Heroes
Yad Vashem is situated on a hilltop outside Jerusalem. Established by the Israeli government to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and those who came to their aid, it is a shrine, a museum, and a research center. Leading toward the museum is a long, tree-lined avenue, the Allée des Justes, or Avenue of the Righteous. Each tree commemorates a non-Jewish person who risked her or his life in order to save a Jew during the Nazi period. Only those who gave help without expectation of reward or benefit are deemed worthy of inclusion among the righteous. Before a tree is planted a special committee, headed by a judge, scrutinizes all the available evidence concerning the individual who has been suggested for commemoration. Notwithstanding this strict test, the Avenue of the Righteous is not long enough to contain all the trees that need to be planted. The trees overflow onto a nearby hillside. There are now more than 6,000 of them. There must be many more rescuers of Jews from the Nazis who have never been identified. Estimates range from 50,000 to 500,000, but we will never really know. Harold Schulweis, who started a foundation that honors and assists such people, has pointed out that there are no Simon Wiesenthals to search out those who hid, fed, and saved the hunted. Yad Vashem, with a limited budget, can play only a passive role in reviewing evidence about people nominated by survivors. Many who were helped did not, in the end, survive; others prefer not to relive painful memories and have not come forward, or in any case could not identify their rescuers.
Perhaps the most famous of those commemorated at Yad Vashem is Raoul Wallenberg. In the early years of World War II, as the Nazis extended their rule across Europe, Wallenberg was leading a comfortable life as a Swedish businessman. Since Sweden was neutral, Wallenberg traveled extensively throughout Germany and to its ally, Hungary, in order to sell his firm’s line of specialty foods. But he was disturbed at what he saw and heard of the persecution of the Jews. One of his friends described him as depressed, and added, “I had the feeling he wanted to do something more worthwhile with his life.” In 1944, the scarcely credible news of the systematic extermination of the Jews began to build up to such a degree that it could no longer be ignored. The American government asked the Swedish government if, as a neutral nation, it could expand its diplomatic staff in Hungary, where there were still 750,000 Jews. It was thought that a strong diplomatic staff might somehow put pressure on the nominally independent Hungarian government to resist the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. The Swedish government agreed. Wallenberg was asked to go. In Budapest he found that Adolf Eichmann, who had been appointed by Himmler to administer the “final solution,” was determined to show his superiors just how ruthlessly efficient he could be in wiping out the Hungarian Jewish community. Wallenberg succeeded in persuading the Hungarian government to refuse Nazi pressure for further deportations of Jews, and for a brief interlude it seemed that he could return to Sweden, his mission accomplished. Then the Nazis overthrew the Hungarian government and installed in its place a puppet regime led by the Hungarian “Arrow Cross” Nazi party. The deportations began again. Wallenberg issued Swedish “protective passes” to thousands of Jews, declaring them to have connections with Sweden and to be under the protective custody of the Swedish government. At times he stood between the Nazis and their intended victims, saying that the Jews were protected by the Swedish government and the Nazis would have to shoot him first if they wanted to take them away. As the Red Army advanced on Budapest, the situation began to disintegrate. Other neutral diplomats left, but the danger remained that the Nazis and their Arrow Cross puppets would carry out a final massacre of the Jewish ghetto. Wallenberg remained in Budapest, risking falling bombs and the hatred of trigger-happy German SS and Hungarian Arrow Cross officers. He worked to get Jews to safer hiding places, and then to let the Nazi leaders know that if a massacre took place, he would personally see to it that they were hanged as war criminals. At the end of the war, 120,000 Jews were still alive in Budapest; directly or indirectly, most of them owed their lives to Wallenberg. Tragically, when the fighting in Hungary was over, Wallenberg himself disappeared and is presumed to have been killed, not by the Germans or the Arrow Cross, but by the Soviet secret police.1
Oskar Schindler was, like Wallenberg, a businessman, but of very different character and background. Schindler was an ethnic German from Moravia, in Czechoslovakia. Initially enthusiastic about the Nazi cause and the incorporation of the Czech provinces into Germany, he moved into Poland after the invading Nazi armies and took over a factory in Cracow, formerly Jewish-owned, that made enamelware. As the Nazis began taking the Jews of Cracow to the death camps, Schindler protected his Jewish workers, using as a justification the claim that his factory was producing goods essential for the war effort. On the railway platforms, as Jews were being herded into the cattle-cars that would take them to the extermination camps, he would bribe or intimidate SS officials into releasing some that he said belonged to, or had skills that were needed for, his factory. He used his own money on the black market, buying food to supplement the inadequate rations his workers received. He even traveled secretly to Budapest in order to meet with members of an underground network who could get news of the Nazi genocide to the outside world. Near the end of the war, as the Russian army advanced across Poland, he moved his factory and all his workers to a new “labor camp” he constructed at Brinnlitz in Moravia. It was the only labor camp in Nazi Europe where Jews were not beaten, shot, or worked or starved to death. All of this was very risky; twice Schindler was arrested by the Gestapo but bluffed his way out of their cells. By the end of the war, at least 1,200 of Schindler’s Jewish workers had survived; without Schindler they would almost certainly have died.
