To designate a hell
is not, of course, to tell us anything
about how to extract people from that hell,
how to moderate hell’s flames.

Still, it seems a good in itself to acknowledge,
to have enlarged, one’s sense
of how much suffering
caused by human wickedness
there is in the world we share with others.
Someone who is perennially surprised
that depravity exists,
who continues to feel disillusioned
(even incredulous)
when confronted with evidence
of what humans are capable of inflicting
in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties
upon other humans,
has not reached moral
or psychological adulthood.

No one after a certain age has the right
to this kind of innocence, of superficiality,
to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.

There now exists a vast repository
of images that make it harder
to maintain this kind of moral defectiveness.
Let the atrocious images haunt us.
even if they are only tokens,
and cannot possibly encompass
most of the reality to which they refer,
they still perform a vital function.
The images say:
this is what human beings
are capable of doing –
may volunteer to do,
enthusiastically, self-righteously.
Don’t forget.

— Susan Sontag

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     Philosophical postscript

Nothing more need be said after the Sontag quote.  I will add something anyway.  If one chooses to think (believe) that there is no freedom, no ability to choose and that all is set in-the-stone of remorseless cause and effect — then you nor I have no responsibility whatsoever for anything that we do.  The idea of “justice” is a delusion, a massive shared mistake.  There is no culpability or approbation for any individual act of any person, whether that of a street person, picking through piles of refuse for his/her survival or the President of the United States residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

You can be kind and generous, or a card-carrying-mother-fucker.

     It’s all the same.