The Ethical Life

Living an ethical life can be challenging when one is surrounded by an unethical society. The sheer corruption and mendacity that radiates from the current administration in Washington DC permeates American culture in ways both obvious and subtle. Yet, one has to question whether the corruption is a matter of degree or of kind, and I would quickly answer that it's the former. A nonchalant attitude towards unethical behavior runs deep in American society. We're more a society of sinners than saints.

Which to me accounts for at least part of the oppressive heaviness of contemporary American life. Leaving philosophical or theological woo-hoo aside, perhaps the biggest advantage to living ethically is that it's a lot lighter. As a quietly wise Dharma teacher once remarked, the best thing about refraining from lying is that you don't have to remember what you said. Coming up with convoluted rationalizations for illegality or mendacity requires a lot of detailed tracework, together with an ability to remember all of those twists and turns, not to mention anticipating objections or logical inconsistencies requiring even more rationalization and explanation. It's exhausting. And if you have to remember what particular person or group of people you said that to, the challenge grows all the more difficult.

Why live with that? Why live with the uncertainty that any moment somebody might blow the whistle on your workplace transgressions? Or that a new security person has been scrutinizing the cameras at Whole Foods and saw you pilfer those self-serve items from the hot and cold tables and those new security people have been given a go-ahead on taking action? Or that some sharp-eyed grocery clerk is going to catch you trying to slip something past the self-checkout at Safeway and call the police? Or that the IRS is going to figure out just how much you've inflated your tax deducations? When is that so-called friend of yours going to start getting shirty about the loan that you haven't paid back? Or the client you've intended to stiff turns out to be a lot more litigious than you anticipated?

Or something simpler: a new friend figures out how much you lied about your background and accomplishments. So much for that friendship. The list goes on and on, that horrible accounting of petty transgressions. Nothing amounting to a felony or even, in most cases, actionable offenses that could land you in the hoosegow. Just a steady drip-drip of unethical behavior. People can be pretty clever in the ways they justify themselves: oh, it's stealing from Whole Foods and they're a big horrible corporation owned by Jeff Bezos, that plutocratic son of a bitch. Or everybody cheats on their taxes. Or it's no big deal that I made up a better past for myself. I just wanted to impress him/her, that's all. I really needed the job.

Thus the advantages of the ethical life: better relationships with other people, a lack of worry about getting caught, no strain having to remember your circumlocutions and evasions and rationalizations, and in general a much lighter-weight existence that allows you to focus on the things that matter and not a bunch of crap you should never have imposed on yourself in the first place. To take it beyond that into the realm of philosophy or the like can be useful, but really it needn't move beyond the realm of the purely practical to justify itself and then some.