Ethical obligation to yourself? I don’t think so

When I raised the issue several months ago of whether we had ethical obligations to inanimate objects — including corporations — many people took the time to write to me and tell me that it didn’t matter whether they had such an obligation to a corporation, because they had an obligation to themselves. Two weeks ago, when a fellow columnist referenced my original column, I began to get more of the same arguments.

Because so many people feel so strongly about this, it’s really a shame that the argument just doesn’t do the work they want it to do. The attempt to solve the original question this way is neither surprising nor unusual. When confronted with such quandaries, many become uneasy with the uncertainty and, like drowning people, are inclined to grab onto the first thing that looks like it might support them.

When someone wants to do something — in this case return found money — but can’t find an existing obligation requiring them to do it, the natural instinct is to create the obligation out of whole cloth. We see the same phenomenon with people who create “rights” to suit their desires of the moment, whether those rights are defensible or not.

It doesn’t take a whole lot of scrutiny to determine that the idea of having an obligation to yourself just doesn’t make much sense. It’s a lot like saying that you owe yourself money. How in the world can you pay yourself? Do you take money out of one pocket and put it into another? If you fail to do that, are you cheating yourself? Are you a bad person?

In defense of those who’ve made the argument, I think I understand what they’re trying to say. Using the image of an obligation to themselves, they may feel they have a personal moral code that impels them to act in a certain way. They would feel that they had not lived up to this code if they acted any differently.

That’s certainly noble, but is a long way from having an obligation. The whole notion of obligations in ethics — for those who believe we have such obligations — is that they govern the range of actions we classify as “other-regarding.” These are actions that involve other people in significant ways, which, after all, is the whole reason we engage in ethical inquiry to begin with.

On the other hand, self-regarding actions, those things that don’t involve other people, are really something that ethics shouldn’t concern itself with. Suppose you decide that you should rise early each day to pray and that you would be a lesser person if you don’t. I may find that laudable or I may be unconcerned about it. But if you decide to sleep in one day and miss your prayers, while you may be disappointed, it’s really no business of mine. I can’t make an ethical judgment about your behavior on that score.

We engage in ethical inquiry for two important reasons. The first is so that we can gauge our own behavior — our own moral code. Do we measure up, we want to know? The other reason is so that we can tell whether we should assign others “praise or blame,” as Aristotle would say.

When ethicists talk about obligations, we’re referring to those actions and obligations that involve other people. After all, ethics is really about how we behave in relation to others. If our common code of ethics establishes that you have an obligation to do something, and you fail to do it, then we can say that you have acted unethically and have merited some blame.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t have a personal moral code, but it must at least rise to the level of what we commonly agree on are your ethical obligations. Now, you are certainly free to exceed those obligations, but even if you do, this doesn’t create a greater obligation for others. Your personal moral code doesn’t become the standard for others to meet.

Consider the case of finding a small amount of money — say $1 — on a deserted street in a large city. Most people, realizing that the effort to find the owner would far exceed the value of the money, would look around to see if there was anyone who could conceivably have dropped it. Finding no one, they would simply pocket the bill and walk away. I think most other people wouldn’t see any ethical obligation to do more than that.

Now suppose you have a heightened sense of what you see as morality. You spend hours going door to door in the neighborhood. Good for you, but it doesn’t mean someone who didn’t do that is an unethical person. Or, you may take a more moderate approach, find the nearest church, and drop the money in the poor box. Again, good for you, but I still don’t think you can justifiably say anything bad about someone who doesn’t do that.

That’s why the issue of whether we have an ethical obligation to inanimate objects is important. The question is not what you, personally, would choose to do, but what is required of us all. When judging the actions of another, the standard we use must be something we can all generally agree with and reasonably defend.

You may return the money because you feel some personal drive to do that. I don’t think anyone would say you were unethical if you did. But is someone who doesn’t return the money unethical? To say that he or she is, you would need to start from an obligation to act in a certain way, and that obligation can’t stem from some personal code you might have adopted. It needs to be defended on more objective grounds.

You can discuss this with other readers in our Ethics Matters forum at www.infoworld.com/forums/ethics or write to me at ethics_matters@infoworld.com.