Posthumanism’s Revolt Against Responsibility

Nolen Gertz

Commonweal Magazine

Originally published 31 Oct 23

Here is an excerpt:

A major problem with this view—one Kirsch neglects—is that it conflates the destructiveness of particular humans with the destructiveness of humanity in general. Acknowledging that climate change is driven by human activity should not prevent us from identifying precisely which humans and activities are to blame. Plenty of people are concerned about climate change and have altered their behavior by, for example, using public transportation, recycling, or being more conscious about what they buy. Yet this individual behavior change is not sufficient because climate change is driven by the large-scale behavior of corporations and governments.

In other words, it is somewhat misleading to say we have entered the “Anthropocene” because anthropos is not as a whole to blame for climate change. Rather, in order to place the blame where it truly belongs, it would be more appropriate—as Jason W. Moore, Donna J. Haraway, and others have argued—to say we have entered the “Capitalocene.” Blaming humanity in general for climate change excuses those particular individuals and groups actually responsible. To put it another way, to see everyone as responsible is to see no one as responsible. Anthropocene antihumanism is thus a public-relations victory for the corporations and governments destroying the planet. They can maintain business as usual on the pretense that human nature itself is to blame for climate change and that there is little or nothing corporations or governments can or should do to stop it, since, after all, they’re only human.

Kirsch does not address these straightforward criticisms of Anthropocene antihumanism. This throws into doubt his claim that he is cataloguing their views to judge whether they are convincing and to explore their likely impact. Kirsch does briefly bring up the activist Greta Thunberg as a potential opponent of the nihilistic antihumanists, but he doesn’t consider her challenge in depth. 

The info is here.

Here is my summary:

Anthropocene antihumanism is a pessimistic view that sees humanity as a destructive force on the planet. It argues that humans have caused climate change, mass extinctions, and other environmental problems, and that we are ultimately incapable of living in harmony with nature. Some Anthropocene antihumanists believe that humanity should go extinct, while others believe that we should radically change our way of life in order to avoid destroying ourselves and the planet.

Some bullets

• Posthumanism is a broad philosophical movement that challenges the traditional view of what it means to be human.
• Anthropocene antihumanism and transhumanism are two strands of posthumanism that share a common theme of revolt against responsibility.
• Anthropocene antihumanists believe that humanity is so destructive that it is beyond redemption, and that we should therefore either go extinct or give up our responsibility to manage the planet.
• Transhumanists believe that we can transcend our human limitations and create a new, posthuman species that is not bound by the same moral and ethical constraints as humans.
• Kirsch argues that this revolt against responsibility is a dangerous trend, and that we should instead work to create a more sustainable and just future for all.

Rebuilding the Economy Around Good Jobs

Zeynep Ton
Harvard Business Review
Originally posted 22 May 20

One thing we can predict: Customers who are struggling economically will be looking more than ever for good value. This will give the companies that start building a good jobs system a competitive advantage over those that don’t. After the financial crisis of 2008, Mercadona — Spain’s largest grocery chain and a model good jobs company — reduced prices for its hard-pressed customers by 10% while remaining profitable and gaining significant market share. Hard work and input from empowered front lines had a lot to do with it.

The pandemic is likely to accelerate the ongoing shakeup of U.S. retailing. The United States has 24.5 square feet of retail space per person versus 16.4 square feet in Canada and 4.5 square feet in Europe. This is almost certainly too much and the mediocre — the ones that don’t make their customers want to keep coming back — will not survive.

The pandemic is likely to speed up the adoption of new technologies. Although typically seen as a way to reduce headcount, adopting, scaling, and leveraging new technologies require a capable and motivated (even if smaller) workforce.

There is an alternative: A good jobs system that has already proven successful. Long before the pandemic, there were successful companies — including Costco and QuikTrip — that knew their frontline workers were essential personnel and treated and paid them as such. Even in very competitive, low-cost retail sectors, these companies adopted a good jobs system and used it to win.

There’s a strong financial case for good jobs. Offering good jobs lowers costs by reducing employee turnover, operational mistakes, and wasted time. It improves service, which increases sales both in the short term and — through customer loyalty — in the long term.

The info is here.

