Psyblog has a post today on a series of studies done to compare how people think socially and financially and the relationship between the two.  The findings seem consistently to support the idea that people tend to separate their financial and social thinking.  The studies found that social rewards (even those like candy that have an easily measurable monetary value) engendered as much investment in a project or undertaking as a moderate financial reward.  However, smaller financial rewawrds seemed to engender less investment and performance in the activity.

This compartmentalization of thinking in relation to finance explains a lot about people’s behavior regarding money.  An alumnus of a school may feel happy to volunteer time (social donation) but not money (financial donation) to that institution.  People feel bad about homeless people on the street but are reluctant to actually give money.  It is one of the challenges of living a wholisticlally ethical life to try to overcome this barrier and integrate our financial thinking into the rest of our lives.

Link

A little over a week ago, I went to see the Britten War Requiem which was being performed at the school that I work for. It is undoubtedly one of the great requiems in the musical tradition and has been difficult for me to get it out of my head since the conert.

Britten was comissioned to write the piece to dedicate Coventry Cathedral, which has been destroyed in World War II and was to be rebuilt. Britten, a pacifist, wrot the requiem, using the full Mass texts intersperced with poetry written by Wilfred Own, a soldier in WWI (who was killed a week before the end of the war). The consequent piece is the most dramatic and emotionally charged attacks on the institution of war in human society that I have ever encountered. Every poem underscores the absurdity of war and its ultimate futility. Britten artfully mixes the poetry in with the latin texts for an extremely powerful effect. Musically the piece is a spectacular modern, dissonant and atonal meandering structure. It is surprisingly listenable but yet still qiute profound. I particularly liked the part where the Dies Irae was introduced by the Trumpet and trombone sections playing horn calls that mimicked at the same time the bugle call of the cavalry and also the call of the Last Judgment. War is Hell. Literally.

I have never considered myself a pacifist. I do not like violence or condone it (outside of video games and movies of course ) but cannot categorically say that I am opposed to all violence at all times. I’m very torn on this position. In studying German history in my years studying German, I learned a lot about the evils that humanity is possible of achieving. WWI and WWII encompas both of these and in a sense are the dialectic of violence. World War I was the quo et demonstratem of pacifism.

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenched there,
And streched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! and angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so,
but slew his son, -
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

The first world war war underscored the pointlessness of war in general. Why were these particular youths who had nothing against these other particular youths killing each other over disagreements that other unrelated leaders had with each other? It was all so pointless and evil. World War I I think represents the evil that humanity is capable of even when it is not trying to be evil.

World War II on the other hand represents what humanity can do when it does try to be evil, and I think it is the counterexample to the pacifist. The Allies were by no means saints going into save the Jews from the death camps, and many of their motivations and tactics were by no means honorable. Yet still, when you go to one of the concentration camps or study the history of Nazi germany you quickly come to the conclusion that this had to be stopped and by force.

Links:

• War Requiem Text
• Some Background on the Requiem

I had an interesting conversation with a friend a couple weeks ago about the ethical implications of a multi-billion person humanity. This is where the personal and social moral worlds intersect. It seems like many of the systemic evils in our world (poverty, hunger, consumerism, apathy) are caused partly if not entirely by large numbers of individuals acting, well, as individuals, rather than as members of the network we call humanity. This is a different side to ethics that does not really fall much into our everyday consciousness of our ethical decisions.

Many decisions we make daily do not seem to have much of an ethical component to them. They do not involve interaction with, let alone harm to another person. They do not harm us. They seem to be simply actions. Let us make this a bit more concrete with an example about urban sprawl. Urban sprawl is a growing societal problem in the U.S.. It is a large environmental concern, destroying habitats, fueling erosion by crating ground cover, and leading to water shortages. It is deeply related to the growing class-ification of our society. It destroys community and aesthetics through mindless copying of housing designs. Needless to say it is a problem that the U.S. faces. It is also a problem that has moral consequences and is to some extent a moral issue.

However the factors that lead to urban sprawl do not seem to be ethical at all. Individual families want large homes that are not ‘in the goonies’ but also in a place with open spaces and fresh air. Consequently there is a huge demand for the suburban housing market, which then expands (and along with it, the size of our sprawl). This same effect can be seen in a huge number of societal problems: global warming, globalization, recycling problems, white-flight, immigration. The list goes on. It seems as though awide swath of our society’s most endemic social evils have their origins in relatively minor acts of individuals.

This provides a framework for an additional level of meaning in Kant’s Categorical Imperative, which states that we should Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. When I encounter a moral dilemma, I must proceed in a way that I could rationally assent to becoming a law for all times, places, and people. However, we can see also now that the categorical imperative also tells us what situations are in fact moral dilemmas. In fact every situation turns out to be a moral dilemma because every situation will look different when we examine how it would be if everyone were to act that way.

This actually can be helpful to us. There are many situations where we have some inkling of an idea that it is a moral situation, but it does not seem to be particularly important. Recycling comes to mind. Keeping in mind the categorical imperative (and the empirical fact that oftentimes everyone else will do the same thing in that situation), we can learn to see the broader context and ethical significance of such acts and hopefully be further motivated to live them out.