#125: Your moral gerrymandering is hurting you
You're a good person. You try to be a good friend, a good colleague, and a good neighbour. You care about other people, you pull your weight, and you don't let anyone down. But, sometimes, you feel you're not enough. You're exhausted, but taking time for yourself means doing wrong by somebody else. You feel like you need to destroy yourself just to avoid being a bad person.
If this sounds familiar, you're not crazy or inadequate. The problem is that you've constructed a moral framework that unfairly burdens you, and you don't even realise, because on the surface it looks like you're following completely plausible moral principles. But don't worry: help is at hand! Your Imperfectionist friend here is going to show you what's gone wrong and how to fix it.
Episode transcript:
What about when having healthy boundaries means letting other people down?
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello again, everyone! It’s not the first episode of 2026, but it is the first solo episode of the new(ish) year - is that worth celebrating? I might be scraping the barrel a bit here. Anything to brighten the dreary grey January days.
I hope you enjoyed listening to my interview with Dr Dana Klisanin in the previous episode. I have a couple of updates on that for you. One is that Dana’s TEDx talk, which wasn’t yet available to watch when the episode was released, is now online. Another is that, after she appeared on the podcast, Dana wrote an article in Psychology Today in which she reflects on perfectionism, and talks about how nature can help us get over it. I’ve updated the notes for that episode with links to both of these, so please do go and check them out to get more Dana in your life.
Back to this episode. I want to talk to you about double standards. The sort of double standards that lead you to be kinder to other people than you are to yourself. You might think you know what’s coming, but actually, you’re probably wrong. The sort of double standards I want to talk about here aren’t the sort that can be unmasked with the question: would you say that to a friend? You know: the sort that lead to you judging yourself as lazy, stupid, disorganised, unworthy, and so on, when you’d never dream of thinking about your friends or colleagues in that way. I’ve talked about those sorts of double standards before, and if you’re a regular listener, you’ll know what I think of them. Recently, though, I’ve realised that many of you are working with a different set of moral double standards. One that’s actually quite difficult to spot, and that doesn’t get revealed in a satisfying lightbulb moment. And because it’s difficult to spot, it sits there in the background, undermining you and sapping your energy, leaving you feeling like a bad person who should be doing more when you might not have more to give. It arises not from making judgments about yourself that you wouldn’t make about other people, but from applying different (though individually coherent) moral frameworks to yourself and other people.
Stand by for a very brief lesson in moral philosophy, because that’s going to be necessary to show you what’s going on. How, in general, do we decide how to behave ethically? Well, there are a few different approaches we can use to make these decisions, and I’m going to focus on two of them here, which are arguably the two main ones: consequentialism and deontology. According to consequentialism, working out how we ought to behave is all about the consequences. If you’re faced with a range of choices about what to do next, then you should do whatever, on balance, produces the most happiness, or whatever best minimises suffering, or whatever brings about some other set of positive consequences. So, if you’re standing next to a railway line and you’re in control of a lever that determines whether the oncoming train goes to the left, killing one person who’s lying obliviously over the track, or to the right, killing five people who are lying obliviously over the track, then you should move the lever so that the train kills the one person and saves the five, rather than vice versa. Better that one person dies while five survive, rather than have five die and only one survive. Of course, if there were a third option where you could send the train down a track where it’s not going to hurt anyone, or yell at the people to get off the track, then you should do that instead, because that’s an even better outcome. Maximise happiness, minimise suffering. That’s what consequentialism tells us to do.
