Doing the "right" thing?

by Groff Schroeder

Chances are, pretty much anybody and everybody sets out to do the correct thing when they decide to take any action – and virtually everyone seeks to take actions that provide positive outcomes for themselves and or others. Unfortunately, there appear to be many people on earth willing to use deception to manipulate the decisions and actions of others. Therefore, the success or failure of any decision or action to achieve the desired positive outcome depends upon access to complete and correct information.

Incorrect information almost universally leads to incorrect points of view, incorrect decisions, and actions that fail to produce desired outcomes. Consider individuals who seek to purchase a reliable automobile. A person who believes a premium vehicle brand naturally must also have premium reliability could easily pay a premium price for a prestigious, but ultimately unreliable new vehicle. Similarly, if a person knows that a certain vehicle brand has a reputation for reliability, they may decide to purchase vehicles of that brand only, and be willing to pay a significant price premium for the reliability the brand offers. However, if they are unaware that specific year-model examples of the brand have a known history of being unreliable, they too may pay a premium price for an unreliable vehicle.

To further complicate decision making, other people often have relatively benign but important conflicts of interests in our decisions, and thus the information they communicate. Consider individuals selling vehicle brands or year-model examples known to be unreliable. Even though reliability is only one of many factors that cause people to choose specific vehicles, seller(s) could clearly be reluctant to intentionally or unintentionally provide potential buyers with reliability (or any other) information that could reduce a potential buyer's interest in the vehicle.

In addition, there are people who are willing to engage in unethical actions to benefit themselves or others and who are very willing to communicate intentionally incomplete, misleading, incorrect, or blatantly false information in service to their goals. In most cases, the more money, power, etc. at stake, the more probable it is that unethical actions will occur – and the more dishonorable the potential unethical actions undertaken in pursuit of the nefarious goal may become.

Finally, at least some people appear ready, willing, and able to unethically spread incomplete, incorrect, or intentionally false information – and to intentionally participate in a wide variety of other unethical behaviors – as a means of cynically manipulating others into achieving their unethical goals. There are even numerous infamous examples in history of the use of industrialized deception (propaganda) in pursuit of seriously immoral governmental, corporate, military, political, and personal goals.

Therefore, when preparing decisions it appears useful to gather your information carefully, and to act not only after ensuring your information is complete and correct, but also only after ensuring that you have not been intentionally deceived, misled, or manipulated. Every decision you make depends upon the information you have, and every action you take changes the universe forever. Decisions based on incomplete or incorrect information can only identify the correct course of action by accident. Actions based upon decisions stemming from intentionally false information, intentional deception, or the successful manipulation of you or your point of view can be catastrophic.   

"Doing the 'right' thing?" appeared in the June 7-13, 2017 edition of the Colorado Springs Independent with the quotation below.

"All warfare is based on deception." Sun Tzu, The Art of War, ~500 BCE