"Amoral rather than admirable."
Careful there mate. I was raised amongst some pretty hard liners who would have some real objection to what you just said. (Deep, deep, deep conservative/capitalist/libertarian territory.)
What you may find hard to understand is that they are moral people. Their entire lives are lived in the service of very strict morals to which they are unswervingly dedicated. It is simply that their morals are completely and utterly different from yours or mine. To them, anyone who isn’t hard line conservative/capitalist/libertarian is immoral, trying to corrupt them, weaken them and steal from them. These people have a very defined sense of right and wrong, but it largely revolves around the idea of “what is mine is mine, what is yours is yours.” The ownership of (and right to) property/money/etc. is as deeply important to them as egalitarianism (and the right to live your life as you choose) is to me.
It’s all a lot greyer than that, too. For example, I believe in the right to own property/money/etc. I believe that this something worth defending, but I certainly view other rights as far more important. The democratic right to participate in one’s government is probably number one on my list. This is followed very closely by freedom of speech, assembly, religion, sexual orientation, right to privacy and other things that allow us to believe what we choose to believe. My morals say that it is from these rights and freedoms that all others flow. I view the right to own property, earn wealth and improve one’s station in life as an extension of those other rights. If we need to temporarily suspend, suppress or limit the right to hold property or earn wealth in order to defend these other rights and freedoms, I find this an acceptable trade off.
The conservative/capitalist/libertarians I was raised with believe in these things as well, but in a sense almost completely backward. To them, the single most important right is that of owning property and earning wealth. So long as a man has the right to improve his station in life all other rights flow from this as a natural consequence. They believe it so very deeply they are often willing to suppress all other rights and freedoms in order to defend that which they hold most dear.
To the conservative/capitalist/libertarians, I am thusly evil, because I would willingly suppress those rights they hold most dear in order to preserve that which I hold most dear. And as much as I try not to, I do tend to view them in the same light for the same reasons.
So the result of my long rant is that while you might call the people involved in things like Insider Trading “immoral,” there is every chance that according to their own belief systems, what they did was not only okay but actually Good and Right.
Isn’t moral relativism fun?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