The Ethics of 'Biohacking' and Digital Health Data

Sy Mukherjee
Fortune.com
Originally posted June 6, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Should personal health data ownership be a human right? Do digital health program participants deserve a cut of the profits from the information they provide to genomics companies? How do we get consumers to actually care about the privacy and ethics implications of this new digital health age? Can technology help (and, more importantly, should it have a responsibility to) bridge the persistent gap in representation for women in clinical trials? And how do you design a fair system of data distribution in an age of a la carte genomic editing, leveraged by large corporations, and seemingly ubiquitous data mining from consumers?

Ok, so we didn’t exactly come to definitive conclusions about all that in our limited time. But I look forward to sharing some of our panelists’ insights in the coming days. And I’ll note that, while some of the conversation may have sounded like dystopic cynicism, there was a general consensus that collective regulatory changes, new business models, and a culture of concern for data privacy could help realize the potential of digital health while mitigating its potential problems.

The information and interview are here.

AI thinks like a corporation—and that’s worrying

Jonnie Penn
The Economist
Originally posted November 26, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Perhaps as a result of this misguided impression, public debates continue today about what value, if any, the social sciences could bring to artificial-intelligence research. In Simon’s view, AI itself was born in social science.

David Runciman, a political scientist at the University of Cambridge, has argued that to understand AI, we must first understand how it operates within the capitalist system in which it is embedded. “Corporations are another form of artificial thinking-machine in that they are designed to be capable of taking decisions for themselves,” he explains.

“Many of the fears that people now have about the coming age of intelligent robots are the same ones they have had about corporations for hundreds of years,” says Mr Runciman. The worry is, these are systems we “never really learned how to control.”

After the 2010 BP oil spill, for example, which killed 11 people and devastated the Gulf of Mexico, no one went to jail. The threat that Mr Runciman cautions against is that AI techniques, like playbooks for escaping corporate liability, will be used with impunity.

Today, pioneering researchers such as Julia Angwin, Virginia Eubanks and Cathy O’Neil reveal how various algorithmic systems calcify oppression, erode human dignity and undermine basic democratic mechanisms like accountability when engineered irresponsibly. Harm need not be deliberate; biased data-sets used to train predictive models also wreak havoc. It may be, given the costly labour required to identify and address these harms, that something akin to “ethics as a service” will emerge as a new cottage industry. Ms O’Neil, for example, now runs her own service that audits algorithms.

The info is here.

James Gunn's Firing Is What Happens When We Outsource Morality to Capitalism

Anhar Karim
Forbes.com
Originally posted September 16, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

A study last year from Cone Communications found that 87% of consumers said they’d purchase a company’s product if said company showed that they cared about issues consumers cared about. On the flip side of that, 75% of consumers said they would not buy from a company which showed they did not care. If business executives and CEOs are following along, as they surely are, the lesson is this: If a company wants to stay on top in the modern age, and if they want to maximize their profits, then they need to beat their competitors not only with superior products but also with demonstrated, superior moral behavior.

This, on its face, does not appear horrible. Indeed, this new development has led to a lot of undeniable good. It’s this idea that gave the #MeToo movement its bite and toppled industry giants such as Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey and Les Moonves. It’s this strategy that’s led Warner Brothers to mandate an inclusion rider, Sony to diversify their comic titles, and Marvel to get their heroes to visit children in hospitals.

So how could any of this be negative?

Well, consider the other side of these attempts at corporate responsibility, the efforts that look good but help no one. What am I talking about? Consider that we recently had a major movie with a song celebrating difference and being true to yourself. That sounds good. However, the plot of the film is actually about exploiting minorities for profit. So it falls flat. Or consider that we had a woman cast in a Marvel franchise playing a role normally reserved for a man. Sounds progressive, right? Until we realize that that is also an example of a white actor trying her best to look Asian and thus limiting diversity. Also, consider that Sony decided to try and help fight back against bullying. Noble intent, but the way they went about it? They helped put up posters oddly suggesting that bullying could be stopped with sending positive emojis. Again, all of these sound sort of good on paper, but in practice, they help no one.

The info is here.

