Money Modulates Morality: The number in your bank account changes the way you morally self-evaluate.
A Tuesday Tantrum
Tantrum Tuesday
If you’re a new reader to the blog, welcome to Tantrum Tuesday! On Tuesday I pick a topic that pisses me off and, well, I throw a tantrum about it. Today, we’re going to talk about how our society has a very nontraditional sort of moral relativism: one based on cold hard cash.
Feeling Blue
In 2019 a college admissions scandal broke news in America, the code name for the investigation into the scandal was “Operation Varsity Blues.”
Varsity blues tracked a college admissions coach who had formed a cabal with several athletic coaches of obscure sports at top universities to sell a “side door” to guaranteed admission via falsified athletic excellence.
Why was this called a “side door” and not a “back door?” Because there was already a backdoor, and it’s perfectly legal to use: large donations to university development funds. The price of the side door is off by a magnitude from the price of the back door. If you wanted to buy your child back-door admission into an Ivy the price tag starts in the tens of millions and goes up. The side door, however, started in the 500k-1 million range.
When the story broke, people were outraged. Implicated students and coaches received death threats despite the decades-long open secret of the back door. Harvard maintains special interest lists “Dean’s Interest List” and “Director’s List” during the admissions process which noted applicants from 1-.1% families who were likely to give generously to the endowment.
Today I want to talk about why people are sending death threats to c-list celebrities that wanted to buy their child’s way into prestige, but not doing the same to the 9.34% of Harvard admits that came from the “Dean’s Interest List” and “Director’s List” between 2010 and 2015.
Moral Relitavi$m
The public wasn’t mad that Felicity Huffman had the gall to attempt to buy her daughter’s way into USC. They were mad that she had the gall to try to do it at a bargain bin price. If the Huffman’s had instead donated $20 million dollars to the university with a wink and a nudge about a future wing on the library, their daughter would have received admission paperwork in the mail like everyone else, no fuss would have been raised, and the public would have been none the wiser.
But the Huffman’s didn’t have $20 million to spare, they had $500,000. Humans are a lot like crabs in a bucket. We take a sick joy in tearing down those who think to operate above their station. Buying your way into college is the privilege of oligarchs, not actresses.
This is telling of a deeper truth in the way that morality works in a capitalist system: it is relative to the number in your bank account. I’m not going to begin to list the ways that the legal system is unfairly slanted towards the wealthy, because that would imply a simpleton’s belief that law and morality are synonymous. Instead, I want to tell you a true story.
Tim The Time Thief
Time theft is a cool name for a shitty idea: that employees are stealing from their employers by lying about how much time they actually worked. Breezing by all the pretzel logic it takes to make it to this issue through the valley of darkness that is wage theft, let’s talk about my friend Tim.
Tim is a junior consultant out of school. He’s dirt poor and up to his neck in student debt, but is the only one working to support his wife and child. Tim was really thrilled to get such a good job, even if they are working him to the bone: he is doing practically all the work his seniors assured his clients they would be doing, taking a junior salary and billing at a senior rate. As is industry practice, he is encouraged to inflate his hours so that “if you do something that should have taken 15 minutes in 5 minutes, bill 15 minutes.”
Tim, understandably, feels conflicted about these practices. When he brings up his feelings of sliminess with his superiors, he is told to lay off it.
“That’s just the way this industry works. We understand it, the client understands it, you’ll get it soon enough. The client has money to burn, and they don’t care as long as the work gets done and it isn’t their head on the chopping block if things go south.”
Tim returns to work, assured that since everyone knows the subtext of the situation, no one is doing anything wrong. However, Tim doesn’t just bill time to the client- he’s also expected to supply time totals for internal work he’s been doing each week. Tim uses the same billing practices internally he uses with his clients, until one day he’s called into his boss’s office.
Boss: “Tim, I was looking over your time cards for last month and it said you logged a full 8 hours each day. You aren’t working from home, are you?”
Tim: “No I wrap everything up before I leave for the night.”
Boss: “How can it be then, Tim, that you’re able to arrive at 9am, take a one hour lunch every day, and leave at 5pm, yet still work 8 hours? That’s only 7.”
Tim: “Oh, I’m just a fast typist. I normally save around an hour a day on tasks that take slower typists more time. Time card entry, email, presentations- I normally can get about 15 minutes worth of work done in 5.”
Boss: “Tim, that’s time theft. You can’t log time cards that way- you’re stealing hours from the company. We pay you a salary for 40 hours a week. If you’re getting work done early, you should move on to another task, or put that extra time towards billable hours.”
Tim: “Oh, sorry… I just figured since that’s how we bill clients, then it would be how we billed internal time.”
Boss: “It’s different, Tim. If I catch you stealing time again, you’ll be cleaning out your desk.”
Tim leaves the meeting red in the face. He feels foolish that he could have made such a stupid mistake. He’s extremely worried about his job and berates himself for playing so fast and loose with the rules. He wonders if his boss thinks he’s a bad person now. He feels like a bad person, for lying about how many hours he actually worked, knowing now that it put his job, and by extension his wife and son, in jeopardy.
However, over the next few weeks, Tim grows resentful. Why is it OK that the company should be able to lie to clients about time, but he can’t lie to them? Tim stays an extra hour after 5pm every day to make up for the lost lunch hour, but he doesn’t work- instead he just watches funny videos online, and logs the time as “Personal Development.”
Is Tim a bad person? He’s putting his wife and child at risk by continuing to lie on his time cards. On top of that, he’s breaking the law by stealing time from his employer and falsifying time cards. In an absolutist framework, he’s definitely acting immorally.