Deontology, on the other hand, takes into account things other than consequences. I don’t mean that deontologists don’t care about consequences - they do - but they care about other things too. Things like rights and obligations. Deontology often takes the form of rules about how to act, like the ten commandments, or Immanuel Kant’s categorial imperative, according to which we should always act as if following a maxim that could become a universal law - which is the basic idea behind parents disapprovingly asking their children, ‘What if everyone were to do that?’ when they do something like take more than their fair share. For deontologists, doing the right thing can sometimes make the world a worse place. That might sound bizarre, and it might seem like nobody would (or should) choose to act in a way that makes the world a worse place, but actually we all do this all the time. Here’s an everyday example. Suppose that a friend lends you £100, and you promise to pay her back next week. Next week comes around, and you’re about to repay your friend the £100 you owe, but then you happen to notice that a colleague is raising money for a good cause and has shared their GoFundMe page. It occurs to you that, although you have an obligation to repay your friend £100 - you promised, after all - that money could be put to better use if you were to donate it to your colleague’s charitable appeal. Donating the money instead of repaying your friend would lead, on balance, to more happiness and less suffering than repaying your friend and not donating the money. What should you do? According to consequentialism, you break your promise to your friend and donate the £100 - assuming that whatever suffering your friend experiences as a result is outweighed by the happiness brought about by donating. Your friend is pissed off, but perhaps people who would otherwise go hungry get a meal. On the other hand, according to deontology, you should repay your friend, like you promised. Perhaps your friend plans to blow the money on a night out, which might seem like a waste when it could be feeding hungry people, but that’s not the point. You have an obligation to your friend to pay her back, and that takes priority over the good you could do if you fail to fulfil that obligation. Repaying your friend makes the world a worse place, but it’s still the right thing to do, according to the deontologist.
As it happens, most of us are deontologists when it comes to borrowing money from friends. If you were the friend who lent the £100, you’d be upset if the person who borrowed it donated it instead of repaying you, wouldn’t you? Even if it did lots of good in the world. You’d probably say something like, ‘That money wasn’t yours to donate!’, which opens another deontological can of worms that has to do with rights: your friend had no right to donate that money, because they owe it to you. In extreme cases, though, you might be more forgiving, and more consequentialist. So, if your friend was on her way to repay you the money, which was in the form of cash, because for the sake of this example let’s say that this is all happening in the 1990s, and if your friend got mugged at knifepoint and handed over the £100 in order to avoid getting killed, then you probably wouldn’t whine that she had no right to hand over your money to the mugger. In that case, you’d prioritise the consequences over the rights and obligations. (To any philosophers listening to this, please don’t furiously get in touch about my lack of ethical nuance here.)
I’m not here to try to persuade you here that any one moral framework is the correct one. The point I’m trying to make is that, in everyday life, most of us move between consequentialism and deontology, depending on the situation - unless your name is Immanuel Kant, of course, and if it is, then you’re far too dead to be listening to this. Most of the time, if we’re not grappling with a really thorny moral dilemma, doing the right thing involves following our moral intuitions about what we should do. Following our conscience, in other words. And our conscience is sometimes swayed by consequentialist considerations, sometimes by deontological ones, sometimes by other factors, and of course all this varies somewhat between individuals.
Now, there’s something else I want to say about consequentialism versus deontology, which will turn out to be relevant later. Notoriously, consequentialism is demanding in a way that deontology isn’t. Let’s go back to that £100 that your friend lent you. Suppose that you’re persuaded by consequentialism and that you donate the money to charity instead of repaying your friend, because you can do more good in the world that way. Why stop there? The next time you get your hands on some money and you’re thinking of spending it, shouldn’t you donate that, too? Perhaps it’s 1pm and you’re feeling peckish, and you’re passing a sandwich shop so you contemplate going in and buying something to eat. That might cost you £5. But if you were to donate that £5 to charity instead, the world might be a better place. You’d be a bit hungry, but so what? It’s not going to kill you. And even if it did kill you - even if you embraced this ‘donate instead of spend’ thing wholeheartedly, to the extent that you’re on the verge of dropping dead because you haven’t eaten for days - you need to balance your suffering against the perhaps considerable alleviation of suffering that your donated money is doing elsewhere. It’s hard to have boundaries with consequentialism. Anytime you think about doing something for yourself, for your own wellbeing, consequentialism has a better idea. Things are different with deontology. If you have an obligation to give your money to someone else, then you need to do that, but otherwise you get to keep it. And if you decide to give it away even though you’re not obligated to do so, then great - that makes you an extra nice person, but not giving away your money when there is no obligation to do so doesn’t make you a bad person.