Nike, Kaepernick and the morality of capitalism

Steve Chapman

The Chicago Tribune
Originally posted September 5, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

The Republican Party has a large complement of corporate titans in its camp. But conservatives are reminded every day that some of the most successful and innovative companies are led and staffed by people whose worldview is deeply at odds with conservative ideology.

There is Amazon, whose founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post, a frequent target of Trump’s animosity. There is Apple, where CEO Tim Cook has been a vocal critic of racial injustice and anti-gay discrimination. Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg has written, “A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half our homes.”

Starbucks responded to Trump’s travel ban by pledging to hire 10,000 refugees. After the Parkland school massacre, Dick’s Sporting Goods stopped selling military-style firearms. Google, under pressure from employees opposed to creating “warfare technology,” withdrew from a Pentagon project on artificial intelligence.

But at the moment, the most visible face of corporate liberalism is Nike, whose new ad campaign features Kaepernick, a former San Francisco 49ers quarterback known for kneeling during the pregame national anthem to protest police abuses and racism. The campaign decision provoked a tweet from the president, who asserted, “Nike is getting absolutely killed with anger and boycotts.”

The info is here.

Amazon, Google and Microsoft Employee AI Ethics Are Best Hope For Humanity

Paul Armstrong
Forbes.com
Originally posted June 26, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Google recently lost the 'Don't be Evil' from its Code of Conduct documents but what were once guiding words now appear to be afterthoughts, and they aren't alone. From drone use to deals with the immigration services, large tech companies are looking to monetise their creations and who can blame them - projects can cost double digit millions as companies look to maintain an edge in a continually evolving marketplace. Employees are not without a conscience it seems, and as talent becomes the one thing that companies need in this war, that power needs to wielded, or we risk runaway train scenarios. If you want an idea of where things could go read this.

China is using AI software and facial recognition to determine who can travel, using what and where. You might think this is a ways away from being used on US or UK soil, but you'd be wrong. London has cameras on pretty much all streets, and the US has Amazon's Rekognition (Orlando just abandoned its use, but other tests remain active). Employees need to be the conscious of large entities and not only the ACLU or civil liberties inclined. From racist AI to faked video using machine learning to create better fakes, how you form technology matters as much as the why. Google has already mastered the technology to convince a human it is not talking to a robot thanks to um's and ah's - Google's next job is to convince us that is a good thing.

The information is here.

America is spiritually bankrupt.

Cornel West
The Guardian
Originally published January 14, 2018

Here are two excerpts:

The distinctive features of our spiritual blackout are threefold.

First, we normalize mendacity and naturalize criminality. We make our lies look like the normal order of things. And we make our crimes look like the natural order of things. We too often say Wall Street is a good servant – rather than a bad master – of the common good. Then we look away from the criminal behavior of big banks because they are too indispensable to prosecute.

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Second, we encourage callousness and reward indifference. We make mean-spiritedness look manly and mature. And we make cold-heartedness look triumphant and victorious. In our world of the survival of the slickest and the smartest, we pave the way for raw greed and self-promotion. We make cowardice and avarice fashionable and compassion an option for losers. We prefer market-driven celebrities who thrive on glitzy spectacles and seductive brands over moral-driven exemplars who strive on with their gritty convictions and stouthearted causes.

Third, we trump the moral and spiritual dimensions of our lives and world by applauding our short-term gains and superficial successes. This immoral and brutal disposition reinforces – and, in part, is a result of – the all-encompassing commodification of a predatory capitalism, running out of control in our psyches and societies.

The opinion is here.

‘Politicians want us to be fearful. They’re manipulating us for their own interest'

Decca Aitkenhead
The Guardian
Originally published December 8, 2017

Here are two excerpts:

“Yes, I hate to say it, but yes. Democracy is an advance past the tribal nature of our being, the tribal nature of society, which was there for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years. It’s very easy for us to fall back into our tribal, evolutionary nature – tribe against tribe, us against them. It’s a very powerful motivator.” Because it speaks to our most primitive self? “Yes, and we don’t realise how powerful it is.” Until we have understood its power, Bargh argues, we have no hope of overcoming it. “So that’s what we have to do.” As he writes: “Refusing to believe the evidence, just to maintain one’s belief in free will, actually reduces the amount of free will that person has.”

