Self-absorption, self-obsession, the need for validation from others, toxic vanity, being in the spotlight … the list goes on. Please do not judge yourself if you possess any of the mentioned characteristics – however, I would encourage you to investigate if your self-worth and esteem are contingent on how others’ perceive you. Ideally, our self-worth comes from within. We do not need to seek it outside of ourselves. When you find yourself doing so, pause, and offer yourself what you need.

At first glance, the claim that highly socialised people find morality especially burdensome seems backwards. Socialisation is, by definition, the process through which people absorb the norms of their community until those norms feel natural rather than imposed. We would expect the well-socialised person to coincide with morality rather than strain against it. Yet a substantial line of thought in psychoanalysis, philosophy, and sociology argues the opposite: that the deeper a person’s internalisation of moral norms, the heavier the psychological cost of living up to them. Understanding why requires distinguishing several distinct mechanisms that produce this effect.

Freud: Civilization as Repression Turned Inward

The most direct source for this idea is Sigmund Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930). Freud’s central claim is that civilised life requires the systematic renunciation of instinctual gratification, particularly aggressive and sexual impulses. Civilisation inhibits humanity’s instinctual drives, which can result in guilt and a lack of fulfillment. This is not a side effect of morality but its very mechanism: in order to live in a civilised society, humans must take their aggression and turn it on themselves in the form of a conscience, or super-ego, which takes the place of the pareent as the child matures.

This matters for the socialisation question because the superego is not a fixed quantity, rather, it is built up through the internalisation of external authority, and its severity scales with how thoroughly that internalisation has occurred. As civilisation evolves, the superego becomes stricter, intensifying feelings of guilt when individuals fail to conform. Freud makes the resulting trade explicit: a threatened external unhappiness, like the loss of love or punishment by an external authority, is exchanged for a permanent internal unhappiness, the tension of the sense of guilt. He defines this tension precisely: the tension between the harsh superego and the ego subjected to it is what we call the sense of guilt, and it expresses itself as a need for punishment.

Therefore, a highly socialised person has not simply learned the rules; they have built an internal enforcer that punishes them for infractions the outside world may never even notice, including merely wanting to transgress (break a moral ‘code’). The burden of morality, then, is not chiefly the effort of compliance but the permanent, low-grade cost of self-surveillance.

Nietzsche: Bad Conscience as Domesticated Cruelty

Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) offers a related but distinct account, one that Freud himself drew on. For Nietzsche, “bad conscience” arises when a person’s instincts for freedom and aggression – no longer permitted external expression once society confines and pacifies them – are forced inward and turned against the self. The more successfully a person has been tamed by the “morality of custom,” the more violently their own instincts are redirected against their own psyche, producing guilt, self-torment, and a kind of internalised cruelty that Nietzsche regards as pathological rather than noble.

Where Freud treats this process somewhat neutrally, as the necessary price of civilisation, Nietzsche treats it as a form of sickness, that is, the herd’s revenge on the strong instincts it can no longer tolerate expressed outwardly. On both readings, however, the conclusion converges: socialisation does not simply align a person’s desires with moral norms; it manufactures an internal punitive apparatus, and the more complete the socialisation, the harsher that apparatus becomes.

Wolf: The Demandingness Objection – Burden Through Breadth

A different, less psychological route to the same conclusion comes from moral philosophy’s “demandingness objection,” most influentially developed against utilitarianism and explored by Susan Wolf in her essay “Moral Saints” (1982). Wolf’s target is the figure of the person whose every action is as morally good as possible – a person whose every action is as morally good as possible and who is as morally worthy as can be.

Her striking conclusion is that such a person would not be admirable but unattractive: the moral saint lacks the ability to enjoy the enjoyable in life, because full moral perfection edges out the non-moral commitments, tastes, and idiosyncrasies that make a life recognisably human. Commentators summarising Wolf’s argument note that a moral saint’s hobbies and passions survive only until they conflict with morality’s demands, at which point they must be sacrificed (Brainscape summary of Wolf, 1982).

A highly socialised person has internalised not just a few core prohibitions but an extensive web of obligations; to family, profession, community, and strangers alike. The more completely someone absorbs “you should help,” “you should be fair,” “you should not free-ride,” the more situations present themselves as morally loaded. The burden here is not guilt over transgression in Freud’s sense, but sheer coverage: an ever-expanding set of perceived obligations that leaves little room for permissible self-interest.

