subject: What Happened To Good Old Ethics? [print this page] The other day I had a conversation with a most urbane and eloquent risk management consultant who attributed the difficulties we find ourselves in today to the fact that we are living in a 'post-moral' society. Looking around us, at our media, at our governments, at our financial institutions, his conclusion doesn't seem so far off. This begs the question: what to do?
Our knee jerk reaction seems to be to attempt to reconstruct the moral barriers that kept this sort of thing in check in the past. We go about this by introducing new laws, adding ethics to the curriculum in business schools, and reintroducing religious studies in the publicly funded school systems. Is this really the right path for us to take?
There are several reasons why I believe this approach will not only the fail to address the problem, it will actually exacerbate it.
Firstly, the underlying assumption of this approach is that people do bad beings more out of ignorance than from conscious choice. (A similar line of reasoning has cigarette companies place detailed health warnings on cigarette boxes). The people who perpetuated the biggest frauds in history, the Wall Street investment bankers, are not common thugs, raised by crack whores in abject poverty and depravity. They are the sons and daughters of the establishment, sent to the best schools, and provided every possible advantage in life. Their perfidy is a reflection of their character not their conditioning.
Secondly, the best criminals are expert at impression and perception management. Just like Alex, the young protagonist in "A Clockwork Orange", who despite being a remorseless psychopath quickly becomes the prize pupil in the prisons religious studies program; all moral education does for such people is give them a new script to use when they wish to con the morally righteous.
Examples of this abound. Real estate agents give speeches on the importance of integrity. Investment advisers rhapsodize about placing the interests of their clients first; and politicians wax poetic about their driving need to give back out of gratitude for the success they've enjoyed thus far in their lives.
These days you'll meet nice people everywhere you go, but how many of these would you describe as being genuinely kind. So, in closing I would say that we do not live in a 'post moral' society at all! Ours is a society literally obsessed with morality; so much so that it never occurs to many of us to practice what we preach.
