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ON BEING MORAL
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Your Morality Versus Personal Gain Morality & Personal GainThink of it this way. Normally, you should follow laws and rules, and you should not egregiously harm someone, and you should be polite and considerate. Within those bounds, you can pursue your own personal gain. This is a moral 0, because you are not trying to be moral, you are merely avoiding immorality. There is nothing wrong with this; it is the natural state, most of the time.If you start breaking laws and rules for your own selfish gains, or you do other egregious harm to others, or you are not polite or considerate, then you are being immoral. That's a moral negative. When moral issues come into play, you should be moral. Now, you should actually sacrifice your normal personal goals, if they conflict with your moral goals. This is the moral positive. So, when you think you are being moral, a very simple check is whether you are also achieving your personal goals. ExampleMy issue began when I observed something that I thought should be reported to the proper authorities to be investigated -- in my mind, there was a high probability that someone had behaved improperly. (It turned out that there was nothing improper.) I pursued this issue because I thought, and still think, that pursuing the issue was the right thing to do. It took my time and energy. I was not going to make any money from it. In pursuing this issue, I had an emotional argument with someone who vehemently thought I was doing a horrible thing. He was, prior to that argument, likely to refer business to me. So I perhaps lost money pursuing this issue.Therefore, I could not have been pursuing my own personal goals. The organization thought they would benefit financially by joining the fight against me. That does not mean that they were not being moral. It is possible for moral goals to coincide with selfish goals. Instead, it is just a warning. Psychological FactorsIn addition to physical personal goals, such as saving money, psychological goals must be considered too. If I started out disliking the person I was reporting, then perhaps I was willing to lose things for the sake of hurting this person. (But in this case, if anything I liked the person I was reporting.)Being moral should give you a good feeling about yourself -- you should like yourself. That is a psychological advantage to being moral, but it does not count against you. (To the contrary, it is a very good reason for being moral.) Checking it Twice: The Imagining Different Circumstances TechniqueWhat do you do when you think an action is moral, but that action also accomplishes your personal goals? You can just be less confident, but there is a technique for addressing this issue, which I will call imagining-different-circumstances technique, or IDCT for short.What if I didn't like the person I was reporting? Perhaps I was being morally positive, but I have to worry that I am pursuing my personal goals. To use the IDCT, I have to imagine this: If it was someone else that I was reporting, someone that I didn't know, would I still want to do the same thing? When the organization decided to join the fight against me, I decided I would defend myself. At first, I thought I was being neither moral nor immoral. Basically, it wasn't good for the organization for me to defend myself, but I had a right to defend myself. But then I asked myself, what would I do if this organization was attacking someone else in the same circumstance? This is the IDCT. The answer was, I would have been angry, I would have been disappointed in the organization, and I would have fought for that person, at whatever cost it would have been to myself, because it would be the right thing to do. (When I think about it happening to someone else, I am a lot angrier than when I think about it happening to me.) So I was probably being a moral positive, it was just disguised by the fact that I was defending myself. Imagining a situation is not the same as actually being in it. The IDCT doesn't work perfectly, and it will work better for some people than others. It is just a tool to help you understand and identify your motivations for doing what you are doing.
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