Money and the Moral Mask
Ethical Obscurant
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful what we pretend to be.”
- Kurt Vonnegut
Imagine you are in a burning house and you only have enough time to save one thing: a child or million dollar painting. Which do you choose? Most people, instinctively, would say the child. But Will MacAskill, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, would say to save the million dollar painting. His argument is that by saving the painting, cashing it in, and providing malaria bed nets to impoverished African nations you would be able to save hundreds of thousands of children.
This answer feels wrong, but that is MacAskill’s point. He argues that we as humans are ill-adapted to modernity and our conventional notion of ethics is not suitable for today. MacAskill has taken our burning house dilemma and has re-framed it in a well known philosophic problem known as the Trolley problem.
The Trolley problem states that you are driving a trolley and your current path will kill five workers, but there is a switch that will redirect your trolley on a path with only one worker. You can either save one worker or save five. With the burning house scenario you can either save one child or save thousands of children.
While it is easy to immediately jump into an ethical debate about utilitarianism (and it usually does), I want to slow down and observe something interesting. Generally, when the Trolley problem is brought up in an ethics class, someone gets up and talks about how unrealistic the scenario is. (Spoiler alert: it was me in my ethics class). But the burning house problem is specifically designed to sound somewhat plausible. Why?
For me, the defining difference is when the idea of exchanging the painting for money comes into play. Adding the exchange value of money allows so many possibilities to open up. MacAskill, while a smart guy, seems to be missing a huge dimension of ethical thought — the moral dimensions of economics.
The failure to discuss the moral implications of the economy is a valid criticism of Effective Altruism, the movement inspired by MacAskill’s ideas to maximize social return. Generally these criticisms are brought on by members of the far left, such as the Occupy movement. These critiques say that contributing to charity is good but the “effectiveness” of your charity will always be sub-optimal. If you do not address the systemic problems that cause the need for charity, you never get rid of the need for charity. The most vocal criticism came from one of Occupy’s most central organizers in Debt: the first 5000 years.
Can be
found here.
In Debt David Graeber, now Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, covers the history and evolution of debt. Graeber spends much of the book discussing a variety of interesting phenomenon across history and sociology including the simultaneous rise of organized religion and increased debt, the military-coinage-slavery complex, and “everyday communism.” It is a fascinating read, although there is much to disagree with.
Graeber begins Debt with an anecdote about how the idea of the book came around. Graeber was at a party and was introduced to a “do-gooder” human rights lawyer as one of the Occupy organizers. The conversation turned to other forms of his activism. He mentioned his struggles with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He talks about how the IMF facilitated the creation of the third world debt crisis, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. At one point he mentions how IMF austerity measures cut malaria eradication programs and tens of thousands of children died. At some point, the lawyer asks Graeber, “But surely the blame is on the one who borrowed? After all, one has to pay their debts.”
I’m hoping the parallels are self-evident. Children dying of malaria, a choice, and money as the mediator. While Graeber gets closer to the heart of the matter than MacAskill, his radical politics keep pulling him into other dialogues. The heart of the issue is that money acts as an ethical obscurant. It can hide or misdirect the morality of almost any given situation. Money may be the world’s first and only moral technology.
All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players
-William Shakespeare
In the Republic, Socrates went from person to person asking “What is the Good?” This was originally asked to question the notion of the Platonic ideal, but it is notable because it asked the central moral question of that era. Actually, one of my main personal criticisms of the Effective Altruism movement is that they are prematurely optimizing. I also think they haven’t centered around what we should consider as a social good. But more importantly, even beyond defining what is good and evil, we have a much more pressing moral question at hand in the modern era. Can we separate moral action from moral ontology? Or, put another way, are we only what we do and what if what we do is inauthentic to who we are as people?
