Ephrat Livni
Quartz.com
Originally posted July 15, 2018
Here is an excerpt:
“As much as we’d love to believe bad ethics come from bad people and good ethics come from the rest of us, our everyday choices such as cutting someone off on the freeway, fudging on our taxes, taking credit for something someone else did—these are all ethical choices,” he tells Quartz. We don’t think of our individual acts as having major implications, but those are the things we can control.
In his research, he’s found that people are outraged by ethical abstractions and don’t think a lot about simple things they might be doing wrong. “When people list unethical behavior, they often cite the illegal actions of corporations or the heinous decisions of politicians–these are strong examples of a growing disregard for ethics, but what’s missing on the list are the smaller and far more numerous everyday choices we make,” Gilbert says.
He suggests using ethics as philosophical and existential guardrails that guide us as we try to climb the rungs of the moral ladder. By extending the consideration we give our actions to an ever-wider group, we succeed in being more ethical, if not perfectly moral.
The information is here.
