The Monkey We Leave Out

Almost everyone knows the three wise monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Far fewer know that a fourth is sometimes added. Shizaru, usually shown covering his groin or crossing his arms, is said to represent the maxim do no evil. He is missing from the proverb, from the souvenirs, even from the emoji keyboard, which offers only three monkeys. Why do we keep the first three and quietly drop the one who completes the set?

There is an interesting complication to this familiar story. The famous seventeenth-century carving at the Tōshō-gū shrine in Nikkō actually depicts three monkeys, not four. Yet an older Japanese textual tradition contains a reference to a fourth monkey, and its meaning is considerably more intriguing. A manuscript copied in 1597 records the idea that an ordinary person keeps three monkeys, while a person following the Way should keep four. The fourth is described as not-thinking.

Not doing evil, then, is only one interpretation of the missing monkey. Not thinking is another.

Perhaps this is where the question becomes more interesting. Why have we become so attached to the three things we should not see, hear or say, while paying so little attention to the fourth question: what happens inside our own minds when we encounter something we would rather not confront?

I suspect the answer has something to do with the uncomfortable relationship between morality and self-awareness. The first three monkeys can be understood as instructions for how to withdraw from the world. The fourth, whichever interpretation we give him, forces us to examine what withdrawal actually achieves.

A discipline, then an alibi

The famous carving at Tōshō-gū is part of a series of eight panels depicting monkeys at different stages of life. The three familiar figures are known as Mizaru, Kikazaru and Iwazaru. Their names play on the Japanese word saru, meaning monkey, and the negative ending -zaru. The traditional interpretation concerns moral restraint and the protection of the young from improper sights, sounds and speech.

There is, however, an interesting difference between the original Japanese expression and the English version that eventually became familiar across the world. The Japanese formula does not explicitly contain the word evil. It is essentially a sequence of three negatives: do not see, do not hear, do not speak. The word evil became part of the familiar English rendering during the nineteenth century.

This seemingly small translation carries an important consequence. By giving the three monkeys a specific object, we have made the proverb sound like a complete moral philosophy. Yet without that object, the instruction is far more ambiguous. Do not see what? Do not hear what? Do not speak about what?

Perhaps this ambiguity is precisely where the proverb becomes dangerous.

There is a considerable difference between refusing to participate in cruelty and refusing to acknowledge that cruelty exists. The first is a moral discipline; the second is a convenient form of ignorance. Someone who refuses to spread malicious gossip is practising restraint. Someone who refuses to acknowledge abuse because acknowledging it would require them to take a position is practising avoidance.

The physical gesture is identical. The morality is entirely different.

Somewhere in the journey from an Eastern moral teaching to a familiar Western expression, the three monkeys acquired an additional interpretation. Today, we frequently use them to describe the colleague who pretends not to notice wrongdoing, the neighbour who would rather not know, or the institution that closes ranks when its own misconduct becomes inconvenient.

A discipline became an alibi.

And notice where the evil sits in this modern interpretation: always out there, in someone else, something to be looked past. We have taken a teaching that might have encouraged restraint and turned it into a particularly useful defence against responsibility.

The problem is not that we misunderstand evil. It is that we have become remarkably creative in deciding when it is someone else’s problem.

Looking away is easy; looking in is not

The first three monkeys concern our relationship with what enters us from the outside world. They concern what we allow ourselves to see, hear and say. Each instruction can be followed while maintaining a perfectly flattering image of ourselves.

Covering your eyes feels like purity. Holding your tongue feels like discretion. Turning away from someone else’s wrongdoing can even be mistaken for maturity, tolerance or minding one’s own business.

There is something psychologically attractive about this kind of morality. It allows us to feel that we are good because we have avoided the things that might make us appear bad. We can maintain our innocence by maintaining our distance.

But innocence and goodness are not the same thing.

Innocence can mean that we have not participated in wrongdoing. Goodness requires something more: an awareness of what is wrong, an understanding of our capacity to contribute to it, and a conscious decision about how we will behave.

A person who has never encountered temptation might be innocent, but we cannot know whether they are virtuous. Virtue is not demonstrated by the absence of opportunity. It is demonstrated by the decisions we make when an opportunity presents itself.

This is one of the oldest problems in moral philosophy. The Gospels speak of the speck in a brother’s eye and the plank in one’s own. Socrates insisted that the unexamined life was not worth living, directing his relentless questioning towards people’s certainty about themselves. Adam Smith recognised that we judge our own conduct through a flattering lens and need something like an imagined impartial spectator to correct it.

Nietzsche expressed the conflict between memory and pride with particular cruelty: memory says, “I did that,” while pride insists, “I could not have done that.” Eventually, memory gives way.

Sartre would describe much of this as bad faith: the attempt to deceive ourselves about our freedom and responsibility by pretending that circumstances, roles or expectations have made our decisions for us.

