Cheating in Life

Just now Enron executives are coming under trial. These people made millions of dollars in personal wealth while driving the stock price up through devious means. In the end, the company crashed to the ground, leaving many workers without pension plans, which were heavy in Enron stock. Some of these executives, it seems, don't even consider their behavior to have been wrong, pleading innocence to charges brought against them. What could have motivated these people to commit such serious crimes? Further, how could they possibly view their actions as anything but a crime?

In the same way that large corporate scandals are committed, people cheat on their taxes or accept too much change from the corner store. These seem like mundane actions, in the latter case, not even a crime, but when widespread these acts add up and point to a societal cheating problem. There is an "everyone's doing it" mentality is cheating at life, just as there was in the realm of academic cheating. Why shouldn't you cheat on your taxes if you know people richer than you doing it? Don't you need the money more than they do?

As these many of these cheating issues tend to be financial, a lot of times there's also a feeling of entitlement. In the current economy, there's a large gap between the very well compensated and the unskilled working class. This gap leads to people, often rightfully, thinking they are under compensated. Should they be allowed to compensate themselves a little to make up for the money they deserve to be making? Is it o.k. for the corner mechanic to lie about the service on your car if it's what allows him to make ends meet? These people are often only cheating to compensate for the rising cost of living and their poor socioeconomic status, so could it be right?

If we allow the economically disadvantaged to get away with their financial wrangling, how do we justify the Enron and WorldCom executives of the world? Some of these people were cheating only to maintain the status quo at the company, which often benefited themselves financially, but also meant jobs were not lost and the economy was not affected. The deceit was never meant to be a long term solution, many claim that they expected to recoup losses shortly, but found it became a cycle to overstate earnings in larger and larger ways to maintain the same appearances. Do the motivations behind these crimes matter? Does saving jobs in the short-term offset losing people's pensions in the long-term?

Philosophically, some of these instances of cheating in life could actually be justified. If we are to believe Hobbes in his belief that every person should protect themselves, most of the mentioned cases of cheating are doing precisely that. To further Hobbes case, he is often writing about the government being corrupt and not watching out for the people, so they must watch out for themselves. This philosophy would squarely agree that tax evasion is not only a justifiable action, but also could be considered the right action. From a utilitarian standpoint, some of these acts are more justifiable than others. Victimless crimes, such as small scale cheating of a company where no one will specifically feel the financial burden, are hard to argue against. The cheating obviously benefits the cheater in a net positive way, and often benefits the family of the cheater, too. Tax evasion might also be argued a victimless crime - the government doesn't miss a couple thousand dollars when the federal budget is in the trillions. Other crimes, such as the large scale corporate fraud seen with Enron may benefit everyone in the short term, but in the long term negatively affect a much wider range of people ranging from employees who lost their jobs to the state of California, which suffered power deficits and extremely high energy prices. Further, none of these instances of cheating is universalizable, all would cause a collapse of the system which enables them.

It seems that the small instances of cheating, almost consistently philosophically wrong, as too easy to mentally justify in other ways. How do you justify these types of cheating? Is tax evasion right? How should our society work to rid ourselves of the mindset that we are entitled or that everyone else is doing it?

This post is based upon readings from David Callahan’s “The Cheating Culture”, Bethany McLean and Peter Elkin’s “The Smartest Guys in the Room” and statistics from the Budget of the United States Government.