Maybe you can see where I’m going with this. It was that word ‘boundaries’ that tipped you off, wasn’t it? I’ve noticed that, while it’s normal for our moral intuitions to take consequentialist and deontological considerations into account, sometimes emphasising one of those approaches and sometimes the other, sometimes we do that in a way that ends up giving ourselves a raw deal. We gerrymander ethical frameworks against ourselves. You know about gerrymandering, right? It’s the practice, in politics, of changing electoral boundaries to give one party or candidate an advantage. It’s named after Elbridge Gerry, who, as governor of Massachusetts in 1812, changed a district in Boston to a shape that people thought resembled a salamander. Just as gerrymandering the boundaries between electoral districts enables corrupt politicians to ensure that they win and their opponents lose, gerrymandering the boundaries between ethical frameworks enables you to ensure that the demandingness of morality falls on your shoulders rather than those of other people. When you do this, it can be really hard to see what the problem is, because on the face of it, we’re doing the right thing. The morality checks out, or so it seems.
Let me give you an example from my own past. This is a true story, and one that happened long enough ago that nobody is going to be recognisable from the details I give you here. When I was a junior academic, I was contacted by an American undergraduate student who was trying to arrange a visit to my institution that would have looked good on his CV. It ended up being a bit of a headache - and, spoiler, it fell through. This student would do things like land imminent deadlines on me that he’d forgotten to mention previously, while hinting that he’d already told me and I must have missed it. He fibbed on his CV, which eventually prompted an intervention by a staff member at his university, following which the student corrected his oversight (which we all knew wasn’t really an oversight). I could see that this student was - as we say here in the UK - taking the fucking piss. But even so, I continued to help him with his application in ways that went beyond the call of duty. For example, I remember one time I interrupted my own work to deliver part of the student’s application by hand to someone else in the university, because if I’d stuck it in the internal mail it wouldn’t have arrived in time. And while I was doing it, I wasn’t thinking to myself, ‘I am such a mug’. I thought I was doing the right thing. I can remember thinking along the lines of, ‘If I were about to miss an important deadline, even if it was my own fault, I’d want someone else to help me out, and it’s only taking me twenty minutes’. I thought of myself as acting on an obligation to help other people when I could easily do so, which is a pretty plausible-sounding obligation.
Ah, yes. My obligations. Let’s zoom in on this, because even though I’d talked myself into believing I was doing the right thing, I seemed to be the only one with any obligations in this situation - at least, the way I was thinking about it. While I was focusing on my own obligation to help others, I was ignoring any obligations that this student had. Like the obligation to be truthful. So, viewing the situation through a deontological lens, I was getting a raw deal: I had obligations but this student didn’t. Meanwhile - and bummer for me - I was also getting a raw deal from a consequentialist point of view, too. I cared about the consequences for this student more than I cared about the consequences for myself. If this student missed the important deadline, then that would be bad for the student, and I needed to do what I could to ensure that wouldn’t happen. But what about the consequences for me? Running around delivering stuff for this student, getting behind on my own work, having to decipher dishonest communication. None of that was a barrel of laughs, but I was discounting that. The upshot of all this was that I was being given the runaround - and I was giving myself the runaround - but when I reflected on the morality of the situation - in other words, when I gave some thought to what I ought to be doing - it looked like I was doing the right thing. I was acting on a completely respectable obligation. I was doing what I could to maximise good. Everything seemed to check out.
What I was ignoring, though, was the way I was gerrymandering between ethical frameworks. I was cherry-picking bits from different moral theories in a way that ensured that I carried all the burdens while the student was let off the hook. I was thinking: obligations are important, but only when they involve me doing things to help other people. And I was thinking: promoting good consequences matters, but only when that involves me running around making good things happen. At the heart of this craziness was my viewing myself as the only moral agent in this whole situation. I was right that I had obligations in this situation, but I overlooked the fact that so did the student. And I was right that promoting good consequences matters, but I overlooked the fact that it’s not up to me alone to realise those good consequences. The student in this situation may as well have been a toddler, or a cat, as far as my moral theorising was concerned. I was the only one on the hook.
In case you’re wondering how all this ended, I eventually ran out of patience and wrote an email to the student calling him out on his bullshit. He responded sheepishly, and acknowledged his blunders. He really did use that word, too: ‘blunders’.
