When Ethics Become a Luxury

You're listening to The Uppercase Life, where we're all about being good at doing good. I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. The world keeps turning. And for those of us who have big ideas and burning ambition, sometimes it feels like there just aren't enough hours in the day to do all those things we desire, much less all those other things that we're obligated to do, whether we would like to do them or not.
And with a smart phone in hand, we venture out into the world. We're busily darting from one task to the next, and often we're filling those spare moments with furtive glances at messages or mindlessly browsing social media. It's like we are looking up. Less and less. We feel driven to do more and more. And due to our always connected culture and this burgeoning work from home movement that's come up over the last decade.
The average worker today experiences less what I would call separation between work and personal time than ever before. Our demanding lifestyles turn us into demanding people with lower tolerances for things like long wait times, whether we're at a restaurant or whether we're ordering an item shipped to us from the other side of the world. And I feel this all the time.
I order things off of Amazon and I want them now, if possible. Tomorrow at the latest. Two days is a long wait. I mean, but really, what's wrong with that? The times are changing. We can move faster. We can do more. We can spend our free time indulging in this wealth of information and entertainment that's available at our fingertips.
We're living life to the fullest, right? Well, sure, we could do that. Maybe you find the exhaustion of modern life a fair trade for the incredible amount of information and opportunity that we have today. And honestly, a lot of times I feel that way. Maybe you'd argue that the speed of life today isn't really doing you any harm.
And maybe you're right. Maybe it isn't. But what if it eroded away your values? What if you realized that it was beginning to corrode your ethics? What if your character began to suffer as a result of your high intensity routine? Sound a little dramatic or unlikely? What if the speed of your life made being ethical more like a luxury that you just couldn't afford?
Well, actually, that was the conclusion of John Darley and Daniel Batson. In the 1970s, Darley and Batson began thinking about a biblical parable called the Good Samaritan. And in this parable, a man is in need on a highly trafficked road between Jerusalem and Jericho, and he's waylaid by thieves and badly injured. Several devout religious figures pass by the man, but they don't end up stopping to help him.
They have appointments to keep and they presumably don't want to get involved. They don't know what happened to this guy or why he's there. But then a traveling Samaritan notices the man and helps him to safety, paying for his food and paying for his lodging before he continues on his own journey. And although the story of the Good Samaritan is upheld as a heroic tale in a kind of an ethical act, Darley and Batson wondered how our level of hardness might affect our willingness to be that generous and that kind.
And what better place to test some theory like this than a theological seminary, a place where people would be highly aware of this parable and would hopefully be inspired ing to such ethical standards. And so they set up the experiment at a seminary. They picked 40 volunteers, and they gave these volunteers different levels of information. They had them travel from one area on the campus to another, and in their path, they placed a person, an actor, who appeared to be someone slumped in an alleyway, possibly injured.
Unknown. They would see this person as they went on their way, and they would have the option to do something or not. Now, they gave these participants different goals. So for some of them, they told them, you have to go to the other side of the campus and perform this task and you have this amount of time to get there.
For others, they told them, You are already running behind, you're late and you need to hurry on your way. And there were various levels of control for the different groups that they had. But the short end of this experiment was, as you might expect, the people who were told that they were already late or that time was critical walked past this person in need and didn't stop to help them.
Whereas the people who felt like they had some additional time or were not in as big of a hurry, had a much, much higher percentage of likelihood to either personally help the man or to find help for the man by calling for the aid of others. And the conclusion for Darley and Batson was this As the speed of daily life increases, ethics become a luxury.
Maybe your hurry doesn't seem to hurt you. But what if you had the unique opportunity to make a difference in the lives of others and your inability to look up and your pressure to keep moving is creating unethical and calloused habits in your daily life. Maybe it is time to slow down. Maybe it's time to take the headphones out to look around when you're at the red light, to put your phone away for a little bit and ask yourself, is there a need here that I could meet?
Is there someone on my road today waiting for me to be their Good Samaritan? Don't trade your ethics for efficiency. Remember what's important and always be willing to prioritize people over productivity.