My first co-founder was a brilliant engineer. One day I borrowed his car (a fancy late model sports car) for an errand because mine was blocked in. But the speedometer didn't work which made for some strange driving. When I asked him about it, he said, "Oh I disconnected it to improve it's resale value."
We didn't remain together much longer.
To this day, the value of a relationship with another businessperson = sum(assets) * EthicsFactor. EthicsFactor is 1 or 0. There is no in-between.
Nice post, Jacques. It sure feels nice to comment in one your threads again.
That's a nice formula, but how do you quantify ethics? You've committed the Wittgensteinian sin of attempting to quantify something without first defining it. You'd have a difficult time just qualifying ethical behavior with any substantive agreement, based on this thread.
It also sounds like you'd need to be inconsistent in your value judgement or accept being lonely with your ideology. You cut off someone you trusted enough to be a cofounder, who you considered brilliant, because he disconnected the speedometer? It doesn't sound like a pattern of behavior here so...what do you do if your closest friend shoplifts but is otherwise okay? What if your significant other doesn't do the dishes? Do you ask people why they do things you consider reprehensible, or give them a chance to explain themselves and understand the chain of events that led to their decisions? I'm assuming not if you really do mean "binary"...
Think of the most minor unethical thing you can. Would you cut ties with your parents because they did that? If not, your ethical system is not actually binary. The real world is messy, and your philosophy frankly doesn't seem to work.
I think your point is well taken, but, on the other hand, I think that a willingness to screw other people over really is a pretty major red flag for business partnerships.
I'm trying - but for the life of me I can't figure out how a disconnected speedometer would improve the resale value of the car. Did you mean he disconnected the odometer - or is there something I'm not picking up on here?
So naive it's funny. He could have lied ("Oh, a wire came loose, but I have a service appointment booked later this week") and you would have been none the wiser. So does him telling you the truth raise or lower his EthicsFactor?
All a binary EthicsFactor does is reward pure goodness (doesn't exist) or pure evil (hopefully doesn't exist). That's also why video games with Karma meters don't work. If you can't achieve an EthicsFactor of 1 (spoiler alert: you can't), then you might as well go for 0 and try and benefit from that as much as possible. So your binary EthicsFactor thinking incentivises people towards bad behaviour. Fail.
Luckily, most people and the law is more nuanced than that.
I love the formula you pose for thinking about this, and it's so true. Ethical behavior is binary, and a lack of ethical behavior isn't compartmentalized into one small area.
My moral system is so incredibly far away from viewing ethical behavior as binary that I can not relate to how someone would think that way. How do you place the line, where an instance of behavior you don't agree with makes you view someone as not ethical?
When you come from a place of privilege, it's easy to think human behavior is binary.
For example, I would never steal a car! I can afford one, and to be quite honest, I don't need one.
If I was deep into poverty, and needed a car for a job or to be able to provide some function to my family, that temptation might be there. It might be so great that it distorts the ethics of the person so much so they don't see it as unethical.
Instead of stealing a car, they're borrowing it or the other person can just get another one. They would legitimately not see wrong because they feel like they have been wronged when they do not have the ability to get a car.
TL;DR: Ethics are not binary. To even suggest that undermines the entirety of the philosophy dedicated to studying it.
Except you're still acting immorally by forcing your belief system onto others who don't share that belief system. It doesn't matter if you don't believe in property; the person who owned that car does.
When you grow up in an ivory tower so you never have to make hard choices, you have no frame of reference as to the chain of decisions that lets someone commit an "immoral" act.
I put it in quotes, because in the real world morality is subjective, despite what the privileged hackers in this thread will tell you with formulas.
It's easy to make ethics binary when you just stop at what is legal and isn't. If you're the kind to jay walk because you know there's no car so it doesn't matter your ethics are probably a lot more nuanced though.
We didn't remain together much longer.
To this day, the value of a relationship with another businessperson = sum(assets) * EthicsFactor. EthicsFactor is 1 or 0. There is no in-between.
Nice post, Jacques. It sure feels nice to comment in one your threads again.