I quote from a German press material called “Commission to save the world” (long live Google Translate!):
“The new fundraisers are cast: young, female and paid by the agency. The knitted jumpers have disappeared from the streets. Doing good has become a business.”
Take a look at all those ladies involved in making businesses do good [financially] by doing good [morally]. It is a whole new world, with a totally new dogma. Now, the new black is doing good. Is is bad? I don’t thinks so! But what I notice is a unprecedented development of the persuasive element. If yesterday a sick child was not shown, today, the new dogma preaches the naked truth, in its ugliest forms. It doesn’t matter if part of the child’s face is rotten or his belly darken by the dying flesh, the objective must be achieved, i.e., raise money.
Decency, as someone said to me, disappears when the life of a child is at stake. Getting the money for an urgent surgery by any means is morally justified. I am still troubled by this. I wonder myself if someone would agree that stealing a drug is morally justified if you want to save a child. Killing for a drug or smuggling heroin to make money for a surgey. Just like in that movie with Denzel Washington — John Q. All these are tough questions, that trouble ethical experts all over the world and not since yesterday. But the fun part is that we ask ourselves if we can find any moral justification to support such a position. And doing so, we actually develop our moral wisdom, that particular instrument hidden deep inside our brain patterns that makes us choose good over evil most of the time. On the contrary, when this kind of questions are not asked, as many CSR specialists are tempted to do, we learn what I call moral relaxation. This is particular brain pattern that tells us that we can justify good deeds by doing evil things, that we can treat people as means and not as ends when someone’s life is at stake, that we are forced to accept the argument for financial performance when the reputation can be saved by paying a news agency not to release a press material.
At the end of the day, can we really give a damn about Ethics? Is is worth thinking about it? In my opinion yes, because this is the only thing that helps us understand that the type of general description that introduces this material is morally wrong. Why? Because it sets aside women involved in fundraising and emphasizes something against their human dignity, which is “women tend to be predisposed to immoral behavior”. And this is false, as I can tell. We all are predisposed to immoral behavior, not women more and men less. All of us are predisposed at making use of the persuasive element no matter what, all of us are exposed to human suffering (not pain!), all of us are opened to moral shortcuts when we are directly affected by the problem or we are to close to it. Maybe we see now more female fundraisers, but this doesn’t make them worse than men.