I’ve noticed, in coaching sessions, that when people tell me that they struggle with boundaries, there’s often some moral gerrymandering going on. It’s all deontology when they think of their own moral obligations, and it’s all consequentialism when they think of other people. They think of themselves as bundles of obligations to other people, and they think of other people as bundles of good consequences that need to be maximised. They don’t know how to draw and enforce healthy boundaries because they can’t see how to do that without doing something unethical, because of course they should fulfil their obligations and promote good consequences. They can’t see a way out - and they really do need a way out, because what they’re doing to themselves is the equivalent of being a deontologist every time you owe someone else money, but then switching to being a consequentialist every time someone owes you. The result is that you always repay other people, but nobody ever repays you. And it all checks out because in each case there’s a moral framework that justifies the outcome. The problem, though, is the gerrymandering between those frameworks.
If this resonates with you, what can you do? Do you choose one moral framework and stick to it, no matter what? I mean, you could, but that would be hard to swallow. You could choose to be an uncompromising consequentialist who alienates all their friends by never repaying loans and instead donating the money they owe to good causes. Or you could be a die-hard deontologist who believes - like Kant - that telling the truth is always right, even when it means truthfully answering an axe-wielding murderer when they ask where they can find (and chop up) your friend. If that doesn’t sound very appealing, you could instead adopt a less dramatic approach by taking steps to ensure you’re not constantly giving yourself a raw deal when it comes to ethically evaluating your choices. That means taking other people’s obligations into account, not just your own, and counting the consequences for yourself among the good consequences to be promoted.
Let’s say you get an email from a colleague who wants you to join a committee that you’d rather not join. You wish you could be the sort of person who says no and sticks to that, but instead you’re feeling under pressure to agree. Perhaps you think something like the following; ‘Well, I’m a member of a department and we all need to do our bit, membership of a committee is part of my job, and I do want to be a good colleague. And, in any case, the work that this committee wants to do is important and someone needs to do it, so why not me?’ By thinking along these lines, you’re touching on deontological and consequentialist considerations. The deontological considerations involve your own obligations: your sense that you need to pull your weight in the community, and fulfil the obligations of your job. And the consequentialist considerations involve your belief that good things will follow if the committee does its work. So, you’ve identified obligations that you have, and good consequences that others will benefit from. Before you say yes, pause and acknowledge that you’re not the only person with obligations. What about your colleagues - don’t they have obligations to sit on committees too? And if so, how do their obligations compare with yours? If you’re a habitual admin-avoider who has spent the last few years shirking committees and other bureaucratic burdens while your colleagues are creaking under the weight of time-sapping meetings, shared calendars, and spreadsheets, then maybe your time has come and you’d better step up. But if you’re already doing your fair share, then perhaps you’ve already fulfilled any obligations you might have in this area. You can say no - and if you’re concerned about having healthy boundaries, you probably should say no.
Here’s where focusing too much on promoting good consequences can be a real sting in the tail. I’ve spoken to people who recognise that they’re already doing their fair share - they don’t have any unfulfilled obligations, in other words - but they kind of weaponise the consequences against themselves. Sure, they’re not obligated to do this extra thing, but wouldn’t the world be a better place if it happened? Are they just going to sit there and let it all fall through, when they could scrape together a few hours to take on another set of commitments?
This is a tricky one. It does really often happen that if we can give a little bit more of ourselves, the world would be a better place in some small way. That can make it difficult to step back. But I want to offer you a few strategies that can help you think through situations like this, and safeguard your wellbeing and your sanity.
The first is that, as I’ve already said, consequentialism is demanding. If you allow your choices to be guided by promoting good consequences, then the task is never ending. You can devote your entire life and all your energies to maximising the good, until you drop dead from exhaustion. If you want to be consequentialist about this, don’t make the mistake of believing that you’ll ever be done, or that anything you do will ever be enough. There will always be something else you can do to do good in the world. Now, most people I’ve met in coaching sessions aren’t after martyring themselves to the good. They just want to know how much is enough - how much they should be doing to avoid being a bad person. They want to strike a balance between doing good in the world and keeping something back for themselves. If that’s you, then you’re going to need to factor in something other than consequences when you’re deciding how to act; something that will enable you to draw the line between ‘enough’ and ‘extra’. One way you can do that is, as we’ve seen, by thinking about obligations. You fulfil your obligations, and then you’re done. But it’s really common to want to do more. Perhaps, for you, fulfilling your obligations is the minimum. You want to go above and beyond, but you’re struggling to work out what that looks like. Let me share with you a couple of ways to think about this.
