"Immoral is choosing not to act when you hold in your hands the power to create perfection"
About this Quote
Miller frames morality not as avoiding harm alone but as refusing the comfort of inaction when transformative good is within reach. The target is omission: the quiet, socially acceptable decision to do nothing even when one has the capacity to do a great deal. Philosophically it leans toward consequentialism, the view that outcomes matter, and echoes the duty-to-rescue intuition captured by Peter Singer’s drowning child example. If you can save a life with little cost, failing to do so is wrong; scale that up to institutions and technologies and the moral weight grows heavier.
The phrase power to create perfection is deliberately extreme. It dramatizes situations in which people, organizations, or systems possess near-unprecedented capacities to improve human life: public health tools, media platforms, data, wealth, or political authority. Here the admonition fits Mark Crispin Miller’s field. As a scholar of media and propaganda, he has long criticized the ways gatekeepers with vast influence default to self-interest, risk aversion, or manufactured consent, thereby squandering chances to strengthen democratic deliberation. When you can clarify, reveal, or mobilize at scale yet choose silence or spin, the failure is not neutral; it is culpable.
Yet the word perfection carries a warning. Pursuing perfection can justify coercion if one presumes a single, incontestable vision of the good. The twentieth century is full of utopian projects that turned violent in their certainty. Miller’s own work on propaganda shows how claims to perfection can mask domination. A wiser reading treats perfection not as a final state but as a horizon: dramatically better outcomes that are feasible and ethically constrained.
The moral upshot is twofold. First, power implies obligation, not merely permission. Second, humility about ends must guide the use of that power. Avoiding harm is not enough when you can reasonably prevent suffering or expand freedom; action, transparently justified and accountable, is the ethical minimum.
The phrase power to create perfection is deliberately extreme. It dramatizes situations in which people, organizations, or systems possess near-unprecedented capacities to improve human life: public health tools, media platforms, data, wealth, or political authority. Here the admonition fits Mark Crispin Miller’s field. As a scholar of media and propaganda, he has long criticized the ways gatekeepers with vast influence default to self-interest, risk aversion, or manufactured consent, thereby squandering chances to strengthen democratic deliberation. When you can clarify, reveal, or mobilize at scale yet choose silence or spin, the failure is not neutral; it is culpable.
Yet the word perfection carries a warning. Pursuing perfection can justify coercion if one presumes a single, incontestable vision of the good. The twentieth century is full of utopian projects that turned violent in their certainty. Miller’s own work on propaganda shows how claims to perfection can mask domination. A wiser reading treats perfection not as a final state but as a horizon: dramatically better outcomes that are feasible and ethically constrained.
The moral upshot is twofold. First, power implies obligation, not merely permission. Second, humility about ends must guide the use of that power. Avoiding harm is not enough when you can reasonably prevent suffering or expand freedom; action, transparently justified and accountable, is the ethical minimum.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|
More Quotes by Mark
Add to List