(cut)

Participants were asked to fill out an anonymous questionnaire devised to reveal their willingness to use power over a woman to extract sexual favours if guaranteed to get away with it. Some were asked to rate a female participant’s attractiveness. Others were first primed by a word-association technique, using words such as “boss”, “authority”, “status” and “power”, and then asked to rate her. Bargh found the power-priming made no difference whatsoever to men who had scored low on sexual harassment and aggression tendencies. Among men who had scored highly, however, it was a very different case. Without the notion of power being activated in their brains, they found her unattractive. She only became attractive to them once the idea of power was active in their minds.

This, Bargh suggests, might explain how sexual harassers can genuinely tell themselves: “‘I’m behaving like anybody does when they’re attracted to somebody else. I’m flirting. I’m asking her out. I want to date her. I’m doing everything that you do if you’re attracted to somebody.’ What they don’t realise is the reason they’re attracted to her is because of their power over her. That’s what they don’t get.”

The article is here.

Authenticity and Modernity

Andrew Bowie
iainews.iai.tv
Originally published November 6, 2017

Here are two excerpts:

As soon as there is a division in the self, of the kind generated by seeking self-knowledge, attributes like authenticity become a problem. The idea of anyone claiming ‘I am an authentic person’ involves a kind of self-observation that destroys what it seeks to affirm. This situation poses important questions about knowledge. If authenticity is destroyed by the subject thinking it knows that it is authentic, there seem to be ways of being which may be valuable because they transcend our ability to know them. As we shall see in a moment, this idea may help explain why art takes on new significance in modernity.

Despite these difficulties, the notion of authenticity has not disappeared from social discourse, which suggests it answers to a need to articulate something, even as that articulation seems to negate it. The problem with the notion as applied to individuals lies, then, in modern conflicts about the nature of the subject, where Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and many others, put in question, in the manner already suggested by Schelling, the extent to which people can be transparent to themselves. Is what I am doing a true expression of myself, or is it the result of social conditioning, self-deception, the unconscious?

(cut)

The early uses of ‘sincere’ and ‘authentic’ had applied both to objects and people, but the moralising of the terms in the wake of the new senses of the self/subject that emerge in the modern era meant the terms came to apply predominantly to assessments of people. The more recent application of ‘authentic’ to watches, iPhones, trainers, etc., thus to objects which rely not least on their status as ‘brands’, can therefore be read as part of what Georg Lukács termed ‘reification’. Relations to objects can start to distort relations between people, giving the value of the ‘brand’ object primacy over that of other subjects. The figures here may be open to question, but the phenomenon seems to be real. The point is that this particular kind of violent theft is linked to the way objects are promoted as ‘authentic’ in the market, rather than just to either their monetary- or use-value.

The article is here.

The Public’s Distrust of Biotech Is Deepening. Commercialization May Be to Blame.

Jim Kozubek
undark.org
Originally published November 3, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

The high profile patent battle over the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tool, often valued commercially at a billion dollars, and the FDA approval of the first genetically modified medicine for $475,000 — a sale price that is 19 times the cost to manufacture it — have displayed the capacity for turning taxpayer-funded research into an aggressive money-making enterprise. More personally, genetics are being used to typify people for cancer risk and age-related diseases, schizophrenia, autism, and intelligence, none of which truly belong to diagnostic categories.

It is therefore no surprise that parents may want to protect their newborns from becoming targets of commercialization.

In truth, genome sequencing is an extension of earlier commercial sequencing tests and standard newborn screening tests. BabySeq has expanded these to 166 genes, which can theoretically predict thousands of disorders and identify several genetic risk variants. For instance, it has identified a dozen newborns to have a genetic variant associated with biotinidase deficiency, which can impact cognition, and be fixed by taking a simple vitamin. Casie Genetti, a researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital, noted researchers found 109 of 125 babies had at least one, and up to six, genetic variants for an autosomal recessive disorder, meaning that if they went on to have children with a partner who had a corresponding gene compromised in a similar way, it could be damaging or life-threatening for their own baby.

Part of the problem is that we all have some measure of genetic variation, and that can be either dangerous or advantageous depending on the cell type or genetic background or environment.

The article is here.