Schindler exemplifies the way in which people who otherwise show no signs of special distinction prove capable of heroic altruism under the appropriate circumstances. Schindler drank heavily and liked to gamble. (Once, playing cards with the brutal Nazi commandant of a forced labor camp, he wagered all his evening’s winnings for the commandant’s Jewish servant, saying that he needed a well-trained maid. He won, and thus saved the woman’s life.) After the war Schindler had an undistinguished career, failing in a succession of business ventures, from fur breeding to running a cement works.2
The stories of Wallenberg and Schindler are now well known, but there are thousands of other cases of people who took risks and made sacrifices to help strangers. Those documented at Yad Vashem include: a couple in Berlin with three children who moved out of one of the two rooms of their apartment, so that a Jewish family could live in the other room; a wealthy German who lost most of his money through his efforts to help Jews; and a Dutch mother of eight who, during the winter of 1944, when food was scarce, often went hungry, and rationed her children’s food too, so that their Jewish guests could survive. Samuel Oliner was a twelve-year-old boy when the Nazis decided to liquidate the ghetto of Bobowa, the Polish town in which he was living. His mother told him to run away; he escaped from the ghetto and was befriended by a Polish peasant woman who had once done some business with his father. She helped him assume a Polish identity and arranged for him to work as an agricultural laborer. Forty-five years later Oliner, then a professor at Humboldt State University in California, cowrote The Altruistic Personality, a study of the circumstances and characteristics of those who rescued Jews.3
I know from my own parents, Jews who lived in Vienna until 1938, that for each of these heroic stories there are many more that show less dramatic, but still significant, instances of altruism. In my parents’ escape from Nazi Europe, the altruism of a virtual stranger proved more effective than ties of kinship. When Hitler marched into Vienna my newly wedded parents sought to emigrate; but where could they go? To obtain an entry visa, countries like the United States and Australia required that one be sponsored by a resident, who would guarantee that the new immigrants would be of good behavior and would not be a burden on the state. My father had an uncle who, several years earlier, had emigrated to the United States. He wrote seeking sponsorship. The uncle replied that he was very willing to sponsor my father, but since he had never met my mother, he was not willing to extend the sponsorship to her! In desperation my mother turned to an Australian whom she had met only once, through a mutual acquaintance, when he was a tourist in Vienna. He had not met my father at all; but he responded immediately to my mother’s request, arranged the necessary papers, met my parents on the wharf when their ship arrived, and did everything he could to make them feel welcome in their new country.