This seems abstract and philosophical. Ontology? Moral action? If you are a 9-to-5-er, NPC normie this seems far removed from day to day life. The highest call to moral action seems to be who should pick the kids up from daycare. Consider this:
You Don’t Hate Mondays, You Hate
Not Being Yourself
Capitalism is only part of the problemmedium.com
This Medium essay supposes that the central reason we hate going back to work on Mondays is because we cannot be authentic. It makes sense that if money can obscure moral action, an organization based on making as much money as possible would similarly be obscured to the extent of obscuring you from yourself.
I want to add a corollary to that. I would say that most compartmentalize their work actions and home life actions into separate buckets. Most only give moral consideration to their home life actions. If you work at an oil rig or for a defense company, you don’t consider yourself immoral even though your actions direct will harm the environment or others. The oil rig worker would rather be judged according to how he treats his wife and kids, and would feel as though he fairs better because of it.
But you don’t get to choose. Even if they feel like different people, work you and home you are the same person. You are responsible for the actions of any persona you adopt. This was somewhat decided in the Nuremburg trials, but has taken a long time for the world to adopt. If you think about it, the defense contractor engineer’s defense is no different from “I was just following orders.” But we seem to have a hard time recognizing it as such.
Pop culture has picked this up too. Breaking Bad, Bojack Horseman, the Sopranos, the Wire, and a host of other media recognize the dichotomy of believing oneself as upright and the reality of their actions, often using money as an obscuring agent. That’s why many of those characters claim an ‘anti-hero’ status, when if we judge them solely on actions they tend more towards villain than hero. In fact, the whole work-you vs home-you dichotomy was done really well in the most recent season of Bojack Horseman.
I don’t want to seem as though money is inherently bankrupt (*rimshot*). In the burning house scenario, introducing the idea of exchanging the painting for money makes us more aware of our capacities. The largest issue is that what we can do is sometimes obscured by the trappings of the human mind. Urgency short circuits what is the rational result — save as many as possible as often as possible. MacAskill’s point may be that we are embedded in a system that will allow us to do tremendous good if we can recognize these opportunities. We will also need to condition ourselves to take advantage of them.
My whole point is that we need to start recognizing money as a ‘moral technology.’ It seems weird to call a piece of paper a technology, doesn’t it? Merriam-Webster defines technology as:
2. a manner of accomplishing a task especially using technical processes, methods, or knowledge
Money very clearly meets this definition. It enables people to do certain tasks by being an incentive when there is none available. Money also requires deep technical knowledge to produce or move. Think of the Federal Reserve. But money never specifies what task to do or whether that task is “good” or “bad.” That’s why money is so dangerous and somewhat misunderstood. It compels towards action but never specifies the nature of the action and thus obscures our conventional sense of morality.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night does this well. In the novel, Howard Campbell Jr is asked to join the Nazi propaganda machine as a double agent. There is no hope that his true allegiance could ever be revealed. Campbell is fed coded information which he works into the propaganda. This information is of tremendous benefit to the Allies, even though he never finds out what it did himself. The novel follows him dealing with his choices post-WWII in some form of witness protection. The vast majority of the public believes Campbell to be a prominent Nazi propagandist in spite of his role as a double agent.
Much like Campbell, most of us are divorced from the impacts of our decisions. Our day-to-day purchases may be causing environmental ruin in the Amazons or funding child-labor in some faraway sweatshop. But we can never tell. It may equally be allowing someone’s daughter to go to ballet lessons. Whether we are working as coal miners or hospital administrators, we most likely will never face the consequences or rewards of our actions. That’s the issues with systems in general — responsibility is diffused so that no one carries all the blame, but everyone shoulders some of it. Our financial and social systems are so complex we can’t discern what, if anything, we are doing.
At this point, it would be great to hear advice on how to tackle this moral obscurity we all face. If you have any, please let me know. I often feel this strange cloud of depression from our sublime detachment from accountability. I cannot offer you any way forward. It is paralyzing, when you think of moral confusion in earnest but impractical to spend you life fixating on it. In the spirit of practicality then, I leave you with this:
“Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”
-Mahatma Gandhi