We don’t have a very high opinion of ourselves these days. We’re getting by, and in the process of getting by we accept injustice, poverty, hunger, exploitation, and the destruction of the planet – as long as it doesn’t affect us personally. Among politicians, presidents, and industry leaders worldwide, it becomes increasingly hard to find one who is not openly corrupt and self-serving, presenting ruthlessness as the virtue of being able to take care of one’s own interests. Egotism and carelessness don’t seem to cause embarrassment or shame any more: they are accepted features of the character make-up of a successful start-up founder, or a successful US president. – In this situation, it can be funny and instructive to look back to times in which people had very different opinions on how one should live one’s life. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is an extreme example: the word at the core of his moral philosophy is neither fun, nor gain, nor happiness – but duty.

The value of one’s motivation

There is a small convenience shop in the village where I live, in the outskirts of Hong Kong. The owner is also the only employee, and he sells everything one might want while going about one’s day in the village: small snacks, drinks, paper towels, newspapers, pen and paper, toys for the kids. He also really dislikes foreigners. One day I found out that I was regularly paying double the price for a can of coke than what my (local) wife was paying. Now one could ask, purely hypothetically, what reasons might this shopkeeper have to charge some of his customers a higher price and some less, for exactly the same article?

Let’s be charitable. Perhaps he does it in order to promote social justice. Everyone should be able to afford a can of coke. Since this is a small village, many of his customers will not be very wealthy. Perhaps some are positively poor, retired people living on meagre pensions. Me, the foreigner who lives there, is not likely to be one of them. Foreigners, especially white men, tend to get high salaries at their specialist jobs. So perhaps the shopkeeper thinks: Let’s charge the foreigner double (which he can afford and won’t even notice), and in exchange I give a cheaper or free coke to someone of the poorer people who might come into my shop.

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