Moral Impermanence (And a Side Note About The Pirate’s Code)

By Linda Fisher Thornton

Humans go through a stage as toddlers when they believe that something out of sight has magically disappeared and is not coming back. This is a natural part of human development that is studied in developmental psychology, and it normally ends by the time a child is three years old when they develop “object permanence.”

I was thinking about how many examples we’ve seen in the news of leaders making decisions that benefit them personally rather than making ethical decisions. I began to wonder if this flawed thinking could somehow be related to the developmental process of object permanence. When leaders go after something without regard for the impact on others, aren’t they looking away from ethics and toward whatever they stand to gain (power, influence, money, advantage, etc.), pretending like their ethical responsibilities don’t exist?

Unlike toddlers who haven’t reached the stage of moral permanence and think an object is really gone when it’s out of sight, leaders who grab the power/treasure instead of doing the right thing may KNOW that the moral responsibility is there, and KNOW that they should make a moral choice, and CHOOSE to ignore those responsibilities. They may intentionally look away from morality in the quest for gain.

Side Note About the Pirate Code

Looking away from morality seems more like what you would expect to find in the code of pirates rather than in business, government and society. A “pirate code” is a very specific set of rules designed to organize a pirate collective, while achieving maximum plundering and sharing the wealth. Pirates are concerned about how they treat each other, but not those outside of their pirate circle. Other bands of pirates are typically considered the enemy since they could take the desired treasure. Pirates exclude non-pirates and only protect each other. They “take care of their own” but will steal from anyone who has what they want, and they consider casualties along the way to be part of the process. Their code is “selectively ethical.” Are leaders who intentionally do whatever it takes to “grab the highest gain” without consideration for their impact on others (outside of their insider’s club) a version of modern-day pirates?

Notice the ethics of leaders before you choose to follow them. If you observe them using “us versus them” language, grabbing money or power, or promoting violence to get what they want, beware. They may not be holding themselves to any moral code or limits of behavior.

But should we really compare such power-grabbing leaders to pirates? While they were definitely known to plunder throughout history, even pirates followed strict limits on a leader’s power.