Opportunism and Subjective Ethics

The ethics of opportunism is a fascinating subject, and its one that I’ve been pondering, perhaps in a different light, for quite a while now. Opportunism plays a key role in understanding ethics and morality on the meta level. In my own study of ethics, I’ve found that all people can be broken down into two camps of ethical thinking: objective moralists and subjective moralists. To broadly define the two, objective moralists tend to believe in absolute truth, and with that tend to follow more traditional ideas of virtuous, or “good” behavior. Subjective moralists believe that truth lies in the experience of an individual, creating a system of loosely defined “good” and “bad”, “right” and “wrong”, favoring a system around “dialogue, not debate” wherein all viewpoints are held as equally ethical (so long as they’re within the Overton Window of polite society).  Before I go any further, I would like to point out that I place myself in the objectivist camp, and therefore my analysis should be read with that bias in mind. 

Anecdotally, I tend to find the vast majority of people in the modern US to belong to the subjective moralist category, where it has become a hallmark of left-leaning political ideologies, as well as most centrist, or even near-right policy decisions. I’d argue that the neo-reactionaries of today’s far-right are also subjective moralists, wishing to simply replace a system which they deem undervalues them with one that undervalues others. Here is where we can begin to see the opportunistic thinking inherent to subjectively moral ideologies. When all points are equally valid, the point or policy with the most backers becomes the one which is eventually adopted—not the one which is necessarily the most efficient or equitable. We can see that play out perhaps most simply in our political arena, which has seen major turmoil in the past few years due to increased fractionalization along lines of group identity.  With a true subjectivist mindset both the Alt-Right and the Culturally Marxist left are able to correctly claim moral superiority (as they are each living “their truth”), it’s largely impossible for the country as a whole to move forward. 

In a less politicized example, we could look at this from the standpoint of a public goods problem. Say a firm is polluting above the socially optimum level of pollution, which causes disastrous effects to the local environment and the people living in it. It could easily be said that they’re engaging in an opportunistic behavior: alleviating pollution is expensive and they’re cutting costs by not doing so, which is good for their bottom line. Following a subjective line of ethical reasoning, they could easily argue that this pollution is necessary for their firm to stay productive, and for their workers to be continually employed. This places them on somewhat of a different moral footing than had we been using an objective lens that they’re polluting above optimum, and therefore should be forced to correct. 

Of course, people don’t always behave in an opportunistic manner. Just because someone works on a subjective belief system, that does not mean they will always behave unethically, or even behave unethically often. It does; however, remove some of the moral incentive to behave in a non-opportunistic manor. Nor does this mean that people in the objectivist branch are wholly incapable in engaging in opportunistic behavior, especially if they can convince themselves that the efficient choice just so happens to be the one which aligns best with their own interests. In a world with an imperfect level of knowledge and communication, it’s impossible to know every variable which could impact a certain decision, which makes objective truth hard to prove. Both systems of thought have drawbacks, and can lead to opportunism when it suits them, and at the end of the day it is down to the individual to behave in a virtuous, efficient, and ethical manner.