Would You Still Do It If No One Saw? The Performance of Kindness

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You help an elderly person cross the street, and then, almost without meaning to, your eyes drift around to check whether anyone saw you. Did that glance just wipe out the kindness you'd done a moment before? A thousand years ago, a Sufi from Baghdad was so troubled by this question that he wrote an entire book on how a person can test their own intentions.

A muddy country road in Illinois. An old stagecoach jolts along. Inside sits Abraham Lincoln, years before anyone had even spoken of him as a future president, along with a traveling companion. The two are deep in debate. Lincoln is arguing that beneath every good deed a person does, there lies, in the end, a selfish motive. His companion objects, but Lincoln won't budge. Just then, as they pass a creek, they hear a sharp animal cry. On the bank, a mother pig is thrashing and squealing; her piglets have sunk into the mire and are about to drown. Lincoln tells the driver to stop, climbs down, pulls the piglets out of the mud one by one, and sets them on dry ground. When he climbs back into the coach, covered in mud, his companion smiles and asks him where the selfishness was in all that. Lincoln's reply is the kind that ends an argument. That was the very essence of selfishness, he says. I would have had no peace of mind all day if I had gone on and left that suffering old sow worrying over those pigs. I did it to get peace of mind for myself.

The story was told in an Illinois newspaper. We don't know for certain whether it really happened this way. Even so, philosophers fell in love with it. The American philosopher Joel Feinberg uses this scene as an example in his essay on psychological egoism, a piece that has been taught in universities for generations. Psychological egoism is the view that people act only in their own interest, and that what we call kindness is really personal satisfaction in disguise. Lincoln's answer is the most charming defense this view has ever had.

And yet the answer has a flaw, and that flaw was spotted more than a hundred years before Lincoln, at the start of the eighteenth century, by the English clergyman Joseph Butler. Feinberg follows in his footsteps. The question is this: why would Lincoln have felt uneasy if he had left those piglets behind? Only because he genuinely wanted them to be saved. There must first be a desire that cares about someone else's good, so that when that desire is fulfilled, a person can feel at ease. You don't feel pangs of conscience over something you don't care about at all. So peace of mind is not the goal of kindness, but its shadow. It follows the one who does good, but it doesn't steer them. Someone whose only aim was their own peace of mind would never have stepped out of that coach. They would have shut their eyes, covered their ears, and gone on their way.

But hidden inside the Lincoln story is a subtler and more unsettling question. There was a witness in that scene. Lincoln had just claimed that all good deeds are selfish, and someone was sitting right beside him, watching. Had he been alone in the coach, would he still have climbed down?

The oldest form of this question in philosophy appears in Plato's Republic. Glaucon, one of Socrates' partners in debate, tells a story. A shepherd named Gyges finds a ring in a chasm that opens up after an earthquake. When he turns the ring's stone toward the palm of his hand, he becomes invisible. Once the shepherd discovers this power, he goes to the palace, seduces the queen, kills the king, and seizes the throne. Glaucon's claim is plain: put such a ring on the finger of the most honest person alive, and they would do exactly the same. What we call justice is just a decorated name for the fear of getting caught. People behave well not because they are good, but because they are seen.

You don't need a ring from a fairy tale to test this claim. The restaurant you eat at in a city you'll never visit again, the shopping cart left unreturned in a parking lot where no one is looking, a wallet found on the sidewalk with no identification inside... All of these are the little Gyges rings of everyday life. So there are two separate questions in front of us. First: when we do good, are we also gaining something for ourselves? Butler's answer took some of the edge off that question. The second is far tougher: does our goodness need an audience? In the eighteenth century, this second question landed on the desks of two thinkers who lived hundreds of kilometers apart, and it reached each of them in a different form.