Different thinkers, different centuries, but a remarkably similar observation: human beings are frequently better at identifying moral failures in others than acknowledging them in themselves.

Perhaps this is because recognising someone else’s wrongdoing costs us very little. Recognising our own threatens the story we have spent our entire lives constructing about who we are.

We do not simply want to be good. We want to believe that we already are.

And those are two very different desires.

The problem of the witness

There is a particularly uncomfortable question that the three monkeys invite us to consider: at what point does observing wrongdoing become a form of participation in it?

Imagine witnessing someone being humiliated, exploited or treated unjustly. You recognise what is happening. You understand that it is wrong. Yet you say nothing, do nothing and eventually carry on with your day.

You have not committed the original offence. You have not spoken the cruel words or delivered the unjust punishment. In the narrowest possible interpretation, your hands are clean.

But are they?

There is a distinction between causing harm and allowing harm to continue when you have a reasonable opportunity to challenge it. These are not identical moral acts, but neither are they entirely unrelated.

The uncomfortable reality is that our actions are not the only things for which we can bear responsibility. Sometimes our inaction has consequences just as real as our actions.

This is where the idea of moral neutrality begins to fall apart.

We often imagine that there are three possible positions in the face of wrongdoing: to participate in it, to oppose it, or to remain neutral. But neutrality is rarely as passive as we would like to believe. By refusing to intervene, we may leave the existing arrangement untouched. We may allow the person with power to retain it, the injustice to continue, and the victim to remain alone.

In these situations, doing nothing is not necessarily doing nothing.

Of course, this does not mean that every failure to intervene is immoral. People have different capacities, different levels of power and different risks to consider. Someone who cannot safely confront an abuser is not morally equivalent to someone who protects that abuser for personal advantage. Responsibility must account for what a person could reasonably have done.

But there is a difference between being unable to act and deciding that the situation is not worth acting upon.

The more uncomfortable question is not whether we could have prevented every wrong in the world. We could not. It is whether we have become accustomed to treating our own convenience as a sufficient reason to ignore the wrongs we could have challenged.

The witness occupies a peculiar moral position. They are not necessarily guilty of the original wrongdoing, but they can no longer claim complete ignorance of it.

Knowledge changes the nature of our responsibility.

Before we know, we may be innocent. After we know, we must decide what to do with that knowledge.

The fourth monkey and the danger of not thinking

This brings us back to the strange historical fourth monkey.

The idea of not-thinking is, in some ways, more profound than the familiar instruction to do no evil. It moves the discussion away from our outward behaviour and towards the invisible process by which we justify that behaviour.

It also raises a difficult philosophical distinction.

There are different kinds of not-thinking. There is the quietness of a mind that has learned to step away from vanity, prejudice and endless judgement. There is also the emptiness of a mind that refuses to examine what it encounters.

These may look similar from the outside, but they are morally opposed.

One is an escape from the ego. The other is an escape from responsibility.

We should not confuse freedom from unnecessary judgement with freedom from moral judgement itself. A person who is not constantly judging others may be displaying wisdom. A person who refuses to judge whether an obvious injustice is wrong may simply be avoiding an inconvenient conclusion.

Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the banality of evil are relevant here. Her controversial observation was not that evil is insignificant, but that extraordinary wrongdoing can be carried out through ordinary people who abandon independent moral judgement, retreating into routines, roles and accepted explanations.

The danger is not always a person who consciously embraces evil. Sometimes it is a person who stops asking whether what they are doing is right.

They follow instructions. They obey expectations. They protect their position. They tell themselves that someone else is responsible.

Eventually, the absence of thought becomes the absence of resistance.

This is particularly troubling because we tend to associate thoughtlessness with stupidity. But intelligent people are perfectly capable of thinking themselves into moral blindness. In fact, intelligence can make self-deception more sophisticated. We can construct elaborate explanations for why our behaviour was justified, why our silence was necessary, why the harm was unavoidable and why our responsibility ends precisely where it becomes inconvenient.

We do not always lack the capacity to recognise wrongdoing. Sometimes we use that capacity to explain it away.

Perhaps the hardest form of moral discipline is not simply refusing to think evil thoughts, but refusing to let our thinking become a defence mechanism against uncomfortable truths.

Why the three undermine the fourth

The first three monkeys do not necessarily sit alongside the fourth as neutral companions. When interpreted carelessly, they can work directly against it.

To avoid doing evil, we must be capable of recognising it. To recognise it, we must be willing to encounter it. We must sometimes look at things that disturb us, listen to things that challenge our beliefs, and speak about things that other people would prefer remained unspoken.

A person who has trained themselves not to notice cruelty, dishonesty or injustice has not necessarily become more innocent. They may simply have become less equipped to recognise when they are participating in it.