Sadly, my parents’ efforts to persuade their own parents to leave Vienna were not heeded with sufficient speed. My mother’s father, for example, was a teacher at Vienna’s leading academic high school, until the school was ordered to dismiss all Jewish teachers. Despite the loss of employment, he believed that since he was a veteran of World War I, wounded in battle and decorated for gallantry, he and his wife would be safe from any attack on their person or lives. Until 1942 my grandparents continued to live in Vienna, under increasingly difficult conditions, until they were sent to concentration camps, which only my maternal grandmother survived. Even during the grim years of the war prior to 1942, however, we know from letters that my parents received that some non-Jews visited them, to bring news and comfort. When my grandfather became nervous about possessing his ceremonial sword (because Jews had for some time been forbidden to keep weapons), a friend of my mother’s hid the sword under her coat and threw it into a canal. This woman was also a schoolteacher; her refusal to join the Nazi Party cost her any chance of promotion. Non-Jewish former pupils of my grandfather continued to visit him in his flat, and one refused to accept a university chair because he would then have been compelled to support Nazi doctrines. These were not heroic, lifesaving acts, but they were also not without a certain risk. The important point, for our purposes, is that all the social pressure on these people was pushing them in the opposite direction: to have nothing to do with Jews, and certainly not to help them in any way. Yet they did what they thought right, not what was easiest to do or would bring them the most benefit.
Primo Levi was an Italian chemist who was sent to Auschwitz because he was Jewish. He survived, and wrote If This Is a Man, an extraordinarily telling account of his life as a slave on rations that were not sufficient to sustain life. He was saved from death by Lorenzo, a non-Jewish Italian who was working for the Germans as a civilian on an industrial project for which the labor of the prisoners was being used. I cannot do better than close this section with Levi’s reflections on what Lorenzo did for him:
In concrete terms it amounts to little: an Italian civilian worker brought me a piece of bread and the remainder of his ration every day for six months; he gave me a vest of his, full of patches; he wrote a postcard on my behalf and brought me the reply. For all this he neither asked nor accepted any reward, because he was good and simple and did not think that one did good for a reward.
… I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid, as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror, something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving.
The personages in these pages are not men. Their humanity is buried, or they themselves have buried it, under an offence received or inflicted on someone else. The evil and insane SS men, the Kapos, the politicals, the criminals, the prominents, great and small, down to the indifferent slave Häftlinge [prisoners], all the grades of the mad hierarchy created by the Germans paradoxically fraternized in a uniform internal desolation.
But Lorenzo was a man; his humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was outside this world of negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man.4
A Green Shoot
We must, of course, be thankful for the fact that today we can help strangers without dreading the knock of the Gestapo on our door. We should not imagine, however, that the era of heroism is over. Those who took part in the “velvet revolution” that overthrew communism in Czechoslovakia, and in the parallel movement for democracy in East Germany, took great personal risks and were not motivated by thoughts of personal gain. The same can be said of the thousands who turned out to surround the Russian parliament in defense of Boris Yeltsin in his resistance to the hard-liners’ coup that deposed Mikhail Gorbachev. The supreme contemporary image of this kind of courage, however, comes not from Europe, but from China. It is a picture that appeared on television and in newspapers around the world: a lone Chinese student standing in front of a column of tanks rolling toward Tiananmen Square.
In liberal democracies, living an ethical life does not involve this kind of risk, but there is no shortage of opportunities for ethical commitment to worthwhile causes. My involvement in the animal liberation movement has brought me into contact with thousands of people who have made a fundamental decision on ethical grounds: they have changed their diet, given up meat, or, in some cases, abstained from all animal products. This is a decision that affects your life every day. Moreover, in a society in which most people continue to eat meat, becoming a vegetarian inevitably has an impact on how others think about you. Yet thousands of people have done this, not because they believe that they will be healthier or live longer on such a diet—although this may be the case—but because they became convinced that there is no ethical justification for the way in which animals are treated when they are raised for food. For example, Mrs. A. Cardoso wrote from Los Angeles:
I received your book, Animal Liberation, two weeks ago … I thought you would like to know that overnight it changed my thinking and I instantly changed my eating habits to that of the vegetarian … Thank you for making me aware of our selfishness.
