Devil's Advocate: Is it okay not to care?

YES: Gregory Chang

Let me be clear. I'm not saying suffering doesn't matter, or that civic participation is optional. Vote. Don't be cruel. Help when you can. But the demand that every educated person maintain emotional engagement with every global crisis isn't moral clarity. It's a recipe for burnout disguised as virtue. Be proud if you dedicate yourself to a cause. But don’t, perhaps, sharpen the guillotine for those who simply don't share your particular passion, wagering that their indifference must trace back to daddy's credit card.

Here's the uncomfortable arithmetic: you have roughly sixteen waking hours per day. Subtract work, relationships, and basic functioning. What remains isn't infinite. Attention given to tracking one crisis is attention unavailable for your struggling friend, your dissertation, or, in a more charitable light, the St Andrews food bank, which could actually use volunteers. This isn't selfishness; it's maths. Triage isn't immoral in medicine, and it's not immoral in moral life either. Pretending attention is unlimited doesn't create more capacity; it just ensures you engage superficially with everything and deeply with nothing.

You have heard it said that ‘silence equals complicity.’ Am I therefore complicit in the child labour in Congolese cobalt mines? I own a phone. I haven’t posted about Myanmar this week, does that make me a quiet supporter of the junta? Yemen, Sudan, Congo, Afghanistan, Haiti, climate disasters, trafficking, factory farming. An endless queue of catastrophes in which I am complicit.

The problem is, of course, that at this very moment, atrocities and emergencies are unfolding across dozens of countries. If I must actively resist all of them to avoid complicity, I become a day trader, endlessly rebalancing my ‘care portfolio’ across crises. Watching the moral markets, chasing the next spike, selling yesterday’s outrage to buy today’s. A full-time job with no closing bell and no off-hours.

But if I'm permitted to select some causes while remaining silent on others, then I need to know: how to square the circle? Who decides which silences equal complicity and which are merely unfortunate?

If silence on any crisis equals complicity, then everyone is complicit in everything they're not actively resisting right now. And if everyone is complicit in everything, the term loses all meaning. You're left with a framework that demands infinite engagement. Absurd and impossible. Or collapses into childish finger-pointing about whose causes count.

That's not moral philosophy. That's moral blackmail with a syllogism attached.

So, here's my modest proposal. If you care deeply about everything and anything, wonderful. Go touch grass occasionally. But this business of policing what others are permitted to care about? Insufferable. Stay in your lane. Post your cause. Worry about your own thoughts and prayers. A human has a certain finite capacity for grief, and you must pick and choose, which means, inevitably, leaving out terrible things and people who didn't deserve to die. That's not a moral failure. That's being human.

Those who crusade against the ‘apolitical’ are making less of an argument than a sermon. They preach to the converted, to the choir, while the pews empty out. Fine. Climb onto your high, righteous throne and enjoy the view. But beware, uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. How grand the folly of treating taste as ethics, silence as cruelty, and flinging around “privilege” and “complicity” so eagerly, they fade into the ambient hum of moral theatre. If the goal is mobilising students toward genuine engagement, shame and surveillance won’t rally them. It will likely achieve the opposite. Defensiveness, resentment, and justified scepticism toward moral policing masquerading as activism.

Care about what moves you. Let others do the same.

NO: Aleia Bhalla

In the digital age, everything is built around fleeting emotion, and while this may not matter when it comes to our parasocial relationships, it is devastating when it comes to our personal ones. When it comes to us acknowledging the atrocities of war and the humanitarian crises across the globe, we begin to forget, and so it becomes easier to forgive – even when forgiveness isn't earned. 

But today more than ever, we cannot afford not to care. We must try our best to counteract the compassion fatigue of the internet and make it a point to feel every ‘big feeling’ that is subverted by our ping-ponging algorithms. 

From every viral video’s hook and every news headline, to the ‘lore-drop’ texts on the group chat, everything is trying to draw you in and make you think to yourself, “Hey, this seems important […] maybe I do care. Maybe I should listen.” But if all that we encounter on the internet today hopes to tell us why we should care, I wonder why we need to be convinced in the first place. Humans are by design empathetic creatures. We are evolutionarily built to care for our peers, to love our children, and to nurture our societies as a whole. After all, isn't our ability to empathise exactly what distinguishes us from most of our animal counterparts? 

And yet we are straying away from this. We have stopped empathising, and under the guise of ‘protecting our peace,’ we refuse to go out of our way for our friends or to take on the burden of trying to help. 

And so, we must ask ourselves, is this okay? I say, undoubtedly, No! 

In the last decade, we have learnt to desensitise ourselves to both the horrors and the joys of the world. Hours of our day are spent half-asleep and dopamine-starved on our couches scrolling between videos of puppy yoga, genocide, and distinctly un-subtle ads for Bloom supplements. And what do we learn at the end of this? Not about flexibility, or the world, or nutrients … but instead we learn the art of decidedly not caring.

You may argue that we are only sorting through information, but in reality, the filter we are using is one which prevents us from ever reflecting on ourselves and the environment we live in. Nothing is exciting anymore, and nothing fills us with enough rage for our passion to last longer than a few weeks.

But the truth is, the most incredible displays of human connection and milestone moments in one’s life are those marked by exceptional amounts of caring: freaking out about album drops and crying about failed situationships; protesting on the streets of a college town; creating masterpieces in the wake of immense pain and unconditional love. 

Every human experience worth experiencing and every emotion that reminds us of our humanity is rooted in collective care. Now, I don't know about you, but I refuse to lose these connections because I wasn’t willing to bear the inconvenience and the discomfort of knowing. 

We cannot risk our care turning into indifference in an effort to protect ourselves from some tears. The second it does, we risk losing our laughter and with that everything that made us human in the first place.

Illustration by Veronika Sullivan