The Door Singer Cannot Open

On moral expansion, structural conditions, and why better arguments aren't always the answer.

I was not hired to run the creative arts program. I was hired to assist someone who ran it. Six weeks in, that person went on sabbatical and never returned, and I found myself directing a choir, an orchestra, six rotating bands, three weekend services, an AV department, and a theater program — working seventy-plus hours a week, conducting when I wasn’t playing piano, playing piano when I wasn’t singing, and managing everything in between with a part-time orchestra director and a part-time choir director for rehearsals.

The job was enormous. It was also, for a time, genuinely alive. I loved it.

Then I discovered what had been there before I arrived. A small cluster of people in the choir and orchestra had bullied previous directors. Nasty notes left where I would find them. Snide comments timed for maximum visibility. A drummer who refused to follow my conducting pattern not out of confusion but out of something that looked a great deal like contempt. One grown man, when rehearsal ran thirty minutes late, threw a tantrum I would have found remarkable in a two-year-old. The behavior was not a response to anything I had done. It was a pattern, established and practiced, waiting for the next person to occupy the position.

I made a decision I have been thinking about ever since. I hired a choir conductor known for running rehearsals like a drill sergeant. My reasoning was practical: I needed coverage in two places at once, and I needed enough relational breathing room to keep doing my job without being slowly ground down. What I could not fully see at the time was that the decision would not address the framework those people were operating from. It would only make it more overt. The passive-aggressive became openly aggressive. Eventually, one member head-butted another.

A year later I resigned. And in the aftermath, turning the experience over looking for what I had missed, I kept arriving at the same recognition — one that had less to do with my own perception and tactics than I initially assumed, and more to do with what the situation structurally made available.

I had positional authority. I did not have relational authority. Those are not the same thing, and only one of them is sufficient to hold a room through genuine cultural change. Relational authority is built over time, through trust, through shared history, through the accumulated credibility that lets a leader ask people to be uncomfortable and have them stay. I inherited a room that had already formed around its own dynamics, six weeks into a role I had not been hired to hold, without the runway to build what genuine change would have required.

Above me, the leadership was splintered. Different factions wanted different outcomes. The organization had its own stated standards of conduct — and when those standards were tested, the organization declined to enforce them. The bullying in the room below me and the dysfunction in the leadership above me were not separate problems. They were expressions of the same organizational failure, and the person absorbing the friction generated by both was me.

When I announced my resignation, the bullying stopped. Three or four weeks of model behavior followed, and then came the request: reconsider. Look at how well we’re getting along. What they were pointing to was real. The behavior had changed. What had not changed — what could not change in three weeks, or perhaps at all under those conditions — was the perceptual framework that had produced the behavior. The sense of entitlement. The conviction that aggression toward leadership was a legitimate tool. Nothing in the organizational culture had shifted to make that framework less viable. The compliance was tactical. The structure was intact.

I am telling this story not because it is exceptional but because it is ordinary, and because it illustrates, with a precision that abstract argument rarely achieves, a problem at the center of how we think about moral progress — and a problem that one of the most important moral philosophers of the last century has not adequately solved.

The Expanding Circle

Peter Singer’s most enduring contribution to moral philosophy is not a rule or a principle. It is a direction. In The Expanding Circle (1981) and across decades of subsequent work, Singer argued that the capacity for impartial reasoning requires us to extend moral consideration progressively outward — from self to family to community to nation to species and, wherever there is capacity for suffering, beyond. The circle of who counts morally has been expanding throughout human history, and Singer’s case is that reason itself demands we keep expanding it.

The argument is compelling, and its conclusions have been genuinely radical. Singer’s work on global poverty, on animal liberation, on the moral status of non-human sentient beings — these are not positions that sit comfortably within existing moral common sense. He has arrived, through rigorous argument, at places most people have not followed him. And he has forced, across his career, a serious reckoning with the question of whose suffering counts and why.

The mechanism Singer proposes for moral expansion is deliberative. The circle widens because sufficiently rigorous reasoning, freed from self-interested bias, compels the recognition that suffering is suffering regardless of whose it is. If you accept the principle of equal consideration of interests — that like interests deserve like weight regardless of who holds them — then the logical extension of that principle keeps pushing the boundary of moral consideration outward until it reaches every sentient being capable of suffering.

The problem is not with the destination. Singer is right about where the circle needs to go. The problem is with the mechanism. And the mechanism is where almost everything goes wrong.

The Problem Lives Upstream

Singer’s framework assumes a moral agent who, given correct reasoning, can produce moral expansion. The picture is something like this: suffering exists, it is in principle visible, and the moral failure consists of applying the wrong principles or failing to follow the argument where it leads. Correct the reasoning, and the circle widens.

