And even then, it comes after other needs like comfort and achieving my own goals. I won't sacrifice much of anything for ethics.
And yet, in the US, we have congressmen/women who regularly engage in insider trading and accept bribes in the form of lobbying and cushy jobs after they leave office, we have multiple sitting Supreme Court justices accepting bribes, and we have a former president who isn't even held to the same standard we hold our children.
I'd be hard-pressed to come up with any examples of a high-status individual being held to a higher standard than the rest of us. Sure, there's a lot of belly-aching on social media from time to time, but in most (all?) cases, it's for falling short of a standard we're all expected to satisfy, and there's almost never any real consequences.
When you use the word “bribe” to describe something that isn’t, it dilutes your point significantly.
This is a thread about ethics, you can use precise words and still talk about how they are unethical.
You can indeed question the research of less ethical behaviour by richer people however you need to bring some evidence. This [1] article for example talks about a study which didn't replicate the behaviour. It's actually a well balanced discussion of the overall evidence.
[1] https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/are_rich_peopl...
By handwavy I meant that one can easily come up with "logical" arguments around behaviour that dont reflect reality, so it needs to be backed up by evidence.
Thanks for posting the article I was not aware of this research (while I was aware of the research showing the opposite).
2 things to note: 1. How is it possible that the two don't cite each other?! I have to call out the scientific report paper in particular. Piff's work is more than 10 years old and well known. Instead the authors only cite work that supports their premise. I would have thrown it out as a reviewer just based on this. That said the article I linked should have mentioned some of the work cited in the scientific reports article as well.
2. It seems studies are done quite differently, the article you linked seems to largely rely on surveys (sidenote I really dislike the use of mechanical turk for these things, way too unreliable) of assessment others or their own ethical behaviour. Piff's work was more experimental (thus lower numbers and less reliable in that sense)
I think the Piff study is just really flawed because they were trying to use a quantifiable proxy.
"we used observers’ codes of vehicle status (make, age, and appearance) to index drivers’ social class."
IMO they chose a really bad proxy, and they never validated it. It's completely based on an assumption, and one that we can all probably point to personal examples that violate it. To me, that's "hand-wavy" science. To your point, I could probably come up with a handful of different explanations that correlate car make/model to seemingly aggressive driving behavior. Some of them probably correlate with wealth and others not so much.
I do think there's a danger of confirmation bias. Just like the nature study demonstrates that there is a normative belief that wealthy people act less ethically, it's really easy for our status-obscessed ape minds to latch onto studies that support it. Even when they aren't the greatest.
Regarding your thoughts on the car study I broadly agree it is not a very good proxy for wealth (also areas with many company cars likely skew results as well). However I do think that it's trying to independently verify peoples self-evaluation using similar experiments what gives us much better insights and there were a number of other studies with similar results.
Confirmation bias is always a danger and the paper that was described in the article which could not reproduce the correlation between car cost and behavior tried to follow best practices to minimise it, so probably should be given more weight. I actually wondered if there is a difference also according to culture, i.e. Piff's results were obtained in the US, while the other article was in the Netherlands.
They are missing the intermediate step that shows the model measures what it's supposed to. In this case, they never validate that car make/model is a good proxy for wealth. The entire premise is based on a book titled "Luxury Fever"[1] and not on peer-reviewed research. They never actually explain this model, either. What cars are mapped to their 1-5 scale? Is a Lincoln a 5 or a Ferrari? No idea. There's contradictory evidence that many wealthy people drive Hondas and Fords and that less-wealthy people buy luxury cars as a pseudo-status symbol. That's why symbols of wealth (clothes, cars, etc.) are a bad model for actual wealth, especially in a society with a large debt burden and when the models go unvalidated. There are other questions I would have, like small-ish sample sizing, to basing the entire study in Berkeley, to only doing the traffic study between 2-5pm. I would question how well that study can be extrapolated. If you do a quick Bayesian statistical significance test on their vehicle data, it doesn't appear statistically significant. But they report correlations instead.
All that to say, there's a lot of contradictory evidence on both sides. Social science is hard, and I was trying to make the main point that we need to be very careful about making strong and broad claims from limited evidence. And I say this as someone who drives a bargain-basement hatchback with mechanical windows :-)
many of those "rich" people could be supporting many other "poor" people via jobs that you just wiped out for a small personal gain.
The reverse would be true where poor people could be ruined, unless the value provided is worth significantly more than the debt created, which seems doubtful.
To be in $10k debt, it means you have more debt than assets.
Either way, wealth distribution is wrong. Stealing is stealing.
Individually, no. But we have a remarkable ability to adapt group ethical systems when resource needs demand it. The conflict arises when these adaptations occur in too-small a group, e.g. at the company level within a country, or a country level within an integrated continent.
There's a gray area, usually referred to as "dark patterns" that aren't yet proven to be illegal, but likely are, if the regulators ever had the free time to care.
But yeah. Unethical people might find they have a hard time actually getting past a certain point in relationships (business or friendly), though sometimes it's good to have a few shrewd people in your back pocket to call on.
That's the seed of evil: the idea of isolated existence. The strong just pull it out. The weak passively watch how it grows and wait until it's rotten down in envy, experiencing all sorts of sufferings on the way there.
It's the difference between a short term and a long term view.
"Man — every man — is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others.
He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor
sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-
interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life."It's a luxury to live in a society where most people have ethics. I really enjoy having that luxury; I suspect you do, too.
So if you want to not have them yourself until you get ahead of everyone else, that sounds kind of like a sociopath.
Normies simply will never understand what it's like to be on the receiving end of normie social habits. They're more insular than you're indicating.