Ethics. Are they needed in today’s enlightened society? The answer to that question would depend on what ethics are.
In this day of political correctness, people don’t want to be told something is good or bad, right or wrong, black or white. Today everything is simply different, a shade of gray, if you will. People have come to accept their own personal definitions for right and wrong. “What’s right for one person isn’t necessarily right for another,” they say. But, if we are to survive as a society, we must have a common definition of right and wrong. If we leave the definitions up to the individual, we can’t even condemn the actions of someone like Hitler (who, in his own mind, thought he was doing the world a great service by advancing the Arian race). By his definition, his actions were right, although most of us would disagree.
In today’s society, ethics has become a bad word and people are looked down on for saying something is right or wrong. They’re called intolerant, prejudice, narrow-minded, or worse, for saying everything isn’t gray. But everything isn’t gray.
As much as tolerance and acceptance are touted in today’s society, it simply isn’t the way the world works. If a man steals money from a company, he’s a thief. To say ‘he used company funds inappropriately’ doesn’t make him any less a thief. Couching his action in political correctness simply makes it harder to determine exactly what he did wrong (did he spend money without authorization or did he steal the money). Blurring the definition removes the social pressure of the wrong doing, making it easier for him to do it again next time. If the man is to be punished for his actions, we must somehow get back to what’s right and what’s wrong.
Ethics is the term we use to describe the process of peeling off the layers of political correctness to get back to what’s right and wrong.
Most societies base their definition of right and wrong on a religious teaching. In the U.S., it’s Christianity. In India, it’s Hinduism. Its source is less important than society’s general acceptance of its definition. Once accepted, laws can be made based on the definitions and the society can then be governed.
If a society is to exist in any state other than chaos, a definition of right and wrong must be generally accepted and becomes the framework on which that society is built. In order for punishment to be applied for breaking a societal law, there must be mechanism that allows us to get back to that framework of right and wrong, no matter how many layers of indirection we place upon it. The mechanism is called ethics.
Life is tough and often a struggle. In that struggle, it’s imperative that we maintain our ethics. If we don’t, if we disregard that framework of right and wrong, our society will degrade into chaos.
Image a world where every aspect of life was devoid of ethics. Your banker would regretfully inform that your investment went bust, while his account grew the amount of your investment. Your doctor would tell you he could enable you to live longer if you would only write him into your will. A police officer would stop you in the street for the sole purpose of extracting a bribe. The list goes on and on. Would these professional’s be wrong to act that way (black), or would each simply have a different approach to life (gray)? Without ethics, who’s to say?
In summary, ethics are nothing more than a mechanism allowing us to get back to the framework our society was built on, the accepted definitions of right and wrong. That ability enables us to punish those that do wrong. And it’s the threat of punishment that controls how people interact with each other and thus keeps our society civil.
Are ethics needed? Yes. Without them, life is just one big con game.
