On ethics

As some you might recall from your tertiary education, the world is all "ethical" nowadays. The professional organisations and academic institutions of the world are all enforcing this wonderful new regimen of right and wrong upon all of the world's young (and sometimes not so young) population.
It is my opinion that the impact of all of these above efforts to inculcate ethics in young adults is trivial.

Why? Well, let's start with some anecdotal evidence: Almost nobody I have known has ever taken any ethics class seriously, whether it be for young accountants, engineers or, heaven forbid, lawyers. In fact, many people found the courses laughable. And it isn't that the lecturers didn't try to make the courses relevant. There are always a bunch of modern case studies accompanying every lecture, "proving" that conflict of interest is wrong, and protecting the rights of the community is good.

But the question still remains: why is this schedule of ethics failing? I guess it comes down to a few of things:

1. Teaching a person Ethics 101 does not an ethical person make (and it is dull).
   
2. The pay-off for being ethical in modern society is currently trumped by the pay-off of being unethical.
   

I don't want to go into each point in too much detail, but some comment is in order. From the first point it is evident that we need some other method of incorporating ethics into our lives and understanding the impact of collective ethical behaviour in our work and personal lives. The second point necessitates the shifting of the goalposts – making it profitable for us to be ethical as a collective, and shunning those who are unethical at the expense of others.

Now, for an interlude. I have always been a staunch believer learning through books is always bested by learning through experience. There might not be much debate about this, but I feel it very important to mention that by making a choice in real life, just to see it backfire, is the best way for anyone to learn. You learn by the whip of life – run like a maniac around the school yard, and you are bound to stub your toe, and cry. If you make a bad decision, there are bad outcomes for you. A good decision allows you to shoot ahead and is profitable. Interlude concluded.

What does this interlude have to do with anything related to ethics? I think it has everything to do with ethics. I believe that it is the answer to most of the problems we have to do with unethical behaviour. The reason is that modern society has managed to instil many disconnects between our decisions and the outcomes of those decisions. These disconnects fool our mind into making bad decisions more often without us knowing the negative outcome until it is too late.

The impact on our personal lives is evident. Example:
Our money is mostly held electronically, which means that there is a disconnect between spending money and intuitively knowing that there is now less to spend (not to mention that humans are hopeless at comprehending the value of numbers higher than 7). This leads to a collective increase in debt, which has the unfortunate long term outcome of people living for the bank. The other side of this coin is that banks actively encourage people to go into debt, since the repayments of debt are, generally-speaking, the main income stream for banks. I am not here to debate the economic value of debt, but the example seems to show that disconnects create situations where one party can benefit at the unfair expense of others.

I am not supposing that we should all move back to having cash under our beds or that we should banish EFT's and banks from society. I am also not saying that it is possible to remove all disconnects either. But what we need is a stronger link between the decisions people/companies/politicians (politicians aren't really people, are they?) make and the negative outcomes they have on others. When a banker makes decisions which harm us, that banker needs to feel the pain from stubbing his toe and cry. The same goes for all of us in positions where we could harm others.

This concept is often called having “skin in the game”. We need this to be a more integral feature of modern society in order for us to encourage ethical behaviour. No amount of teaching and lecturing and idealistic conferences on human rights will change the status quo, unless “skin in the game” is made part of everybody's lives (including politicians and bankers). If this concept is not assimilated into society, the pay-offs for being unethical will never change. And if the pay-offs won't change, simple game theory tells us that it is unlikely that the collective behaviour will change.