What Is Ethics, Anyway?

Today I had a painter guy come to my house to give me an estimate on a very small job. This guy is very chatty and at one point got to sounding off on what's wrong with the world. The problem, he says, is that the world is "anti-religion," so you have no ethics anymore.

This is a very widely accepted paradigm: If you have religion, you have ethics. If you have no religion—say, you're an atheist—you have no ethics.

Now, I don't buy either part of this. I believe you can have ethics without religion (I believe that an atheist can be just as moral and ethical as anyone else); and I believe that you can have religion without ethics. But I didn't want to get into a real argument with this guy—and have to "come out" as an atheist—so I just gave him this ready counterexample: The Mafia guy goes to Mass on Sunday and goes on beating up or even killing people the other six days of the week.

And this guy himself wanted to inflate his estimate, which was for a job that insurance was going to pay for, so that I could keep 40 percent and pass the other 60 percent on to him. I said No, I didn't want to pocket anything.

Also, this guy likes to be paid with a check payable to him personally, rather than to his company name, so that he doesn't have to report the income on his income tax.

How does this square with "ethics"? These two things, are they somehow not ethics? The only explanation that comes to my mind is that this is—to him--just the normal way of doing business, i.e., "business as usual." I'm too tempted to repeat the easy quip that "business ethics" is an oxymoron.

But we have to also recognize a human trait that never ceases to amaze me: the ability to compartmentalize things in one's mind, to keep them separate. Sort of like the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. So we can be righteous on Sundays and sinners the other six days.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein