October 8, 2024 · 2 years ago
The world is unfair. Hard work does not always lead to success. Good people suffer. Children and animals suffer. People who exploit others prosper. Talent matters, but luck decides more than we like to admit.
Still, we'd like to believe that people eventually get what they deserve. This is known as the just-world hypothesis: the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.
There are good reasons to be wary of it. If we assume the world is fair, we may decide that anyone who suffers must deserve it. We blame people for their poverty, illness, or misfortune instead of seeing the role played by chance, circumstance, or the misdeeds of others. Success can distort our judgments too. Forgetting the lucky breaks that helped us makes it easier to believe we have earned everything we have.
Acknowledging unfairness can be difficult. Effort still improves our chances, but living with the possibility that it may go unrewarded can wear us down. Why endure another setback or keep working toward an unlikely goal? We do not need to believe in cosmic justice to have reasons to act. But we often want reassurance that our efforts will amount to something.
Research on just-world beliefs makes a useful distinction here. Believing that we ourselves will be treated fairly is associated with better well-being and a more hopeful outlook. Believing that the world treats everyone fairly can encourage us to judge those who suffer. The hope that sustains us through our own hardships can become a harsh judgment when applied to someone else's.
We are left to carry out a balancing act: how do we sustain faith in our own actions while remaining compassionate and humble about the lives of others?
I find one answer in the Hindu idea of karma.
As I understand it, karma stretches cause and effect beyond a single life. Actions may bear fruit much later, under circumstances we cannot see or remember. What happens within this life is only part of an account we cannot fully know.
It is easy to read this as the just-world hypothesis extended across lifetimes. If actions have consequences that follow us into another life, then surely everyone must be getting what they deserve. On this reading, suffering becomes evidence of some forgotten wrongdoing, and prosperity becomes evidence of virtue.
But this reading turns a belief about the consequences of action into a claim that we can judge people by their circumstances. Believing in karma does not give us access to another person's past or the authority to pronounce on their moral worth. We cannot observe someone's suffering and claim to understand the moral account behind it.
More importantly, an understanding of karma is incomplete if it stops at explaining how someone arrived at their present circumstances. We are acting in the present too. Our response to suffering is itself an action for which we are responsible. Speculating about another person's past does not settle what we should do for them now.
This is why Nishkamatva (desirelessness) is inseparable from a full understanding of karma. It asks us to do what is right without attachment to the fruits of our actions. Our responsibility to act does not depend on a guarantee that we will succeed or be rewarded. Nor does uncertainty about another person's past relieve us of the need to consider our duty toward them.
If someone is ill, I can help care for them without deciding whether they deserve their illness. I can try to relieve their suffering without needing to explain or justify it, and without making recovery a condition of my care. Opposing injustice requires a similar willingness to act without assurance of the outcome, even when we fear that our actions may cause further suffering. Arjuna faces this dilemma in the Bhagavad Gita when he considers walking away from a war against his own relatives, for fear of the senseless suffering he would create. Krishna asks him to fulfill his duty without attachment to the outcome. We must consider the consequences of our actions without making certainty of success or freedom from suffering a condition of acting.
In my own life, this belief has offered me comfort by placing what happens within an order larger than I can understand. That comfort does not require me to call suffering good or stop trying to change the circumstances that led to it. It gives me a way to bear uncertainty while continuing to act. In success, the same limits on my understanding leave enough room for humility and gratitude.