"Ethics in Hard Times: Why Do (Other) People Make Bad Decisions?"

Melissa Burchard (University of North Carolina, Asheville)

The pandemic has created new hard times as well as exacerbated many ongoing difficulties. In these circumstances, I believe we need to pay special attention to our ethics to make sure that they don’t let us down. When times get tough, we need our ethics to stay strong, but because there are many factors in US society that work against ethics even in good times, we are likely to find ourselves morally challenged when hard times come around. And because we don’t have a strong public moral training or discourse even in good times, we may find ourselves baffled by the seeming absurdity of the decisions that others – or we – make when things get difficult. I will draw on work in moral theory by Laurence Thomas to help explain why people often don’t seem concerned to actually help others, by Seiriol Morgan to help explain why people are often inclined to treat others as a means to their own ends, and offer my own picture of how a morally unhealthy attachment to a misleading conception of liberty encourages people to mistake what is morally permissible. All these ideas about moral thinking in the US help explain some of the ways that people come to make the decisions that they do.