The other week, Herself found a lotto ticket on the street. She was rushing, so she stuck it in her pocket. She’d figure out how to get it back to the owner later.
But because she was rushing, she completely forgot about it until that evening at dinner. She fished it out of her pocket and we had a look, but the ticket itself told us nothing. No name and address. The shop wasn’t mentioned on the ticket, unless there’s some code there we didn’t understand.
And because of where she found it, we also realised that it was impossible to guess what shop it came from; or even if we found the right shop, that they could return it to the purchaser.
Everything we buy, how we interact with others, how we vote, how we travel – it’s all weighted with greater implications
Our practical problem then turned into a moral one. One possible course of action would have been to tear up the ticket, thus ensuring that we didn’t accidentally profit from someone else’s misfortune. But that never came up. If random chance was going to send a few million someone’s way, it might as well be us. In fact, you could argue that keeping the ticket was the most moral course of action: by allowing ourselves to win, we also helped increase the amount of goodness in the world. Goodness largely for ourselves, admittedly.
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But we weren’t comfortable about it. Oh, no. We’re not monsters. We discussed at length how truly terrible we’d feel if the ticket happened to be a winner; and what steps we might take to assuage our multimillionaire guilt. Naturally, we wouldn’t go public with the win, but what if the numbers on our ticket (it was “our” ticket now) weren’t chosen at random? They were birthdays, or even more tragically, death anniversaries? The original buyer would have the crushing experience of seeing their numbers finally come up, and the realisation that some unscrupulous swines had cashed in on it. Who knows what kind of murderous impulses that might unleash in a person?
We realised that we’d have to be highly circumspect with our new wealth. Perhaps invest in some security cameras.
Unsurprisingly, it turned out not to be a winning ticket. But even if it was, I wouldn’t tell you.
This was a rather pleasant hypothetical discussion, yet in our day-to-day lives we all have to make moral judgments all the time; or at least we should. Having the time and the head space is another matter. Everything we buy, how we interact with others, how we vote, how we travel – it’s all weighted with greater implications; for geopolitics, the environment, for the wellbeing of others. And for most of us, most of the time, there are very few straightforward decisions; it’s more about doing the least harm.
In so many ways, we are all compromised
The World Cup starts this weekend. I won’t be watching, as I’ve no great interest. But for many fans, I imagine the next few weeks might be an uncomfortable experience: knowing that the regime in Qatar is despicable, that the sparkling new sports grounds came into existence thanks to the back-breaking labour of migrant workers, many of whom allege non-payment and forced labour. More than 6,500 migrant workers have died in Qatar since it won the right to host the World Cup a decade ago. That’s roughly the same as the number of civilians who have died in the war in Ukraine. Those fans will be watching their beloved sport take place in stadiums that have been constructed from the blood of other people.
This may or may not affect their enjoyment of the games – we can all ignore what’s uncomfortable when we need to – but at the very least it makes a nonsense of the high-blown claims Fifa makes for the sport: that it brings people together, that it is a force for good in the world. Ignoring simple right and wrong – encouraging the players and fans to do the same – robs it of any greater meaning. It reduces football to little more than people kicking a ball around a pitch. In so many ways, we are all compromised.