One involves the idea of obligations to ourselves. Most of the time, when we think about obligations, we think of what we owe to other people. But it’s also possible - although somewhat unfashionable among philosophers these days - to think about obligations to ourselves. One way you could do that is to think of your future self as a person, like any other, who warrants your consideration and compassion. I talked about this in episode #78: Fix your self-compassion with the metaphysics of personal identity (and an Aeropress). So, to return to that scenario in which you’re asked to join a committee that you’d rather not join, perhaps it’s helpful to think of saying ‘yes’ as equivalent to committing another person to the future work of belonging to this committee - it just happens that the other person in question is your future self. Would it be inconsiderate to sign a colleague up to this committee, without their agreement? Would doing so be to overlook or give insufficient weight to the burdens they’re currently struggling with, and that they’ll continue to struggle with in the future? Would it be unfair, because they’re already doing more than their fair share in this area? This perspective can be helpful in getting to grips with useful intuitions about how much work is enough and how much is too much.
Another thing to consider is whether you’re giving sufficient weight to the consequences of your decision for yourself. So, you’ve decided that the world would be a better place if this committee were properly staffed, and you could make that happen by agreeing to belong to it. What would be the consequences for you? Would you be miserable? Would you end up burnt out? Would you need to neglect your family or activities that you value in order to take on the extra work? Would agreeing to this committee support a sustainable working pattern, in which you can continue with the projects you care about without getting sick? Because all these are consequences too, even if they’re ones that you’re in the habit of ignoring.
A third way to strike the right balance between doing too little and too much, ethically speaking, involves another moral framework that I haven’t mentioned yet: virtue ethics. This isn’t consequentialism, and it’s not deontology either. According to virtue ethics, the right thing to do is whatever the virtuous person would do. You’ll find this approach in Aristotle. Without getting into detail about this approach, I want to mention two ways in which you can usefully draw upon it to help guide your decisions here. One is to pick a role model. Can you think of someone - a senior colleague, perhaps - whose approach you admire? Someone who you think strikes the balance you’re trying to strike between ‘not enough’ and ‘too much’? Who manages to be a good colleague without depleting themself? Imagine that this person is asked to join the committee you’re being asked to join. What would they say? How would they view the situation? How would they justify the decision they make? Would they even feel the need to justify it at all? Thinking about our decisions in terms of what a specific person would do can be really helpful, and can make the entire situation much more human and relatable than thinking in abstract terms about lists of obligations and consequences.
Another way you can draw on virtue ethics is to imagine yourself as the role model. Imagine your child, or a junior colleague, looking to you for guidance. You want to model a healthy relationship with your job. How might this inform your decision about the committee? This can be a really useful tool, because many of us who have a tendency to minimise the consequences for ourselves of taking on extra work are much less willing to minimise the consequences for other people in the same situation, especially people who we feel protective towards. Act according to the example you want to set for someone whose wellbeing you care about.
And a final word, before I say goodbye. Remember: boundaries, assertiveness, and self-advocacy can all be uncomfortable. It can be uncomfortable to say no. It can be uncomfortable to recognise that our needs conflict with other people’s needs, and to prioritise our own. A lot of the time we are ashamed of our unwillingness to do the things we don’t want to do, which I guess is why so many people, when asked to join yet another committee, say things like ‘I can’t’ rather than ‘I won’t’ - they don’t want to reveal that it’s in their power to do what someone else wants them to do, and yet decline to do it. Accept all this, my friend! The discomfort doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong. Often it’s the opposite. Think of that junior colleague witnessing you say things like ‘Not this time, I’m afraid’ or ‘I don’t schedule meetings on Tuesday afternoons, that’s my writing time’, and feeling empowered to assert themself next time. Think of the security that comes with trusting yourself to recognise and work within your limits. And think of how being liked for being the person who’s willing to give of themself without limits and until they’re depleted is maybe not the brand of positivity you need to worry about cultivating.
Take care, friends.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d leave a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!
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