Sunday, February 07, 2010

Morals, Ethics, doing the right thing. Not stealing is not a grey area, it is not right. We don't need a law to say that just because someone leaves a mobile phone on a bar, that someone else has the right to take it and use it. I was behind a car as it turn on the on ramp of the highway. as he turned, something went flying from the car. I pulled over and found his wallet. phone number in it and so I called him. later that day he came by and got the wallet. One day in Mexico, I was on my motorcycle. I stopped for lunch and in getting something out of my tank bag I dropped my wallet. Before I noticed and old man walking by stopped and pointed at my feet to the wallet. It is not karma, it is just honest people. There is no other way to act. I could not be a moral person if I had not stopped and the old man could not if he had not acted the way he did.

So for someone to justify not acting the ethical way, including a company, is just justifying acting in concert with the criminal mind. But let's go one step further. You are in some place where smoking is still allowed. does that mean you have the moral right to smoke offending and damaging others? You are in a restaurant and you can smoke, should you and by doing so ruin someone’s meal? If you are French or I guess Dutch, you do. and when someone points out that you are ruining their meal the excuse is that they have the right to smoke and that you are rude for objecting to it. We have coffee at starbucks because they have no smoking and yet in France one women tried to hide her smoking knowing full well it was not allowed. So who would be so rude as to mention it. I was.

Self imposed ethics is something Westerners come to the third world are expected to have. But they act and dress in ways that are insulting to the locals. But the locals need their money so they play into the game. Even when they go to a watt, often the foreigners wear cutoffs, short shorts and shirts or blouses more appropriate for the beach than a secret place. But they are the rich foreigner on vacation and so they can lord it over the local. At a restaurant some white guy with a loud wife and two kids is walking around with no shirt on. this is something only the lowest of the low here would do and certainly not something he would do or be allowed to do in a restaurant in the West.

Reminding people that there are moral and ethical ways to act may be left to a few of us but someone needs to do it. We make laws and then either get the police involved or the courts rather than say to a neighbor whose young children are making loud noise at 1 am that they need to settle down. Or that thieves, robbers, cheaters are wrong and need to be caught and that companies that do not cooperate freely and easily with the police are just being obstructionists and helping the criminal in the long run.

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