to fundamental human qualities. When faced with the ultimate mysteries, dogma falters. What remains is the call for curiosity, for open-minded inquiry, for compassion, and for a courageous commitment to act according to our best understanding, however incomplete. This is where the Circle of Concern, now cosmically vast, must reconnect with the Circle of Influence, however seemingly small. We cannot solve the universe, but we can choose how we live within it. We can choose to cultivate wisdom, to reduce suffering where we find it, to foster understanding, and to act as responsible stewards of our small corner of this immense reality.

Similarly, the overview effect, coined by writer Frank White, which refers to the cognitive and emotional transformation astronauts often report upon seeing Earth from space, frequently instills a deep sense of awe, unity, and an urgent, almost spiritual, responsibility for the planet and humanity as a whole, transcending mundane concerns and fostering a more global sense of kinship.

"In outer space you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world. and compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say. 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.'" Edgar Mitchell

A cosmic concern, then, reframes our striving: it moves us beyond the often-futile ambition of conquering our circles of concern and discourages the compulsion to rigidly define the limits of our influence. Instead, it cultivates an inner spaciousness, born from this cosmic concern. From here, the recognition that our individual actions are, on a cosmic scale, utterly small and insignificant, and it’s this that also allows us to cease our frantic attempts at fixing an overwhelming reality. Instead, we can orient our actions towards becoming grounded expressions of our deepest understanding of what it means to be a conscious, caring, embodied participant in an unfolding, and often bewildering, cosmic mystery.

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