In seventeen eighty-five, in Königsberg, Immanuel Kant published a short but enormously influential book, the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In it there is a simple shop scene. A merchant does not overcharge customers who know nothing about buying and selling. If a child walks into his shop, the child pays the same price as everyone else. His conduct is flawless. Kant, however, asks a question: why does the merchant do this? If he does it because he has calculated that honesty is good business policy, that a shop known for honesty wins customers, then his action is in accordance with duty, but it does not spring from duty. He has done the right thing, but for the wrong reason. Kant takes an even bolder step. Some people are helpful by nature; they take a genuine, inner pleasure in bringing joy to others. According to Kant, their conduct is lovable, and it deserves praise and encouragement, but it does not deserve moral esteem. Their kindness comes from an inclination, not from a principle. Then he asks the reader to imagine someone else. This person's own grief has extinguished all his compassion, and the troubles of others no longer move him at all. Even so, with no desire to help, he helps simply because it ought to be done. For Kant, this is where true moral worth first appears.

Let's carry this idea into the present day. It's the middle of the night, and you're coming home completely exhausted. Your neighbor's elderly mother is stuck in front of the building with heavy shopping bags. You don't feel like helping at all, and nobody is watching. Still, you pick up the bags and carry them up four flights of stairs. On Kant's scales, this act weighs more than the same help given on a cheerful day in front of a group of friends.

Perhaps Kant's most honest lines are these: we can never be fully certain that any action was truly done from a sense of duty. Even the most rigorous self-examination cannot reach the hidden springs of our actions. Kant calls this the dear self. Even behind the decision we believe to be our noblest, that dear self may be lying in wait. So Kant offers us no comfort. If worth lies in an inner principle that no one can see, then even we cannot fully see that principle.

Twenty-six years before Kant, in seventeen fifty-nine, Adam Smith, who was lecturing on moral philosophy in Glasgow, had approached the question from a completely different direction in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Today we know him mostly as an economist, but for Smith, we first learn morality through the eyes of others. Someone who grew up in a solitary place without ever seeing a human face could no more know whether his conduct was good or bad than whether his own face was handsome or ugly. Society is our mirror. Over time we take these outside gazes into ourselves, and a spectator forms within our breast. Smith calls this spectator the impartial spectator, the man within the breast, the great judge of our conduct.

This is where Smith's most valuable distinction for our subject begins. A person can love two different things: being praised, and being worthy of praise. A mature person takes no pleasure in praise he has not earned; he may even feel ashamed of it. On the other hand, if he has done something praiseworthy, his conscience is at peace even if no one notices. To the question, would you still do it if no one saw, Smith's answer is this: someone always sees, and that someone is the spectator within. The real question is whether that spectator is truly impartial, or merely an echo of the crowd outside.

So how powerful is that outside crowd? In two thousand six, psychologists at Newcastle University in England ran a simple experiment. The department's tea room had an honesty box that no one supervised. Anyone who took tea or coffee dropped the money into the box themselves. The researchers placed a small image next to the price list above the box, changing it from week to week. Some weeks it was a photograph of a pair of eyes, other weeks a picture of flowers. In the weeks with eyes, the money put into the box rose to nearly three times what it was in the weeks with flowers. No one was actually watching. There was only a pair of eyes printed on paper on the wall. Smith's hope was that the spectator within us would mature enough not to need those paper eyes. The experiment shows that the spectator is still fed from outside.

Kant and Smith were rightly troubled by this. But roughly nine hundred years before them, in Baghdad, a tradition had arisen that carried the same concern to a far darker depth. What concerned this tradition was not only whether people did good for an audience. What they really wanted to know was how the desire to be seen hides itself even from the one who holds it.

The word riya comes from an Arabic root meaning to see. The word itself carries the question at the start of this episode: doing something to be seen, doing something to show. In Islamic thought, the subtlest and most unsettling analysis of riya was made by al-Harith al-Muhasibi, who lived in Baghdad in the ninth century. His name comes from the word for accounting, because he was a man who ceaselessly called himself to account. He died in Baghdad in eight fifty-seven. Junayd of Baghdad, the great Sufi of the following generations, was among those in his circle.

