People make different decisions in a language they learned late. The finding is robust and has been replicated across several language pairs. Present a moral dilemma in a participant's native tongue and they respond one way; present the identical dilemma in a second language acquired in a classroom and a measurable proportion switch. They become more utilitarian, more willing to accept a harm that produces a larger benefit, and less swayed by the framing of a question as a gain or a loss. The effect is not explained by comprehension. It survives in participants who are highly fluent, and it appears even when the second language was learned to near-native proficiency. The favoured explanation is emotional distance. A native language is acquired in the body before it is acquired in the mind: it arrives attached to a parent's voice, to being comforted, to being told off. Words in it carry a physiological charge that words learned from a textbook simply do not. Asked to make a decision in the second language, the speaker is working with vocabulary that has never been shouted at them. What follows is genuinely uncomfortable, and it points in two directions at once. The optimistic reading is that a second language is an instrument of clarity. It offers a version of the self that is slightly further from panic, and there are decisions one would rather make there. The pessimistic reading is that this same distance is precisely what makes cruelty easier. A harm described in a language with no childhood attached to it is a harm at one remove. The literature on this is not reassuring, and it should not be read only as a story about better judgement. There is a third possibility, which I find more persuasive than either, and which the experimental design tends to obscure. It may be that neither self is the real one. The native speaker is not being irrational; they are responding to a question that has been loaded with everything they have ever felt. The second-language speaker is not being wise; they are answering a lighter question, one that has been stripped of its weight in transit. If that is right, then learning a language does not give you access to a truer version of yourself. It gives you a second instrument, tuned differently, and the useful skill is not choosing which one is honest but knowing which one you are currently holding.