This is precisely the structure of the demandingness objection as it is standardly raised against consequentialism: if morality requires maximizing good outcomes, then almost every choice — how you spend money, time, or attention — becomes a moral test, and the well-socialized agent who takes this seriously is perpetually under evaluation.

Not every tradition agrees.

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics offers the sharpest counter example: virtue is a disposition built through habituation, and the fully virtuous person acts well with pleasure, because their desires have themselves been trained to want the good. On this view, feeling like it’s a struggle means your character isn’t fully formed yet. Aristotle called this being ‘continent’ — doing the right thing, but only by fighting off the urge to do otherwise. That’s not the mark of a well-socialized person; it’s a sign the job isn’t finished. A well-socialized person should experience morality as second nature, not imposition. The “burden” thesis, then, may reflect a specifically modern, post-Freudian picture of conscience as an internal disciplinary agency, one foreign to Aristotle’s picture of virtue as integrated character.

Durkheim: Integration and Social Cost

Émile Durkheim’s sociology offers a structural variant. In Suicide (1897), he treats strong social integration as generally protective, but identifies conditions – cases where someone is so fused with their group’s identity that their own individual life stops feeling like it matters to them – under which near-total subordination to group norms turns self-destructive. For example, a soldier who throws himself on a grenade to save his unit, or a cult member who follows an order to end their life because the group’s cause has completely replaced their sense of self.

His concept of the “collective conscience” implies that deeper integration makes moral rules feel less like personal preferences and more like external social facts pressing in; obligatory precisely because they are so thoroughly shared and enforced.

Synthesis

Three distinct mechanisms emerge by which socialisation could make morality burdensome rather than easy:

1. Depth (Freud, Nietzsche): socialization builds an internal punitive structure (the superego, “bad conscience”) whose severity tracks how fully authority has been internalised, producing guilt even absent external sanction.

2. Breadth (Wolf, the demandingness objection): the more thoroughly someone absorbs moral norms, the more everyday moments start to feel like moral tests. Choices that used to feel free and casual (how to spend an evening, what to say in a small conversation) start to feel like they carry a ‘right’ answer you’re obligated to find.

3. Structural pressure (Durkheim): deep group integration makes collective norms felt as external, obligatory, and sometimes crushing.

Aristotle’s habituated virtue is the counterweight: none of this is a necessary feature of socialisation as such, only of particular pictures of how conscience forms. Whether morality feels like burden or ease may depend less on how much someone is socialised than on what kind of relationship to norms that socialisation produces – punitive self-surveillance, expansive obligation, or integrated character.

Sources: Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930); Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887); Wolf, “Moral Saints,” Journal of Philosophy 79.8 (1982); Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics; Durkheim, Suicide (1897).

Picture a runaway trolley hurtling down a track. Five people are tied to the rails ahead. On a side track, there is one person — a child. You are standing at the lever. Pull it, and the child dies. Leave it, and five adults are killed. What do you do?

This is the Trolley Problem — a thought experiment introduced by philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967 and endlessly debated ever since. It seems, at first glance, like a maths question dressed up in moral clothing. But the more honestly you sit with it, the more it reveals about something far deeper: what we actually believe about human life, responsibility, and the ethics of inaction… and perhaps the need for substantial more information in this hypothetical. We may also need to ask questions about the assumptions of the question, such as, why do we assume five lives are worth more than one when no measurable value can be placed on a life?

Can we really put a number on a life?

The utilitarian answer is clean and confident: pull the lever. Five lives outweigh one. The arithmetic is straightforward. But this assumes something that many of us instinctively resist — that human lives can be compared, ranked, or traded against one another like items on a balance sheet.

Philosophers call this the problem of incommensurability: the idea that some values simply cannot be reduced to a common scale. Five dollars is worth more than one dollar. But is five lives worth more than one life? The moment we accept that framing, we have already conceded something profound — that people are, in some sense, fungible. Interchangeable. Countable.

Most of us feel, in our bones, that this is wrong. And yet we struggle to articulate why.

“The moment we start counting lives,
we have already made a philosophical choice —
one with consequences far beyond any trolley.”

Context is not a distraction — it is the point

Consider what changes when we add detail to the dilemma. The five adults are elderly, estranged from family, and living rough. The one person is a child with parents who adore them, siblings, a whole life ahead. Does this change the calculus? Should it?