Moral perception is not entirely selective. If we continually train ourselves to look away whenever something threatens our comfort, we risk carrying that same habit into our own behaviour.

We become accustomed to not seeing.

And eventually, there may be very little difference between failing to recognise wrongdoing in someone else and failing to recognise it in ourselves.

The same is true of silence.

Speaking no evil is an admirable principle when it means refusing to lie, humiliate, manipulate or spread cruelty. But silence can also become an accomplice. There are circumstances in which the most harmful thing a person can say is nothing at all.

Consider the difference between a person who remains silent to avoid spreading hatred and a person who remains silent to protect someone who deserves criticism. One is exercising restraint; the other is exercising self-interest.

The question is not whether we speak or remain silent. It is why.

Sometimes the most moral thing we can do is refuse to speak. Sometimes it is to say precisely the thing that everyone else is avoiding.

A lie can be spoken through the mouth, but it can also be communicated through a closed one.

Likewise, seeing no evil can mean refusing to seek out cruelty for entertainment, or it can mean refusing to acknowledge the cruelty taking place in front of us. Hearing no evil can mean rejecting malicious gossip, or refusing to listen when someone tries to tell us that we have caused them harm.

The gestures themselves have no inherent moral value. Their value depends entirely on the intentions and consequences behind them.

And perhaps that is the most dangerous aspect of the proverb: it offers us a set of instructions that can be used to cultivate goodness or manufacture ignorance, depending on what we choose to mean by them.

The manufacture of innocence

I suspect that much of our relationship with morality is shaped by a desire that we rarely admit: the desire to remain innocent.

Not necessarily innocent in the legal sense, but innocent in our own eyes. We want to feel that our hands are clean, our intentions are good and our actions are defensible.

We prefer explanations that preserve this image.

When we hurt someone, we remember the circumstances rather than the consequences. When we behave selfishly, we remember what we were going through. When we fail to help, we remember why helping would have been difficult.

We become the sympathetic narrator of our own lives.

Other people, meanwhile, are judged by their actions. Ours are judged by our intentions.

There is something profoundly unfair about this arrangement, particularly because we demand from others the very accountability we struggle to offer ourselves.

Perhaps the desire for innocence is itself an obstacle to goodness. If our primary concern is protecting our image of ourselves, then admitting a mistake becomes a threat rather than an opportunity. Apologising becomes humiliating. Changing our behaviour becomes an admission that we were wrong to begin with.

We begin defending the person we believe ourselves to be instead of examining the person we actually are.

The fourth monkey, whether understood as do no evil or not-thinking, confronts this problem. It does not allow us to treat morality as a performance for an audience. It turns the question inward, towards the private place where our excuses are formed and our intentions are concealed, sometimes even from ourselves.

It asks something far more difficult than whether we have behaved well.

It asks whether we have been honest about the reasons we behaved as we did.

The order worth reversing

If I were to rewrite the proverb, I would reverse its logic.

First, look at evil clearly, particularly when it is inconvenient to do so. Do not confuse awareness with participation or witnessing with approval.

Second, listen when someone tells you something uncomfortable, especially when it concerns you. The criticism that threatens your self-image may be precisely the criticism you most need to consider.

Third, think. Examine your motives, challenge your assumptions and question the explanations that make your behaviour seem automatically justifiable. Do not allow the comfort of certainty to replace the difficulty of judgement.

Fourth, speak honestly. Refuse to spread cruelty, but do not use restraint as an excuse to suppress the truth. Be prepared to say “I was wrong” with the same willingness that you expose someone else’s mistake.

And finally, do no evil.

This last instruction should not be understood as a promise that we can become morally perfect. We cannot. We are inconsistent creatures, capable of kindness and cruelty, compassion and selfishness, often within the same afternoon.

Perhaps the point is not to achieve a state in which we are incapable of doing wrong. Perhaps the point is to become the kind of person who can recognise wrongdoing, including their own, without immediately reaching for an excuse.

There is a difference between a person who has never done evil and a person who has done wrong, acknowledged it, understood it and made a genuine effort not to repeat it. The second person may possess a deeper understanding of morality than the first.

Goodness is not the absence of a dark side. It is the willingness to confront it.

The fourth monkey is therefore not simply another commandment to be placed alongside the original three. It is a challenge to the entire way we understand them.

The three can teach us restraint, but restraint without judgement becomes avoidance. Silence without honesty becomes complicity. Ignorance without curiosity becomes a refuge for wrongdoing.

We should not aspire to be people who see no evil, hear no evil or speak no evil. We should aspire to be people who can face all three without becoming part of what they represent.

Perhaps the reason we keep looking for a fourth monkey is that the first three have never been enough.

And perhaps the real monkey we leave out is the one that reminds us that the greatest obstacle to becoming good is not always the evil we encounter in the world.

Sometimes, it is the person we are desperately trying not to see when we look in the mirror.