Has capitalism has turned us into narcissists?

Terry Eagleton
The Guardian
Originally published August 3, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

In our own time, the concept of happiness has moved from the private sphere to the public one. As William Davies reports in this fascinating study, a growing number of corporations employ chief happiness officers, while Google has a “jolly good fellow” to keep the company’s spirits up. Maybe the Bank of England should consider hiring a jester. Specialist happiness consultants advise those who have been forcibly displaced from their homes on how to move on emotionally. Two years ago, British Airways trialled a “happiness blanket”, which turns from red to blue as the passenger becomes more relaxed so that your level of contentment is visible to the flight attendants. A new drug, Wellbutrin, promises to alleviate major depressive symptoms occurring after the loss of a loved one. It is supposed to work so effectively that the American Psychiatric Association has ruled that to be unhappy for more than two weeks after the death of another human being can be considered a mental illness. Bereavement is a risk to one’s psychological wellbeing.

It is no wonder that the notion of happiness has been taken into public ownership, given the remarkable spread of spiritual malaise around the globe. Around a third of American adults and close to half in Britain believe that they are sometimes depressed. Even so, more than half a century after the discovery of antidepressants, nobody really knows how they function.

The article is here.

Many Antidepressant Studies Found Tainted by Pharma Company Influence

By Roni Jacobson
Scientific American
Originally published October 21, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

Almost 80 percent of meta-analyses in the review had some sort of industry tie, either through sponsorship, which the authors defined as direct industry funding of the study, or conflicts of interest, defined as any situation in which one or more authors were either industry employees or independent researchers receiving any type of industry support (including speaking fees and research grants). Especially troubling, the study showed about 7 percent of researchers had undisclosed conflicts of interest. “There’s a certain pecking order of papers,” says Erick Turner, a professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health & Science University who was not associated with the research. “Meta-analyses are at the top of the evidence pyramid.” Turner was “very concerned” by the results but did not find them surprising. “Industry influence is just massive. What’s really new is the level of attention people are now paying to it.”

The researchers considered all meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials for all approved antidepressants including selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, atypical antidepressants, monoamine oxidase inhibitors and others published between 2007 and March 2014.

The entire article is here.

Lawsuit: Your Candy Bar Was Made By Child Slaves

By Abby Haglage
The Daily Beast
Originally published September 30, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

In the 15 years since the documentary sparked outrage, there are more child laborers in the cocoa industry than ever before. The companies have not only failed to stop the “worst forms of child labor”; they’ve seemingly made it worse. A report released on July 30, 2015, from the Payson Center for International Development of Tulane University and sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor found a 51 percent increase in the number of children working in the cocoa industry in 2013-14, compared to the last report in 2008-09. The number, they found, now totals 1.4 million. Those living in slave-like conditions increased 10 percent from the 2008-09 results, now totaling 1.1 million. The study concludes that while “some progress has been made,” the goal of reducing the number of children in the industry had “not come within reach.”

The California plaintiffs’ false-advertising claims against Nestle, Hershey, and Mars are the latest effort to pressure the chocolate industry to fix a problem it has known about for more than a decade. “Children that are sometimes not even 10 years old carry huge sacks that are so big that they cause them serious physical harm,” the complaint alleges.

The entire article is here.

The Problem with Drug Monopolies: Ethics and Money

How the Government Could Punish That Hedge Fund Bro Who Wanted to Raise a Drug’s Price 5,000 Percent

By Jordan Weissmann

Slate.com

Originally published September 22, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

Assuming his conscience doesn't send Daraprim's price all the way back to $13.50 a tablet, Shkreli will be able to get away with his price gouging for a simple reason: Even though the drug's patents are long-expired, nobody else makes it. Thus, he has an effective monopoly over a life-saving treatment that lacks an alternative. One could argue that this speaks to the fundamental flaws of American oversight of the pharmaceutical industry. While the rest of the developed world uses price controls to keep medication affordable, the U.S. allows drug companies to charge whatever they please, with the hope that once their patents expire, competition from generics will drive down costs. To some slight extent, that's worked—about 8 out of every 10 prescriptions filled in this country are for generic drugs. But as production has become concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer manufacturers, the prices of some generics have rapidly risen in recent years. And the costs of some specialty medications, like Daraprim, have skyrocketed.

