Social movements often assume that when people behave in ways that cause harm, it’s because they don’t care enough. It’s not that they can’t; it’s that they won’t. Resistance is interpreted as apathy, ignorance, selfishness, or bad faith. But this interpretation rests on a deeper unexamined assumption, namely that people approach moral decisions and development from roughly the same starting point.
But people don’t start at the same place. The ability to engage with moral demands is highly variable. It requires the ability to tolerate discomfort, revise identity, risk social belonging, or act without immediate reward. These capacities are informed by biology, development, stress load, social position, and lived experience. When this uneven terrain gets overlooked, constraint gets read as indifference and psychological limits are mistaken for ethical failure. In this sense, moral agency is less a binary than a variable resource. It expands and contracts depending on context, history, and internal bandwidth.
Whether you’re a hard determinist (guilty!), a compatibilist, or a staunch believer in free will, most folks will agree that some working model of psychological agency is both useful and necessary for organizing expectations, assigning responsibility, and coordinating coherent action. This essay explores what happens when movements assume equal choice where real differences exist, and what a more realistic, capacity-aware understanding of moral responsibility might require instead.
Moral Agency: Less a Switch, More a Rheostat
Few credible thinkers still defend a purely will-based or voluntarist model of behaviour (at least I sincerely hope so). And yet, in practice, expectations are often applied as though agency were evenly distributed. Constraints may be vaguely acknowledged, but their implications are rarely given due consideration.
Moral actions and change are cognitively and emotionally expensive, especially when they go against the grain of social norms. They require psychological work that draws on capacities for emotional regulation, distress tolerance, uncertainty management, social risk-taking, delayed or uncertain reward, and so forth – not exactly abstract virtues that can be summoned on demand. They depend on psychological resources that vary substantially across individuals and across circumstances.
For someone with a highly reactive stress response, a moral challenge may register less as an invitation to reflect than as a threat to contain. For someone operating near the limit of their regulatory bandwidth, there may be little surplus available for reassessing identity, habits, or social belonging. In these cases, what looks like indifference or resistance can be better understood as miscalibrated self-protection.
This doesn’t deny practical agency, but it does reframe it as a signal with variable bandwidth rather than a binary switch, expanding and contracting in response to stress, safety, and cognitive load. Its rough parameters are shaped by genetics/epigenetics, developmental history, and social environment, most of which lie outside conscious control.
Where (Moral) Capacity Comes From
If you can devote sustained attention to injustices from which you are not personally suffering, chances are you are drawing on some form of privilege. The term has fallen out of vogue in some circles, and often for understandable reasons, but it remains descriptively useful here. If you don’t like it, just think of it as an unevenly distributed set of conditions that facilitate the development of internal or external resources. Totally elegant and in no way cumbersome, right? Whatever you call them, here are a few factors that support various capacities like moral development:
Temperament
People vary broadly in their baseline temperament in ways that inform how they respond to novelty, uncertainty, challenge, stress, social circumstances, and more. Personality research often describes these patterns using terms like neuroticism, openness to experience , conscientiousness, and agreeableness, which roughly map onto capacities such as threat sensitivity, cognitive flexibility, impulse regulation, and social attunement (respectively). Some folks will recognize these traits from the Big 5 model – they’re usually somewhat heritable and temporally stable, and tend to influence how costly revising beliefs, dissenting, or taking moral risks is likely to feel. For someone who is sensitive to threats or closed to novelty, challenges to their identity or worldview may feel destabilizing rather than stimulating. For others, the same pressures may feel more tolerable or even energizing. Temperament doesn’t determine outcomes, but it roughly defines the range within which other capacities develop and operate.
Baseline Autonomic Arousal
People differ substantially in baseline anxiety, vigilance, reactivity, etc. These differences shape not only how information is processed, but how much psychological room a person has to engage with challenging ideas at all. Chronic stress narrows attention, reduces cognitive flexibility, and biases perception toward immediate threat. Moral reasoning requires precisely the opposite state, particularly when identity or social belonging is challenged.
Developmental Safety and Locus of Control
Early experiences of safety, predictability, and responsiveness from caregivers or attachment figures shape whether people develop a sense of internal control or learn to believe that outcomes are largely imposed upon them. When agency has historically been obstructed, frustrated, or punished, exploration can feel risky (understatement – guess how I know this). Calls to responsibility or accountability land very differently depending on whether responsibility has previously been met with success/empowerment or punishment/harm. .
Social Feedback and Risk
Advantaged social positions and status subsidize exploration and experimentation. Some people can afford to dissent, to be awkward, to incur moral or social costs without serious threat to their social standing (real or perceived) or identity. Others can’t. When deviation is reliably met with deleterious social, economic, or relational consequences, people lose capacity for flexibility. What looks like moral courage from one position can look like recklessness or self-injury from another.
Moral Inequality Without Nihilism
Acknowledging unequal moral capacity tends to make people uneasy. My suspicion is that this discomfort stems less from disagreement than from confrontation with the basic unfairness of the universe, which despite acknowledging it intellectually, most find existentially threatening. It can be mistaken for excuse-making or for denial of responsibility, but agency and responsibility don’t need to be binary to be meaningful in practice; they can be proportional. In fact, in practice, they are; responsibility scales with capacity, and so do expectations.
This view avoids both fatalism and a view of morality built on fantasy. It recognizes that people are neither fully determined nor fully unconstrained (practically, if not ontologically), and that ethical seriousness requires attention to the conditions under which agency is exercised, not just its outcomes.
Moral Expectations for Imaginary People
Movements that assume uniform moral capacity tend to misdiagnose resistance and overestimate the power of confrontation or argument alone. They mistake psychological constraint for ethical failure and treat unequal cost as equal obligation. The result is often rigidity rather than change (see my essay on purity culture dynamics in animal advocacy). This isn’t just a problem of tone; it’s a category error about how people in general and moral agency in particular actually work.
Capacity-aware ethics (actually a thing!) doesn’t abandon moral responsibility; it attempts to situate it realistically. It doesn’t stop at asking what is right, but continues on to what conditions make right action possible. It locates compassion as a perceptual tool necessary for accurate assessment rather than an indulgence, and justice as responsiveness to difference rather than insistence on homogeneity. If movements are to be effective, they must be built for real human minds, not idealized ones (we’re not economists, after all).
The myth of equal choice is appealing because it can feel fair, but fairness as a descriptive claim is grounded in false assumptions that produce brittle movements and misplaced blame. When we ignore constraint, we confuse righteousness with effectiveness and conviction with insight. Taking human variability seriously may look to some like a retreat from ethics and a refutation of responsibility. I argue that it is what makes ethical change at a social level possible at all.