Muhasibi treats riya not as a moral flaw but as a disease of the heart, and he examines it with a physician's care. In his book on observing the rights of God, he calls on his reader to look inside his own mind. He examines, one by one, the first stirring of intention, the thought that surfaces in the middle of a deed, and the residue that lingers in the heart after the deed is done. Riya can seep in through any of them. One person begins with a pure intention. In the middle of prayer, someone enters the room, and the recitation lengthens on its own, the bows grow slower and heavier. Another has never told anyone about a kindness he did, but when the conversation somehow turns that way, the tone of his voice changes. Muhasibi's concern is not the two-faced impostors. They are obvious enough. What truly interests him is the good person who believes himself sincere. This analysis rests on a short but startling hadith. According to the Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, the Prophet said that what he feared most for his community was the lesser idolatry, and when he was asked what that was, he answered: showing off. This is why showing off came to be called hidden idolatry. The reasoning goes like this: if a deed is said to be done for God, but you quietly keep an eye on how people see you, you have given worship a partner. Another narration describes this hiddenness with an image that is hard to forget. Idolatry within this community is more hidden than the footsteps of a black ant crawling across a black stone on a dark night. A dark night, a black stone, a black ant. The eye cannot see it and the ear cannot hear it, yet the ant keeps walking.

The man who took up al-Muhasibi's hunt for this ant most fully, more than two centuries later, was al-Ghazali, who died in Tus in the year eleven eleven. His masterpiece, the Ihya Ulum al-Din, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, contains books devoted to the diseases of the heart. One of them directly condemns the love of fame and the habit of showing off. Here al-Ghazali makes no secret of how much he owes to al-Muhasibi. When he lists the showcases of showing off, he writes almost like a sociologist. A person can show off with the body, taking care to look pale and worn so that others will guess he spends his nights in prayer or his days fasting. He can show off with his clothing, wearing coarse, patched garments that announce he has turned his back on the world. He can show off with his words, sprinkling wise sayings through the conversation and letting everyone see how much he has memorized. He can show off with his deeds, and this is the best-known kind. And he can show off with his circle, forever talking about which scholars he has met, whose door he has visited, and who has come to visit him.

What makes al-Ghazali truly unsettling is the way he breaks showing off into layers. In its crudest form, a person does something only to be seen, and would never do it at all if no one were there. In a subtler form, the deed is still done for God, but when someone is watching it becomes easier, lighter, sweeter. In the subtlest form of all, the audience has no effect on the deed whatsoever. The person does good alone and tells no one. But when the good deed comes to light one day, the heart stirs with joy. He expects a little respect from people. When others fail to greet him first, when his work is not received with enthusiasm, when he is not given special consideration at the market, he feels a pang inside. In al-Ghazali's diagnosis, that pang gives the heart away: it was expecting something in return. The hidden good deed had been entered into a secret ledger of debts owed.

To put it in today's terms, picture someone who has volunteered at a hospital for years without ever telling a soul. One day the hospital management holds a ceremony to thank its volunteers, and forgets that person's name. The small hurt they feel is al-Ghazali's ant on the black stone. Or think of someone who gives anonymously, yet in the middle of a conversation, almost by accident, mentions what a beautiful feeling it is to donate anonymously.

Al-Ghazali does not close off every way out, but he draws his distinctions carefully. He says that being glad when a good deed becomes known is not always a fault. A person may rejoice out of gratitude that God has revealed what is beautiful in him and covered what is ugly, or rejoice in the hope that others will be inspired to do the same good. What matters is the source of the joy. What is more, al-Ghazali sees giving up good deeds altogether out of fear of showing off as a trap in its own right. One of the devil's most cunning tricks is to whisper, this would just be showing off for you, and so keep a person from charity, from worship, from helping others.

This bind is captured most sharply in a saying attributed to Fudayl ibn Iyad, a Sufi who lived even before al-Muhasibi: Abandoning a deed because of people is showing off. Doing a deed for the sake of people is idolatry. Sincerity is when God saves you from both. In other words, showing is a trap, and so is falling silent for fear of showing. These words were spoken more than a thousand years ago. But they never weighed as heavily as they do today, in a world where everyone carries a camera in their pocket.