Let’s say now that Tim has a coworker, Elle, who is in the same situation as Tim, but has no debt- in fact, she comes from family money. When their boss threatened Elle’s job, she scoffed. Unemployment isn’t really a threat to her, since she has more than enough funds to keep her husband and child fed and housed while she looks for a new job.
Immediately we can see that despite taking the same actions, Tim and Elle evaluate them with different moral weights because of their situations. Tim risks the safety and health of his family for what he considers lazy behavior, and is constantly eaten up inside by guilt and worry. Elle doesn’t really think about it- she actually eggs Tim on by sending him funny videos throughout the day.
In fact, the only player in this story that actually has to face the moral consequence of their lies is Tim. Tim’s company is just doing business as usual by rounding up billable hours to clients. Elle isn’t risking anything of genuine material consequence. If all three of them are found out, only Tim will have to pay the social and moral price of being viewed as a lazy failure for not doing his job.
If I Had A Million Dollars…
If Tim won the lottery tomorrow, he would suddenly find himself in the same moral situation as Elle: able to Slack off without guilt because the consequences are now, well, inconsequential.
This is the moral structure of our current society. Those with resources are not just afforded more opportunity, but more leeway should they fail. Beyond morality, this distinct effect is why we see so many entrepreneurs and artists from wealth: they are the ones who can afford to try and try again.
Think about a moral dilemma you are currently facing or have faced in the past. Have you, for example, ever overspent towards the end of your pay cycle, when you know your impulsivity will make for some awkward decisions before your next paycheck? Ask yourself, would having 10 million dollars in your bank account have changed the calculus of your decision? Would you have felt more morally justified in acting with less care?
What about a decision your spouse, friend, or parent made? Was something that seemed inconsiderate to you barely even an afterthought to them because they live in a world where money has less moral weight, or vice-versa?
Realize that Tim has friends, like me, who will judge his actions as moral or immoral. Without the benefit of knowing Tim’s financial situation, I wouldn’t judge him any more harshly than a kid slacking off in school. After I learned that he was the sole breadwinner and was playing fast and loose with his job, I couldn’t shake the conviction that he was doing something improper.
Let’s bring things back to the admissions scandal. The nation as a whole judged the Huffman’s actions as improper. They tried to play with money in a way that is only reserved for a class above them; not just reserved, but sanctioned and encouraged. Certain action, and therefore certain morality, does not belong to the plebs.
In the case of Varsity Blues, there was a sick group satisfaction in tearing down celebrities to the moral level of us proles and punish them in the same way we would punish any one of our own who attempt to cheat the system.
Counterarguments
This was not an argument about moral weight that changes in the presence of wealth, though I am sure interesting arguments are there to be made. This article is about how we feel about our own actions, and those of others in our society, based on how much money is the actor’s bank account. No doubt there will be some who insist their minds are entirely unswayed by the presence of money, to which I say you are one of four things: an absolutist, a liar, a fool, or already wealthy. 1
Money represents the ability to enact direct change. I’d be interested to hear how communities like Effective Altruism think about this. EA’s tend to support “earning to give,” and will accept negative externalities of a role in finance or tech if the salary is good enough to power impactful donation.
There are cases in which the wealthy are actually punished more heavily than they would be had they been poor, such as Lucky Whitehead being fired from the Cowboys for shoplifting, even though it was later proved to be mistaken identity. Before you offer them as a counterargument, remember that the Varsity Blues case we started the article with is one of these cases.
Conclusion
People take sick satisfaction in dragging down those who attempt to excel unscrupulously, without considering that they don’t apply the same scruples to companies or the richest of the rich. We allow our moral judgments and self-reflections to be colored and shaped by the material reality of money. I ask that next time you come upon a moral dilemma, ask yourself if you would approach it differently with $10 million dollars in you pocket.
EDIT: Per the comments, this was a bit of a bold statement- there are a lot of edge cases, like neurodivergence, where normative statements about moral reasoning don’t hold true. Please take my brashness with healthy skepticism and a big grain of salt.
Money Modulates Morality: The number in your bank account changes the way you morally self-evaluate.
You seem to be inferring a lot about what “the public” thinks, primarily from what looks to me like stories published by the priestly caste. People getting death threats from weirdos on the internet is par for the course for anyone in the news.
What would it look like if most adults already saw that the only difference is that these were illegal bribes? What would it look like if much of the general public saw no real difference between these two forms of bribery, and actively disliked the whole system of elite colleges?
I think the news coverage treats these things differently because the priestly caste derives it’s authority from an unreasonable belief that elite institutions provide better education and are selected for primarily on the basis on talent.
Perhaps only a small subset of the credulous public that takes the news industry seriously reacted the way you are describing, and most of the public sees “Harvard” as being nothing more than a wealthy corporation.
You’re claiming money influences all this, and agree, but I also think you can claim to hate rich people with basically zero social consequences. The same can’t be said for any other small group. I don’t think things are as simple as saying “people will make excuses for you if you have money”, - the rules seems to be a bit more like, they’ll make excuses as long as you claim to be on the side of good. People who say there is too much money in politics will cheer a cabal of billionaires and politicians meeting to discuss how the globe should be governed, as long as those meetings produce claims that line up with with that priestly caste says about various dogmas.
> No doubt there will be some who insist their minds are entirely unswayed by the presence of money, to which I say you are one of four things: an absolutist, a liar, a fool, or already wealthy.
I'm on the autism spectrum and feel a little misrepresented here. To me, Tim's case isn't about him acting (ir)responsibly, but about a glaring display of double standard that I find morally outrageous. Maybe you want to add "neurodivergent" to that list?
Otherwise, I enjoyed reading this. The mechanism is no longer a total mystery to me as it has been the case when I was younger, but this is a good and (imo) accurate summary of what's going on. Thank you :)