> If you don’t play ball in certain parts of the world, you end up in a river. The price tag is just different.
Aside from the problems of this statement being a completely vague and unspecific and extreme hypothetical, isn’t there a problem with switching from talking about incentives to talking about threats? Being threatened with death isn’t the same as being offered money, and this ground has been well covered by philosophers who point out that there are things wrong with “admitting that” as you call it. Calling it a price tag seems misleading at best. There’s further a massive problem with suggesting a person’s ethics might be based on what someone threatening them with death wants them to do, no? If the action isn’t something you are choosing to do, and isn’t something you would do if not threatened, for any amount of money, then why would you consider it your actions or part of your ethics?
If you say so. It’s the same thing, even if it’s more comfortable to believe it’s not.
It helps to frame it this way, because once you accept that you’d do that, you’re more likely to accept you would do something unethical for a billion dollars if it had no consequences to you. And from there, it’s a binary search to determine exactly what your price is.
Would you be able to say you wouldn’t lie to your wife if it meant you’d walk away with a billion dollars? Certainly this is contrived, but all examples in this territory are contrived.
Yes, but that's not what we're discussing, because then I can counter with:
"Would you sell your mother or your children at any price?"
And I hope - admittedly, that's speculation - I know what the answer to that would be.
So this is now an absurd discussion, whereas it started off from a rational point of view: there exist such people whose ethics can not be corrupted. The fact that you believe this is not the case says nothing about people in general.
You are asking what I would personally do. But it’s better to think of limit cases that everyone would do — such as lie to their wife for a billion dollars. Since it’s guaranteed you fall into the bucket of “everybody”, that means you can locate your ethical price tag.
It’s helpful for people to do this mental exercise. At least, I find it comforting knowing my own price tags in advance.
That’s a very interesting question. Thanks for that.
The way I view it is that it’s important to seek out yours ahead of time -— to game out different scenarios, and to consider whether you would do X or Y if forced to choose. That way, when you’re in a situation where you feel like compromising, you’ll remember your limits.
In other words, I was less tempted to act unethically in the moment than I would have been if I’d been surprised by the opportunity.
This is especially important in scientific circles. It’s often trivial to falsify data, and the rewards for doing so are generally high. It’s also not always an active, conscious decision; it’s easy to make small mistakes that have favorable outcomes for yourself.
The exercise has helped me steer far away from any of those. I’ve watched peers fall into a trap that I’d label “scientific hype,” i.e. claim that you’re doing something impressive when in reality you’re nowhere close. This is a very easy mistake to make, and if I hadn’t mentally found my boundaries ahead of time then I’d have been vulnerable to making the same error. Or I may have stayed silent when my peers were doing something naughty.
Positive and negative consequences are not the same thing in ethics.
Compare “kill this person to save your son’s life” with “kill this person to earn $1 million.” They’re not equivalent, even if both might be metaphorically referred to as a price.
On the contrary — the decisions you have to make to avoid negative consequences are often the best test of your ethics. Consider how many people would’ve been punished for speaking out against what plantation owners were doing in the 1800’s, for example.
The illusion that they feel different is extremely powerful. It’s worth resisting. It helps uncover all kinds of ways that we contribute to unethical behavior, if only through inaction.
The concept of having a price attached to your ethics is essential. Without it, people fool themselves into believing they’re above temptation. In my experience those same people tend to be the most vulnerable to it.
> If you don’t play ball in certain parts of the world, you end up in a river.
OP branched here: "it's not as if the choices were 'commit crime / get bounty'."
Any example relevant to OP's branch cannot end with the subject in a river. The very fact that you are discussing it proves we've jumped to the other branch of the conditional-- the one where the choice is exclusively between `commit crime / get bounty` (by threat of death in your example)