Years ago, I had a discussion with my girlfriend at the time in which I postulated that if a person really wanted to make the world a better place, they should work towards finding a job where they’re paid vast amounts of money which could then be invested charitably. She refused to the logic of this insight, arguing that taking such a job would somehow corrupt your soul or some nonsense. Well, the “Practical Ethics” blog offered by the University of Oxford agrees with me.

In fact, there are reasons for thinking that, if you spend your money wisely, you can do much more good by taking a lucrative career such as banking than by pursuing a conventional ‘ethical’ career such as charity work.

First, as a banker, you could earn well over £6million. By donating 50% of those earnings, you could pay for several charity workers. So you’d do several times as much good than if you were a charity worker yourself.

Second, if you decide not to be a charity worker, someone else will take your place, and so the benefit you provide would have happened anyway. In contrast, if you take a lucrative career and donate your earnings, your donations provide a benefit which would not have happened anyway.

Third, as a philanthropic banker, you can put your money anywhere. So you can fund only the very best causes. In contrast, as a charity worker, you are much more limited in your choice of where to work. Some causes are thousands of times more cost-effective than others, so this can be a big deal.

My girlfriend was guilty of a common supposition — that money itself is evil as opposed to being a neutral tool that can be applied in a variety of ways. She probably wanted to break up with me after I delivered my flawless argument, but knew that were she to do so, she would be denying herself access to my vast repertoire of sexual skills.

Everyone who knows me, knows that I’m an atheist, and that I think religious inspired moral values are backed by vapor. If I were going around kidnapping teenage prostitutes, violating and humiliating them sexually, and then chopping off their heads with a chainsaw and burying them in my backyard, there would be no spiritual punishment upon my passing. (To be clear, I am not doing this. It’s purely coincidence that several teenage prostitutes have gone missing in the four mile area surrounding my house.)

However, unlike many atheists, I’m not convinced that the world would be a better place if it lost its religious moral values. The Templeton Foundation (an organization which admittedly has a bias towards offering an intellectual defense of religion and spirituality) notes the following in relation to the recent youth riots in Britain.

… Arthur, dean of the education college at the University of Birmingham, led a research team that produced a 2009 report on the crisis of character among England’s underclass teenagers. The report, produced as part of the John Templeton Foundation-funded Learning For Life UK program, warned that many English teenagers living in urban deprivation were disconnected from both their communities and basic morality.
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Not all underclass English youth are in such dire moral circumstances. Arthur found that Muslim teenagers who shared the material poverty of their white and black neighbors nevertheless were far more educated in the virtues and faithful to civil society’s values.
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By contrast, the white and black youth the Arthur study examined were far more likely to come from broken or dysfunctional families, and to have little or no religion at all. This too is not surprising to Arthur, who said that the rapid secularization of Britain, along with a post-1960s ethos that focuses more on rights than duties, has caused young Britons to lose touch with their moral traditions.
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“No government or other secular tradition, has been able so far to replace the Judeo-Christian moral tradition,” Arthur said.
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A grim Arthur declared that we may have entered “a new moral Dark Age,” driven in part by the loss of faith in transcendent values and the decline in authority among society’s institutions. This is not, he fears, only a British problem.
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“I fear that most of America is only 20 to 30 years behind us,” he said. “And I don’t believe we’ve seen the end of this. These young people have done it once, and I think they’ll do it again.”

Some of this is, I suspect, the inevitable gloomy view every older generation takes of the younger generation. And, there were a lot of youths rioting in Paris a couple years ago, and I believe many of them were Muslim. I also think there’s a lot of strong indications that to some degree morality is built into the brain — we are intrinsically uncomfortable performing immoral acts, particularly violence, regardless of our religious upbringing (well, most of us anyway — psychopaths would be a clear exception.) That said, I think this guy is onto something. And it’s fair to worry about a society that loses its religious moral center.

This is kind of interesting.

Pay Pal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters, according to a profile of the billionaire in Details magazine.

Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch–free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place.

Sounds like my kind of town.