The Elusive Nature of Ethics

All ethical decisions are clouded in a haze of varying interpretations, mixed motivations, and chance outcomes.

I’m often confronted with the vagueness of ethical decisions. When does being polite or perceptive in conversation approach manipulation? Much of our conversation is designed to entertain and packaged for palatability. Does couching a liberal-leaning perspective in soft language when speaking to an ardent conservative count as manipulation? Does being polite to your coworkers, and meeting them where they are, mean you’re playing office politics? Is employing tact in conversation just a euphemism for deception? If not, why not?

Working in retail gave me a quality example of this dilemma: I remember a subtle, scowling eye staring at me from the corner of the room as I used to go through the break room and say “hello” to everyone individually. That scowling individual had surely labeled me a phony, popularity seeker. My thoughts at that time were that I was guaranteed to interact with each of my coworkers at some point during my shift, so why not initiate that as seamlessly and politely as I can, by greeting them at first sight. And I genuinely liked the people I worked with, many of them became longtime friends. But my coworkers also liked me for these types of behaviors — they quickly after my arrival voted me employee of the month — and I liked that they liked me. Was purposely employing social adeptness manipulative? Where is the line between friendliness and politicking?

In every sphere of life, professional and personal, we encounter situations where we want something from someone. Whether we want them to become a client or a romantic partner, we act to achieve that outcome. From the way we dress to what we say and don’t say, and the way we carry ourselves, we are constantly doing something — and that “something,” whether it be called appealing to or persuading or manipulating, is typically given a name on purely arbitrary grounds.

And what of those ethical considerations that seem to be decided not by the action but by the consequences? I can recall a time from my younger years when I drank to the point of blacking out. When I blacked out, my friend drove me home in my truck and videotaped me as I stumbled, fell, and cursed his name (for not helping me) as I tried to exit the vehicle. I had no memory of what I saw in that recording the next day. I had, during that period captured in the video, lost all real capacity to make decisions.

It’s not for a lack of alcohol, or an abundance of prudence, that I didn’t get behind the wheel of a car. I’m sure, in a complete lapse of judgment, I would’ve more likely than not functioned on autopilot, done what I was accustomed to doing, and driven myself home — as would most people. Luckily, my friend intervened. How am I less guilty of manslaughter than the person who, because of the same amount of alcohol but with no friend to care for them, drove themselves and accidentally killed someone?

I was once acquaintances with a woman who, at 20 years old and in the throes of a painful breakup, went to a bar with her coworkers and was given copious amounts of alcohol. Afterwards, she stumbled to her car, drove the wrong way up the Sawgrass expressway and killed two young women — one of them was celebrating her 21st birthday. Surely the mind that can’t distinguish between on-ramps and off-ramps is incapable of considering the risks of driving. And it’s rare to find a person who never once drank while underage. Perhaps Kayla’s chief crime, then, was keeping subpar company. A few hours before the accident she tweeted out “2 Drunk 2 Care,” an obvious reference to the breakup and not the deaths which would later occur, but the words were splashed across headlines everywhere nonetheless, and so Kayla will, as part of her 24-year prison sentence, sleep in a jail cell tonight as you and I sleep at home.

I think of a friend of mine who got into an argument at a bar, threw a single punch, and killed a man. I’ve seen someone beat a person until they could only lie on the floor, and then they kicked that person in the face, but that victim recovered, and so they’re less guilty than my friend who threw a single punch. Many people shoot guns in the air when given cause for celebration. Sometimes the bullet lands in an unvisited field, and other times it becomes lodged in the torso of a child. It’s odd how degrees of guilt can be determined by the vicissitudes of chance.

Then, there is the ineluctable specter of motivated reasoning. How many have sought power with the aim of beneficence? How many parents justified all sorts of machinations and ambitious pursuits in order to better provide for their children? How many have let love lead them by the nose to disadvantage someone else as a means to advantaging their loved one? Surely I would strip a scholarship from another person’s child for my own. Certainly I would take the last rose for my lover, without a second thought as to whether or not there should be one left for yours.

I think of charitable acts I’ve performed, and how I’ve purposely aimed to not tell anyone about them. Would the gratifying praise have undone the intended selflessness of the act? If I had reaped this gratification afterwards, would I ever be able to separate it from my motivation? Was my not telling people a way of convincing myself I’m better than I am — yet another route to self-gratification? When the path to a valued reward and the path of a selfless act align, must the one necessarily override the other?

And what of that fulfilled feeling charitable acts leave me with? What of that priceless happiness I carried with me all day after a man experiencing homelessness gave me his last possession, a rosary, to thank me for feeding him? Truly, I’ve never done anything selfless or altruistic that didn’t make me feel good. I don’t think anyone can: as social creatures, performing positive actions for one another is a rewarding experience. How, then, can I ever be selfless? I eat pizza because it feels good; I feed the hungry because it feels good. Why should the performance of one of these acts cause me to be viewed as more admirable than the other?

One can imagine a sort of hollowness hierarchy to ostensibly ethical acts. At the lowest rung, one only does good for transactional self-benefit. For example, offering to help someone with something because you know they’ll offer to pay you. One rung up, we might have the less direct reward of being viewed as superior. Here we would find our performative acts of kindness. Beyond this, we’d have doing good for mutual reward, a shared pact that ensures we can all reap the reward of a just and kind society. Once more, our own selfishness is a primary motivation for this apparent altruism. At the pinnacle of selfish selflessness, we would find those acts with no exogenous reward, but that bring us that pleasant feeling — that swell of pride and happiness — that accompanies having done right by those around us. Every level of this ethical hierarchy is marked by a benefit to oneself.

Selflessness is merely a more effective selfishness. At their roots all ethical acts are rewarding. These things, ethics and morality, are, if not illusive, then quite elusive.