But consider what people actually say when confronted with the consequences of harmful decisions. Across contexts personal and institutional, political and corporate, the confession is nearly always the same: I didn’t know. I couldn’t see. I wasn’t aware. Not: I reasoned incorrectly. The failure names itself as perceptual before it names itself as deliberative.

This is not merely a rhetorical pattern. Cognitive science has spent decades documenting the mechanisms behind it. The brain is not a passive receiver of information that then applies principles to what it receives. It is a prediction machine, continuously generating models of what it expects the world to contain and updating those models when reality fails to match the prediction. The categories through which we perceive others — whose suffering registers as a genuine claim, whose registers as noise or inconvenience or deserved consequence — are not given. They are built, through education, cultural formation, media, institutional life, and the accumulated experience of living within particular social arrangements. A perceptual framework built to assign reduced moral status to certain populations will not register their suffering as morally significant regardless of the quality of the perceiver’s deliberative reasoning. The exclusion happens before deliberation begins.

Singer’s prescription — reason more impartially, extend the principle of equal consideration further — is addressing the deliberative layer while the problem lives in the perceptual layer underneath it. Better logic applied to a distorted perceptual field produces better-reasoned distortion.

But there is a second problem Singer’s framework misses, and it is the one my story most directly illustrates. Even a perceiver whose perception is adequate — who sees clearly enough what a situation requires — is operating inside structural conditions that determine what is actually available. Perception is necessary. It is not sufficient. The conditions within which perception operates either make genuine moral action possible or foreclose it, regardless of the quality of the perception.

I could see, with reasonable clarity, what was happening in that rehearsal room. What I could not manufacture was the relational authority to change it, because relational authority is not a product of correct perception. It is a product of time, shared history, and trust — resources the structural situation had not given me and could not give me. And the organizational leadership that might have provided the sponsorship genuine cultural change requires was itself too factionalized to provide coherent support. The conditions for the moral action the situation required were structurally unavailable. No argument, however rigorous, and no perception, however clear, could have closed that gap.

What Expansion Actually Requires

Singer’s account is thin on the question of what has to happen in a person, and in a structure, for genuine moral expansion to occur. He treats expansion primarily as an intellectual achievement: you encounter the argument, you follow it, the circle widens. The developmental story — what prior conditions make a person or an institution capable of genuine moral revision — is largely absent.

But moral expansion is not primarily an intellectual event. It is a perceptual one, and it is a structural one. Genuine perceptual reorganization — the revision of the framework through which moral reality becomes legible — requires relational conditions: a context safe enough that the disruption of one’s existing framework does not collapse into defensive consolidation. It requires cognitive and emotional resources: genuine moral attention is metabolically expensive, and it is the first casualty of depletion. And it requires what we might call moral self-efficacy: the experientially grounded belief, built through practice, that one can undergo the disorientation of genuine perceptual revision without being destroyed by it.

None of these conditions are equally distributed. They can be systematically provided or systematically denied. Economic precarity depletes the cognitive bandwidth that genuine moral attention requires. Chronic stress narrows the perceptual field toward immediate threat management. The manufactured urgency of the contemporary information environment extracts attentional resources from precisely the populations that can least afford the loss.

And organizations — institutions, communities, cultures — have their own structural conditions that either support or foreclose genuine moral revision. An organization whose leadership is factionalized cannot model the coherence that cultural change requires. An organization that declines to enforce its own stated standards is not merely failing administratively. It is communicating, in the most legible possible terms, which perceptual frameworks are actually sanctioned. The people in that choir did not invent their behavior in a vacuum. They had learned, through the organization’s accumulated responses to their behavior, that it was viable. The organization had taught them what it would tolerate. And the lesson had been absorbed at the level of perceptual default, not deliberate calculation.

This is why Singer’s arguments work on some people and not others, and why the difference is not primarily about intelligence or rationality. The argument arrives at a perceptual door. Whether that door can be opened depends on developmental experiences and structural conditions that Singer’s framework does not account for. Singer describes the destination. What gets a person, or an institution, there is something the argument alone cannot supply.

The Perceptual Shortcut Singer Doesn’t Have

Here is where the analysis opens into something more interesting than a critique.

Research on awe — the emotion produced by encounters with vastness that require a revision of existing mental frameworks — consistently shows that such experiences produce increased prosociality, decreased self-referential processing, and expanded concern for others. The self becomes temporarily less central, and in that temporary decentering, the suffering of others becomes more legible. More registers as a claim. The circle expands — not through argument, but through encounter.