The entire article is here.

Making capitalism more ethical: Dynamism with decency

By Jonathan Haidt
Ethicalsystems.org
Originally published January 1, l2015

When I tell people I teach business ethics, they often ask: “isn’t that an oxymoron?” Their response is not unwarranted. Much of my course is about the clever ways businesses have found to exploit their workers, sidestep regulations, and foist external costs onto others. Businesspeople are brilliant at finding opportunities and some of those opportunities are exploitative.

Yet the great majority of businesses (in developed nations with low corruption) run quite ethically and survive only because they provide a good or service that makes other people’s lives better. When you take the big picture and see those hockey-stick graphs of rising prosperity in the West since 1800, and in Asia since 1980, I think you’ve got to start with the proposition that business is fundamentally good. Creating value for other people (and keeping some for yourself) is virtuous. When people are free to create value, it unleashes the tidal wave of human dynamism. Poverty plummets. When people are not free, you get torpor, North Korea, and Cuba.

The entire blog post is here.

Messy Morals

By Anthony Painter
The RSA Blog
Originally posted on May 29, 2014

David Marquand wants a new public philosophy. This philosophy will be based on ethics – a morality of social justice beyond the market. He sees that we are in a ‘moral crisis’. Markets, individualism and greed have taken over. The public good has been in retreat since Margaret Thatcher came to power.

He has found unlikely allies this week. Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, and a group of capitalists gathering under an ‘inclusive capitalism’ banner have also suggested a different moral economy – though they would not necessarily express it that way. Smart business people and financiers see that the legitimacy of their activities relies on a different alignment between ethics and business. It is more about self-interest than morality. Nonetheless, the crossovers with David Marquand are intriguing.

The entire article is here.

Ethical questions science can’t answer

By Massimo Pigliucci
Rationally Speaking Blog
Originally posted October 11, 2013

Yes, yes, we’ve covered this territory before. But you might have heard that Sam Harris has reopened the discussion by challenging his critics, luring them out of their hiding places with the offer of cold hard cash. You see, even though Sam has received plenty of devastating criticism in print and other venues for the thesis he presents in The Moral Landscape (roughly: there is no distinction between facts and values, hence science is the way to answer moral questions), he is — not surprisingly — unconvinced. Hence the somewhat gimmicky challenge. We’ll see how that ones goes, I already have my entry ready (but the submission period doesn’t open until February 2nd).

Be that as it may, I’d like to engage my own thoughtful readers with a different type of challenge (sorry, no cash!), one from which I hope we can all learn something as the discussion unfolds. It seems to me pretty obvious (but I could be wrong) that there are plenty of ethical issues that simply cannot be settled by science, so I’m going to give a few examples below and ask all of you to: a) provide more and/or b) argue that I am mistaken, and that these questions really can be answered scientifically.

The entire article is here.

The Charitable-Industrial Complex

By PETER BUFFETT
The New York Times - Opinionator
Published: July 26, 2013

Here are some excerpts:

Because of who my father is, I’ve been able to occupy some seats I never expected to sit in. Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left. There are plenty of statistics that tell us that inequality is continually rising. At the same time, according to the Urban Institute, the nonprofit sector has been steadily growing.

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As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” It’s what I would call “conscience laundering” — feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity.

(cut)

I’m really not calling for an end to capitalism; I’m calling for humanism.

The entire story is here.

How Money Affects Morality

By Eduardo Porter
The New York Times - Business
Originally published June 13, 2013

From Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, to Bernard L. Madoff to the standard member of Congress fighting tirelessly to further the interests of campaign donors, human history is full of examples of money’s ability to weaken even the firmest ethical backbone.

Money sows mistrust. It ends friendships. Experiments have found that it encourages us to lie and cheat. As Karl Marx, the scourge of capitalism, noted, ‘‘Money then appears as the enemy of man and social bonds that pretend to self-subsistence.’’

Yet though we clearly understand money’s power to debase character, we have less certain a grasp on what it is about money that corrupts us so. Is it simply greed? Does the appetite for the more comfortable life that money can buy push us over the line?

The entire article is here.