A Circle for All: How Moral Exclusion Led to Planetary Hospice

“Imagine a light rising above each of us, illuminating beyond the darkness to where we can see our family, pets, our friends, then community. Everyone we care about. As the light rises we can see others who we consider worthy of our love or respect or, at the very least, deserving to live their own lives. If we are very open-hearted, we may see in the fading light, our nation and the entire human family… until, far out on the horizon, the dim light shines on some quiet blinking eyes. The other animals. Waiting... all this time.

It's heartbreaking that we humans create for ourselves a walled-off world, a dark and compartmentalized self. We work our entire lives to deny others the love and consideration they deserve just as much as ourselves, just as much as everyone else. Denying others just because they are different, or because we hold power over them, or because we feel we are somehow better than them. And when anyone tries to shine a flashlight into the darkest corners of our carefully constructed circles, we scream to turn out the light.”

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Our Circle of Compassion

For decades, I've observed a curious pattern in human compassion. Those who choose to include farmed animals in their circle of moral consideration—choosing not to eat them—almost invariably extend their compassion to other animal causes: opposing fur farming, animal testing, circus exploitation. More surprisingly (or not surprisingly) they tend to be quicker to recognize and stand up for various human rights issues as well. It's as if breaking through one artificial boundary of moral exclusion dissolves others naturally.

The inverse proves equally telling. Those who maintain strict boundaries around their moral consideration—perhaps extending only to family, community, a religion or a nation—often remain steadfastly blind not just to animal suffering, but to human suffering outside their chosen circle. A person who can't see the problem with animal farming rarely sees the problem with sweatshops. Someone unmoved by the plight of farmed animals more seldomly champions the causes of marginalized humans.

This pattern reveals something profound about moral consideration: it doesn't naturally expand outward from a center like ripples in a pond. Instead, it operates more like a light switch—once truly illuminated for one excluded group, it tends to illuminate all in our closer circles. The challenge isn't in expanding our circle of compassion. The challenge is in recognizing that the boundaries we draw within it were arbitrary all along.

We find ourselves in planetary hospice not despite our capacity for moral reasoning, but because of how we've chosen to use it. Our species' remarkable ability to draw circles of moral consideration—to decide who and what matters—has become our undoing. Not because we lack the capacity for universal compassion, but because we've treated moral exclusion as our default and inclusion as an extraordinary achievement.

The Architecture of Exclusion

The conventional view of moral development depicts an ever-expanding circle of consideration: first self, then family, then community, and perhaps eventually other species and ecosystems. We celebrate this expansion as moral progress, but this framework contains a fatal flaw: it treats selfishness and exclusion as the natural starting point.

This "expanding circle" model has enabled catastrophic moral failures. When we start from exclusion, each step toward inclusion requires justification. We ask: "Why should we care about these others?" Rather than the more pertinent question: "What possible justification exists for excluding them from our moral consideration?"

The consequences of this inverted moral logic surround us. We've built entire civilizations on the premise that most of the living world exists outside our circle of moral consideration. We don't eat animals because we've concluded it's ethical; we conclude it's ethical because we already eat them. We don't destroy ecosystems because we've determined they lack moral worth; we deny their worth because we're already destroying them.

The Self-Reinforcing Cycle

This backward moral reasoning has created a self-reinforcing cycle. Our social structures—industrial agriculture, extractive economies, hierarchical power systems—normalize violence against excluded beings. This normalization then justifies maintaining these violent structures, which further normalize exclusion and violence.

Each turn of this cycle has made it harder to see alternatives. We've built a world where moral exclusion feels not just normal but necessary. We tell ourselves we must exclude to survive, must exploit to thrive, must destroy to build. The violence in our hearts builds the violence in our social structures, which demands more violence in our hearts.

Planetary Hospice: The Final Consequence

Now we face the ultimate consequence of this moral architecture. Our inability to make full inclusion our default stance has led us to planetary hospice. We've created systems that can only function through exclusion and exploitation, and these systems are now failing catastrophically.

The collapse we witness isn't a technical failure but a moral one. We didn't lack the capacity to live differently; we lacked the moral framework that would have made different choices possible. By starting from exclusion rather than inclusion, we made our current predicament inevitable.

The Doomee Response: Choosing Differently at the End

The Doomee perspective offers a radical alternative, even as we face collapse. Instead of responding to crisis by further constricting our circle of moral consideration—a common human response to scarcity—we choose to finally make full inclusion our default.

This isn't about expanding our circle of compassion. It's about recognizing that the circle always included everyone—every sentient being, every living system—and that our moral failure lay in drawing boundaries where none naturally existed.

In planetary hospice, we have one final opportunity to demonstrate what we could have been. We can:

• Acknowledge that suffering capacity, not human-defined utility, determines moral status

• Recognize that creating hierarchies of worth based on species membership was always arbitrary

• Accept that our systems of moral exclusion led us here

• Choose to live our remaining time with full awareness of our interconnection with all life

Living Differently Now

This shift in moral framework doesn't change our trajectory toward collapse, but it transforms how we live into it. When we make full inclusion our default:

• Every act of care takes on deeper meaning

• Small choices become expressions of universal compassion

• We find dignity in acknowledging our shared fate with all beings

• We can face collapse without furthering the moral failures that led us here

The Final Lesson

Perhaps this is humanity's last opportunity to learn what we should have known from the start: that moral exclusion was always a choice, not a necessity. That our capacity for universal compassion was always available to us. That the circle of moral consideration never needed to expand because it was always complete—we simply had to stop drawing lines through it.

In planetary hospice, we can finally acknowledge this truth. Though it comes too late to change our collective fate, it arrives just in time to transform how we face it. We can choose to die differently than we lived: with full awareness of our belonging to the circle of all.

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Last chance. Be kind. Do good. And don't be an asshole on the way out.