Pondering on ethics
Aug. 10th, 2007 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjSo yesterday evening I was doing my beginning-of-the-month accounts (reconciling the checkbook, writing out the monthly bills, reconciling receipts against the charge card bills) and discovered that a couple of credit card charges that should have come through on the June bill hadn't come through on the July bill either. One was from the books-on-tape store that went out of business back in May (for an item I bought at their closing sale), so it may not be surprising that a charge got lost in the shuffle. Their business phone is disconnected now and I have no idea if I'll be able to track anyone down to inquire about the charge. The other was from Sur la Table, which is just a block off of my regular lunchtime bike ride, so I stopped in to show them the receipt and inquire about the problem.
It's not like this is unusual for me, but it tends to get the weirdest reactions. During the interactions with the store clerk, I offered a succession of explanations, starting with the most important and eventually ending up with the most trivial.
"Because it's the right thing to do." [incomprehension]
"Because there's no such thing as 'free' -- I can pay for it now or I can pay for it later in increased store prices or the loss of a place I like to shop if it goes out of business." [further incomprehension]
"Because it's fun to mess with people's minds by being agressively honest." [smile and shrug]
"Because it screws up my financial records." [dawning comprehension and approval]
Why is it so hard to get people to believe that you've done the right thing simply because it's the right thing? Because you want to help create a collective reality in which that's just what people do?
It's not like this is unusual for me, but it tends to get the weirdest reactions. During the interactions with the store clerk, I offered a succession of explanations, starting with the most important and eventually ending up with the most trivial.
"Because it's the right thing to do." [incomprehension]
"Because there's no such thing as 'free' -- I can pay for it now or I can pay for it later in increased store prices or the loss of a place I like to shop if it goes out of business." [further incomprehension]
"Because it's fun to mess with people's minds by being agressively honest." [smile and shrug]
"Because it screws up my financial records." [dawning comprehension and approval]
Why is it so hard to get people to believe that you've done the right thing simply because it's the right thing? Because you want to help create a collective reality in which that's just what people do?