There have been many letters like this. Some of the writers had no particular interest in the treatment of animals before they more or less accidentally came into contact with the issue. Typical of these is Alan Skelly, a high school teacher from the Bahamas:
As a high school teacher I was asked to become involved in the general studies taught to grade eleven. I was asked to prepare three consecutive lessons on any social topic. My wife had been given a small leaflet, ‘Animal Rights,’ by a child in her class. I wrote to the organization, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, in Washington, DC and received on hire the video ‘Animal Rights.’ This video has had such an impact upon my wife and I that we are now vegetarians and committed to animal liberation. They also sent me a copy of your book, Animal Liberation … Please be aware that fourteen years after the publication of your book you are responsible for the radicalization and commitment of my wife and I to animal liberation. Perhaps next month when I show PETA’s video to 100 eleventh grade students I may also extend others’ moral boundaries.
Some of the people who write tell me of particular difficulties they may have; how they can’t get non-leather hiking boots, or see no practical alternative to killing mice that get into their house. One had a retail fur and leather shop when he became convinced that we ought not to be killing animals for their skins—he has had problems convincing his partner to change the nature of the business! Others want to know what to feed their dogs and cats, or whether I think prawns can feel pain. Some practice their new diets alone; others work together with groups trying to change the way animals are treated. A few risk their own freedom, breaking into laboratories in order to document the pain and suffering occurring there, and perhaps to release a few animals. Wherever they draw the line, they all provide significant evidence that ethical argument can change people’s lives. Once they were convinced that it is wrong to rear hens in small wire cages to produce eggs more cheaply, or to put pigs in stalls too narrow for them to turn around, these people decided that they had to bring about a moral revolution in their own lives.
Animal liberation is one of many causes that rely on the readiness of people to make an ethical commitment. For two gay Americans, the cause was the outbreak of AIDS. Jim Corti, a medical nurse, and Martin Delaney, a corporate consultant, were horrified to discover that American regulations prevented their HIV-positive friends from receiving novel drugs that appeared to offer some hope for people with AIDS. They drove to Mexico, where the drugs were available, and smuggled them back into the United States. Soon they found themselves running an illegal worldwide operation, smuggling drugs and fighting government bureaucracies that sought to protect people dying from an incurable disease against drugs that were not proven safe and effective. Eventually, after taking considerable risks and doing a lot of hard work, they succeeded in changing government policies so that AIDS patients—and all those with terminal diseases—have quicker access to experimental treatments.5
Australia’s most memorable wilderness struggle took place in 1982 and 1983, when 2,600 people sat in front of bulldozers that were being used to begin construction of a dam on the Franklin river, in southwest Tasmania. The Franklin was Tasmania’s last wild river, and the dam, to be built to generate electricity, would flood dramatic gorges and rapids, obliterate Aboriginal heritage sites, destroy Huon pines that had taken 2,000 years to grow, and drown the animals that lived in the forests. The blockaders came from all over Australia, some traveling thousands of miles at their own expense from Queensland and Western Australia. They included teachers, doctors, public servants, scientists, farmers, clerks, engineers, and taxi drivers. Almost half were arrested by the police, mostly charged with trespassing. A team of twenty lawyers, all volunteers, helped with court proceedings. Nearly 450 people refused to accept bail conditions, and spent between two and twenty-six days in jail. Professor David Bellamy, the world-renowned English botanist, traveled around the world to take part in the blockade and was duly arrested. Interviewed later in the local police lockup, he said:
It was the most uplifting thing I have ever been part of, to see such a broad cross-section of society peacefully demonstrating in quite inhospitable weather against the destruction of something they all believed in.6
Ethical commitment, no matter how strong, is not always rewarded; but this time it was. The blockade made the Franklin dam a national issue and contributed to the election of a federal Labor government pledged to stop it. The Franklin still runs free.
These exciting struggles exemplify one aspect of a commitment to living ethically, but to focus too much on them can be misleading. Ethics appears in our lives in much more ordinary, everyday ways. As I was writing this chapter, my mail brought me the newsletter of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Australia’s leading conservation lobby group. It included an article by the foundation’s fund-raising coordinator, in which he reported on a trip to thank a donor who had regularly sent donations of $1,000 or more. When he reached the address he thought something must be wrong; he was in front of a very modest suburban home. But there was no mistake: David Allsop, an employee of the state department of public works, donates 50 percent of his income to environmental causes. David had previously worked as a campaigner himself, and said he found it deeply satisfying now to be able to provide the financial support for others to campaign.7
There is something uplifting about ethical commitment, whether or not we share the objectives. No doubt some who read these pages will think that it is wrong to release animals from laboratories, no matter what the animals might suffer; others will think that everyone ought to abide by the decisions of the state’s planning procedures on whether or not a new dam should go ahead. They may think that those who take the opposite view are not acting ethically at all. Yet they should be able to recognize the unselfish commitment of those who took part in these actions. In the abortion controversy, for example, I can acknowledge the actions of opponents of abortion as ethically motivated, even while I disagree with them about the point from which human life ought to be protected and deplore their insensitivity to the feelings of young pregnant women who are harassed when going to clinics that provide abortions.
In contrast to most of the examples given so far, I shall now consider some in which unselfish, ethical action is a much quieter, more ordinary event, but no less significant for that. Maimonides, the greatest Jewish moral thinker of the medieval period, drew up a “Golden Ladder of Charity.” The lowest level of charity, he said, is to give reluctantly; the second lowest is to give cheerfully but not in proportion to the distress of the person in need; the third level is to give cheerfully and proportionately, but only when asked; the fourth to give cheerfully, proportionately, and without being asked, but to put the gift into the poor person’s hand, thus causing him to feel shame; the fifth is to give so that one does not know whom one benefits, but they know who their benefactor is; the sixth is to know whom we benefit, but to remain unknown to them; and the seventh is to give so that one does not know whom one benefits and they do not know who benefits them. Above this highly meritorious seventh level Maimonides placed only the anticipation of the need for charity, and its prevention by assisting others to earn their own livelihood so as not to need charity at all.8 It is striking that 800 years after Maimonides graded charity in this way, many ordinary citizens take part in what he would classify as the highest possible level of charity, at least where prevention is not possible. This happens at the voluntary blood banks that are—in Britain, Australia, Canada, and many European countries—the only source of supply for the very large amount of human blood needed for medical purposes. The gift of blood is in one sense a very intimate one (the blood that is flowing in my body will later be inside the body of another); and in another sense a very remote one (I will never know who receives my blood, nor will the recipient know from whom the blood came). It is relatively easy to give blood. Every healthy person, rich or poor, can give it, without risk. Yet to the recipient, the gift can be as precious as life itself.
It is true that only a minority of the population (in Britain, about 6 percent of people eligible to donate) actually do donate.9 It is also true that to give blood is not much of a sacrifice. It takes an hour or so, involves a slight prick, and may make you feel a little weak for the next few hours, but that is all. How many people, a skeptic might ask, would be prepared to make a real sacrifice so that a stranger could live?
If the willingness to undergo anesthesia and stay overnight in a hospital is enough of a real sacrifice, we now know that hundreds of thousands of people are prepared to do this. In recent years, bone marrow donor registries have been established in about twenty-five countries. In the United States, about 650,000 people have registered and 1,300 have donated. Figures in some other countries are comparable. For instance, in France, 63,000 have registered and 350 have donated; England has had 180,000 registrations and 700 donations to date; in Canada, 36,000 have registered, and 83 have donated; while Denmark’s registrations total 10,000, with five donations. Approximately 25,000 Australians have registered on the Australian Bone Marrow Donor Registry, and at the time of writing, ten have already donated bone marrow.10 With calm deliberation, in a situation untouched by nationalism or the hysteria of war, and with no prospect of any tangible reward, a number of ordinary citizens are prepared to go to considerable lengths to help a stranger.
We should not be surprised about this willingness to help. As the American author Alfie Kohn puts it in a cheery book called The Brighter Side of Human Nature:
It is the heroic acts that turn up in the newspaper (“Man Dives into Pond to Save Drowning Child”) and upstage the dozens of less memorable prosocial behaviors that each of us witnesses and performs in a given week. In my experience, cars do not spin their wheels on the ice for very long before someone stops to give a push. We disrupt our schedules to visit sick friends, stop to give directions to lost travelers, ask crying people if there is anything we can do to help.… All of this, it should be stressed, is particularly remarkable in light of the fact that we are socialized in an ethic of competitive individualism. Like a green shoot forcing its way up between the concrete slabs of a city sidewalk, evidence of human caring and helping defies this culture’s ambivalence about—if not outright discouragement of—such activity.11
Countless voluntary charities depend on public donations; and most also rely on something that, for many of us, is even harder to give: our own time. American surveys indicate that nearly 90 percent of Americans give money to charitable causes, including 20 million families who give at least 5 percent of their income to charity. Eighty million Americans—nearly half the adult population—volunteer their time; they contributed a total of 15 billion hours of volunteer work in 1988.12
We act ethically as consumers, too. When the public learned that the use of aerosols containing CFCs damages the ozone layer, the sale of those products fell significantly, before any legal phaseout had come into effect. Consumers had gone to the trouble of reading the labels and choosing products without the harmful chemicals, even though each of them could have chosen not to be bothered. A leading advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson, surveyed American consumers in 1990 and found that 82 percent indicated that they were prepared to pay more for environmentally friendly products. Between a third and half said that they had already made some environmental choices with their spending dollars. For example, 54 percent said that they had already stopped using aerosol sprays.13
The Council on Economic Priorities is a United States organization that rates companies on their corporate citizenship records. The aspects rated are giving to charity, supporting the advancement of women and members of minority groups, animal testing, military contracts, community outreach, nuclear power, involvement with South Africa, environmental impact, and family benefits. The results are published annually in a paperback that has sold 800,000 copies. Presumably many of those who buy the book are interested in supporting companies that have a good record on ethical issues.
Many of the millions of customers who have helped to make The Body Shop a successful international cosmetics chain go there because they want to make sure that when they buy cosmetics, they are not supporting animal testing or causing damage to the environment. From small beginnings, the organization has grown at an average rate of 50 percent per annum, and sales are now around $150 million a year. Similarly, mutual investment funds that restrict their investments to corporations that satisfy ethical guidelines have become much more significant in the last decade, as people become concerned about the ethical impact of their investments and not only about the financial return they may gain.14
These examples of ethical conduct have focused on ethical acts that help strangers, or the community as a whole, or nonhuman animals, or the preservation of wilderness, because these are the easiest to identify as altruistic, and therefore as ethical. But most of our daily lives, and hence most of our ethical choices, involve people with whom we have some relationship. The family is the setting for much of our ethical decision-making; so is the workplace. When we are in long-standing relationships with people, it is less easy to see clearly whether we do what we do because it is right, or because we want, for all sorts of reasons, to preserve the relationship. We may also know that the other person will have opportunities to pay us back—to assist us, or to make life difficult for us—according to how we behave toward him or her. In such relationships, ethics and self-interest are inextricably mingled, along with love, affection, gratitude, and many other central human feelings. The ethical aspect may still be significant.
Why Do People Act Ethically?
Cynics believe that if only we probe deeply enough, we will find that self-interest lurks somewhere beneath the surface of every ethical action. In contrast to this view, evolutionary theory, properly understood, predicts that we will be concerned for the welfare of our kin, members of our group, and those with whom we may enter into reciprocal relationships. Now we have seen that many people act ethically in circumstances that cannot be explained in any of these ways. Oskar Schindler was not furthering his own interests, or those of his kin or of his group, when he bribed and cajoled SS officers to protect Jewish prisoners from deportation to the death camps. To a successful non-Jewish German businessman, the abject and helpless Jewish prisoners of the SS would hardly have been promising subjects with whom to begin a reciprocal relationship. (Real life has unpredictable twists; as it happened, many years after the war, when Schindler was struggling to find a career for himself, some of those whose lives he had saved were able to help him; but in 1942, as far as anyone could possibly tell, the prudent thing for Schindler to do would have been to keep his mind on his business, or relax with the wine, women, and gambling that he obviously enjoyed.) Similar things can be said about other rescuers in thousands of well-documented cases. The point is sufficiently established, though, by the more humdrum example of blood donation. Since this is an institution that continues to thrive, it is easier to investigate.