In a hadith reported by al-Bukhari and Muslim, seven people are named who will be sheltered in God's shade on a day when there is no other shade. One of them is the person who gives charity so secretly that the left hand does not know what the right hand has given. The same image appears in another tradition as well. In the Gospel of Matthew, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells those who give not to sound a trumpet before them as the hypocrites do in the streets, and asks that the left hand not know what the right hand is doing. Two great traditions, each on its own, turn to the same body and the same two hands. This suggests the question is one that all of humanity shares.

The Quran, for its part, strikes a balance. According to the two hundred and seventy-first verse of Surah al-Baqarah, giving charity openly is good, but hiding it and giving it to those in need is better still. The Quran forbids neither path, but it holds one above the other. And that preference concerns not only the heart of the giver, but also the dignity of the one who receives. In Ottoman cities, in mosque courtyards or along the roadside, you could find stone pillars about the height of a person, hollowed out at the top. These were called charity stones. The giver usually came after dark, left their money in the hollow, and walked away. Later, the one in need would come and take only as much as they needed. The giver never saw the receiver, and the receiver never saw the giver. No one became indebted to anyone, and no one was diminished in anyone's eyes. In the twelfth century, the Jewish thinker Maimonides, who lived in Cairo, ranked charity on eight levels, and he placed giving in which the giver and the receiver do not know each other just below the highest. At the very top, he placed the kind of help that lifts a person to their feet so that they never need help again. Different faiths and different cities meet in the same intuition: secrecy protects the heart of the giver, but it also protects the dignity of the one who receives.

Today we live in a world that is the exact opposite of the charity stone. A food parcel is handed over as the door opens, facing the camera. A pair of shoes given to a street child travels to millions of screens along with the child's astonished face. The help is real: the bread is eaten, the shoes are worn. But something has also been taken from that child. Their need has been placed in someone else's showcase of kindness, without anyone asking for their consent. What the charity stone protected for centuries is gone in a single shot.

Still, we have to be honest here, because the matter is not black and white. A donation campaign launched for a sick child could never have reached its goal if it had not been shared. A friend's photo of giving blood might send you to the hospital too. It is no accident that al-Ghazali left the door ajar for good deeds made public in order to set an example, or that the Quran also counts open giving as good. Here, Fudayl's dilemma returns with all its weight: if you share, it may be showing off; if you don't, perhaps no one will act at all.

What is truly new is that this dilemma is no longer an exceptional moment but has become everyday life itself. Glaucon's ring made a person invisible, and as a way of testing morality, that was an imaginary exception. The devices in our pockets have turned that ring inside out. We are almost never invisible. Every action is a potential stage, every kindness a potential piece of content. On the wall of the tea room in Newcastle there was a pair of paper eyes. On our screens, there are eyes that can be counted, that accumulate, that come back to us as notifications. Adam Smith's two loves, the love of praise and the love of being praiseworthy, are now the two things hardest to tell apart. Because praise arrives instantly and in numbers, while the quiet peace of being worthy always lags a step behind. What Kant called the dear self now has a counter of its own.

Perhaps that is why sincerity should be thought of not as a test, but as a practice. If Kant is right, we will never see every fold of our hearts. If al-Ghazali is right, the ant may be walking at any moment. Then what we can do is not try to prove our purity, but train the spectator within us to live independently of outside eyes. And the way to do that runs through small kindnesses that no one will ever know about. In many neighborhoods across Turkey, the tradition of suspended bread still lives on in bakeries. Someone pays for two loaves, takes one, and the other is left hanging on the hook. No one knows who left it or who took it. There is no photograph, and no thank-you. It is the charity stone's small grandchild, on the scale of a neighborhood.

The honest answer to the question "Would you still do it if no one saw?" will probably be, for most of us, "I don't know." But this question is not a verdict; it is a mirror. Whenever it comes to mind, it helps us examine our kindness of that moment once again. Perhaps sincerity is a place we never reach, but turn toward anew every day. The person who takes the suspended bread will never learn who left it. And the one who left it will never know where the bread went. There may be a little loneliness in this not knowing. But within that loneliness, kindness can, for the first time, remain simply kindness.

We have reached the end of today's episode of Nöron Philosophy. Until we meet again in a new story.