Many philosophers would say we are introducing emotional noise — that the exercise demands we strip away context to test our principles in their purest form. But there is a compelling counter-argument: stripping away context does not purify the dilemma. It destroys it. Because in the real world, a human life does not exist in isolation. It exists within a web of relationships, responsibilities, histories, and futures. The loss of one child reverberates through a family — through parents, siblings, grandparents, friends — in ways that may echo for generations. The loss of five people who have drifted from the world still has weight, still has meaning, but the ripples spread differently.

This is not sentimentality. It is, arguably, a more honest and sophisticated form of moral reasoning than the cold arithmetic of classical utilitarianism.

The Epistemic Objection is a well-recognized challenge. If consequentialism tells you to produce the best outcomes, but outcomes are radically unknowable, then the theory may be practically action-guiding in name only. You can never actually know you’re doing the right thing, which some philosophers argue renders it useless as a decision procedure even if it’s correct as a moral theory.

This connects to what philosophers call the “cluelessness problem”, articulated rigorously by philosopher William MacAskill and others. The argument runs roughly:

• Consequentialism requires you to consider all consequences
• Long-run consequences of any action are deeply uncertain and potentially vast
• Therefore we are systematically clueless about what consequentialism actually requires of us
• This is not a minor inconvenience — it may be a fundamental flaw

The Responses Consequentialists Make

To be fair, consequentialists have replies:

• Expected value theory — you act on probabilities, not certainties. You use the best available estimate of outcomes
• Rule consequentialism — instead of calculating act by act, you follow rules that generally produce good outcomes, sidestepping some epistemic chaos
• Satisficing (good enough) consequentialism — you don’t need to maximise, just produce outcomes good enough

Is doing nothing really doing nothing?

Here is where the thought experiment takes its sharpest turn. Many people, when confronted with the trolley problem, feel that not pulling the lever is somehow morally safer — that inaction absolves them of responsibility. After all, they did not cause the trolley to exist. They did not tie anyone to the tracks.

But this reasoning deserves serious scrutiny. If you are standing at the lever, you have agency. You have full knowledge of the situation. You have the physical ability to intervene. At the moment you choose not to act, you are not opting out of the moral situation — you are making a deliberate choice within it. The mental process is identical to pulling the lever: you weigh your options and select one. The only difference is whether your hand moves.

The philosopher Peter Singer pushed this point hard with a simpler scenario: if you walked past a child drowning in a shallow pond and chose not to help because you didn’t want to ruin your clothes, almost everyone would consider you morally culpable. The water caused the drowning. But your character is revealed by what you were willing — and unwilling — to do.

“Inaction, when chosen consciously by someone with agency and the ability to intervene, is not a neutral act. It is a moral choice — and it tells us something real about who we are.”

This connects to the concept of moral cowardice: avoiding a difficult choice not because inaction is right, but because acting feels uncomfortable, costly, or risky. Virtue ethics — the tradition stretching back to Aristotle — holds that our character is defined not just by what we do, but by what we are willing to do, and what we are prepared to let happen when we could have stopped it.

Where we draw the line — and why it matters

There is another dimension to this worth sitting with: how we decide which living things deserve moral consideration in the first place. If we accept that all life has inherent value, where does that obligation end? Plants are alive. So are insects. So are fish, pigs, chimpanzees.

One principled place to draw the line is at sentience — the capacity to suffer, to experience fear, to feel pain. A heart, a brain, a nervous system suggest an inner life that a plant, however alive, does not possess. This is not a perfect boundary. But it is a reasoned one. And it connects back to the trolley problem in a meaningful way: if what matters morally is the capacity for suffering and the existence of relational bonds, then the texture of each life on those tracks — not just the number — is morally relevant information.

What the trolley problem is really asking

The Trolley Problem endures not because it has a correct answer, but because it refuses to let us hide. It exposes the gap between what we say we believe and what we are actually prepared to do. It forces us to confront whether our moral intuitions are consistent, and whether the frameworks we use — utilitarian calculation, duty-based ethics, virtue and character — can survive contact with a real dilemma.

The most honest response is not to solve the problem, but to feel its full weight. To resist the urge to reduce it to arithmetic. To acknowledge that human lives are not units of currency, that context is not a distraction, and that the decision to do nothing is itself a decision — one that reflects, for better or worse, something true about the person standing at the lever.

There’s always a “trolley” coming.

The trolley problem doesn’t tell us what to do; it tells you something about who you are and forces genuine reflection. That’s closer to virtue ethics territory, ironically — where the question shifts from what produces the best outcome to what does this choice reveal about, and do to, my character.