Richard Titmuss, a distinguished British social researcher, published the results of a study of nearly 4,000 British blood donors in a splendid book called The Gift Relationship. He asked his sample of donors why they first gave blood, and why they continued to give. Overwhelmingly, people from all levels of education and income answered that they were trying to help others. Here is one example, from a young married woman who worked as a machine operator:
You can’t get blood from supermarkets and chain stores. People themselves must come forward, sick people can’t get out of bed to ask you for a pint to save their life, so I came forward in hope to help somebody who needs blood.
A maintenance fitter said simply:
No man is an island.
A bank manager wrote:
I felt it was a small contribution that I could make to the welfare of humanity.
And a widow on a pension answered:
Because I am fortunate in having good health myself and like to think my blood can help someone else back to health, and I felt this was a wonderful service I wanted to be part of.15
Aristotle suggested that we become virtuous by practicing virtue, in much the same way as we become players of the lyre, a kind of ancient harp, by playing the lyre. In some respects this seems a strange idea, but it is supported by further research on the motivation of blood donors. Professor Ernie Lightman, of the University of Toronto, surveyed 2,000 voluntary blood donors and found that their first donation was prompted by some outside event, such as an appeal from a blood bank for more donors, the fact that friends or colleagues were donating, or the convenience of a place to donate. As time passed, however, these external motivators became less significant, and “ideas such as a sense of duty and support for the work of the Red Cross, along with a general desire to help” became more important. Lightman concludes that “with repeated performance of a voluntary act over time, the sense of personal, moral obligation assumed increasing importance.” Researchers at the University of Wisconsin have also studied the motivation of blood donors and found that the greater the number of donations the donors have made, the less likely they were to say that they were prompted to give by the expectations of others, and the more likely they were to say that they were motivated by a sense of moral obligation and responsibility to the community. So maybe Aristotle was right: the more we practice virtue, for whatever reason, the more likely we are to become virtuous in an inner sense as well.16
Altruistic action is easy to recognize as ethical, but much ethical behavior is quite compatible with regard for one’s own interests. Here is one last example, this time from my own experience. As a teenager, I worked during the summer holidays in my father’s office. It was a small family business, importing coffee and tea. Among the correspondence I had to read were, occasionally, letters that my father sent out to the exporters from whom he had purchased goods, reminding them that they had not yet sent him invoices for goods dispatched a considerable time ago. Sometimes it was clear, from the length of time that had elapsed, that something had slipped through the system in the “accounts payable” section of the exporter’s business. If the exporters were large firms, they might never have noticed their mistake; for us, on the other hand, since we worked on gross profit margins of 3 percent, one or two “free” consignments would have made more profit than a month’s normal trading. So why not, I asked my father, let the exporters look after their own problems? If they remembered to ask for their money, well and good, if they did not, better still! His reply was that that was not how decent people did business; and anyway, to send these reminders built up trust, which was vital for any business relationship and would in the long run rebound to our profit. The answer, in other words, hovered between references to an ethical ideal of how one ought to behave (what it is to be virtuous in business, one might say) and a justification in terms of long-term self-interest. Despite this ambivalence, my father was clearly acting ethically.
Ethics is everywhere in our daily lives. It lies behind many of our choices, whether personal or political or bridging the division between the two. Sometimes it comes easily and naturally to us; in other circumstances, it can be very demanding. But ethics intrudes into our conscious lives only occasionally, and often in a confused way. If we are to make properly considered ultimate choices, we must first become more aware of the ethical ramifications of the way we live. Only then is it possible to make ethics a more conscious and coherent part of everyday life.