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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (112538)	8/24/2003 5:42:58 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Actually, not so. <Nice thoughts, but who would abide by them? Ethics, while a very nice concept, are seldom upheld with hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake..> The good thing about ethics is that one can act individually. No approval is necessary. Nobody can stop ethical behaviour. They can threaten to kill, if the person refuses to comply, but that doesn't force one to change from one's ethical ideas. Some people do behave ethically and do uphold their ethics. A particular example I learned about was from my oil industry days, in regard to lead in petrol. It turns out that women don't care much about the money and will spend more money to avoid polluting children's brains with lead. Yes, one woman spending more money to reduce lead pollution wouldn't make an iota of difference to ambient lead ingested by children. But the cost would add significantly to her costs. Too bad, say most women. They prefer to do what's right. Men are not so particular and are more inclined to save money and reason correctly that they won't individually make any difference. There are hordes of women and they generally behave in a similar way, and would in fact cut ambient lead by their individual behaviour, whereas the more rational males would drive around in a fug of lead. Guess which community is better to live in, the self-serving "rational" or the ethical. There's another level to it though, which neither the men, nor women nor petrol suppliers understood - the savings from leaded petrol were not actually savings. Sure, the actual dollars per litre were fewer, but there were countervailing penalties from lead which were unrecognized by nearly all - lead burden on the lubricant, carcinogenic lead scavengers, combustion chamber pollution, octane requirement increase, spark plug fouling, The biggie, reduced IQ in children and therefore adults [when they grow up], was a huge unrecognized cost to the community and the individuals affected [nearly everyone, but some more than others]. Lead in petrol was one of the significant stupidities of the 20th century. I wondered whether the women were more willing to spend more money to avoid environmental pollution because their husbands do the earning and they do the spending, so therefore don't care much about the cost. I suspect that's not the case, though I don't know for sure. I suspect it is simply because women are more ethically oriented than men. I suspect it's a genetic thing - despite rumour to the contrary, women and men are not the same and I suspect it's largely because women bear and feed babies and men don't, so they do things differently. Ethics trumps dollars, for half the population, plus some. Which is why we have the eons-long trend of ethical development. Ethics work. The return on ethical behaviour is high. Successful societies are the more ethical ones. Mqurice