Conversely, the research on organizational incivility demonstrates that the same perceptual architecture can move in the opposite direction with equal force. Christine Porath and Christine Pearson’s research established that exposure to workplace incivility produces measurable narrowing of cognitive bandwidth, decreased helping behavior toward colleagues, and reduced capacity for perspective-taking — the precise perceptual capacities that moral expansion requires. The person absorbing sustained incivility is not merely uncomfortable. They are cognitively and morally depleted in ways that directly constrain what they can see and what they can extend to others. Porath’s subsequent work extended this finding in a direction that matters for any account of organizational culture: witnesses to incivility, not only its direct targets, experience degraded performance and moral disengagement. The perceptual contraction is not contained to the person most harmed. It spreads through the relational field, narrowing the moral bandwidth of everyone formed within the culture that tolerates it. Albert Bandura’s account of moral disengagement specifies the mechanisms through which this normalization occurs: euphemistic labeling that reframes harmful behavior as merely blunt or direct; diffusion of responsibility that ensures no single person owns what the culture is producing; and the gradual dehumanization of targets that makes their suffering progressively less legible as a claim requiring response. What begins as a pattern of behavior becomes, through these mechanisms, a perceptual framework — one that announces itself not as distortion but as accurate perception of how things simply are.

This is Singer’s result achieved through an entirely different mechanism. Not reasoning outward from the self but experiencing the self as permeable to something larger, which reorganizes what claims register as significant. The philosopher Iris Murdoch described something adjacent to this as “unselfing” — the disciplined practice of allowing reality to appear in its actual form rather than in the form the existing framework projects onto it. Genuine attention, for Murdoch, was a moral act before it was a cognitive one, requiring the temporary suspension of self-referential processing that awe produces involuntarily.

What this suggests is that Singer’s expanding circle and the perceptual tradition Murdoch represents are not competing accounts of moral progress. They are accounts of the same destination reached by different routes. Singer’s route runs through argument and deliberation. The perceptual route runs through encounter, attention, relational formation, and the cultivation of a self permeable enough that others’ reality can genuinely land.

The perceptual route has something Singer’s route lacks: an account of why the argument fails when it fails, and what would need to be different — in the person, and in the structure surrounding the person — for it to succeed. It is not that people who reject Singer’s conclusions are reasoning incorrectly. It is that the perceptual framework through which those conclusions would need to register has not been formed, or that the structural conditions that would make genuine moral revision possible are not present. The suffering is not landing as a claim. The relational authority to act on what is seen is not available. The organizational culture has communicated which frameworks it will actually sustain. And until those conditions change, the argument — however rigorous, however irrefutable — arrives at a door it cannot open from the reasoning side alone.

Who Bears the Cost

There is a dimension of this that Singer’s framework handles poorly, and it is the one I feel most clearly from the inside of the story I have told.

When the structural conditions for genuine moral change are absent — when relational authority has not been built, when organizational leadership is incoherent, when the institution declines to enforce its own standards — the cost of that absence does not fall on the institution. It falls on the person occupying the position where those structural failures converge. In my case, that was me. Seventy-hour weeks absorbing the friction generated by a factionalized leadership above and an enabled bullying culture below, with insufficient relational authority to change either, in an organization that had the knowledge, the power, and the stated standards to act differently and chose not to.

Singer’s framework, because it locates moral failure in incorrect reasoning, has difficulty naming what is wrong with this picture in structural terms. It can tell you that the bullying was wrong. It can tell you that the organization’s leadership should have reasoned more impartially about its obligations. What it cannot tell you is that the organization’s failure to act constituted a form of structural harm — that knowledge, power, and choice are the three conditions that produce moral culpability, and that an institution which possessed all three and declined to use them bears responsibility for what followed. The harm was not the product of bad reasoning. It was the product of structural choices that the institution was never required to examine as such.

This is the question Singer’s expanding circle ultimately cannot answer: not just whose suffering should count, but who is responsible for the conditions that determine whether suffering registers as a claim in the first place. The circle expands through reason. The conditions that make expansion possible — or foreclose it — are a matter of power, structure, and the choices institutions make about what they will sustain and what they will look away from.

After the Resignation

Singer gets us to the door. What opens it is something else entirely — and something more demanding than a better argument.

It is the slow, costly, often structurally constrained work of building the relational conditions within which genuine moral perception becomes possible. The trust that makes authority real rather than merely positional. The organizational coherence that communicates which frameworks will actually be sustained. The protected cognitive and attentional resources that allow people to attend to what the situation requires rather than managing the friction generated by conditions they did not choose. The institutional willingness to enforce its own stated standards, which is not an administrative nicety but a foundational communication about what the institution actually believes about dignity.

Singer describes a destination that reason can reach in principle. What my story illustrates is that most of moral life does not occur in principle. It occurs inside structural conditions that either make genuine moral action available or quietly, systematically, make it not. And the people who pay the price for those conditions are rarely the people who designed them.

The circle needs to expand. Singer is right about that. But the expansion requires more than better arguments arriving at closed doors. It requires the patient, structural work of building the conditions under which the doors can actually open — and the honest accounting of who is responsible when they do not.