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morals
 

Why bother being good?

anonymousman's picture
IB
 
Points)
 on 3/23/13 at 10:30am
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WHY BOTHER BEING GOOD?

Everyday the newspaper tells the same depressing stories. Youth crime, corporate tax-avoidance, dishonest lawyers, selfish bankers, mass genocide, needless wars, countless violent acts of extreme hatred, rape, oppression and corruption, right down to the cheating footballer’s wife, as told in the lying gossip magazine.

I don’t read the tabloids too much. I’ve come to realise that when people hear over and over, day after day, about bad things, it seems that they start to think that they are justified in being a little less noble themselves. ‘That’s just the world we live in’ – ‘everyone’s taking drugs’, ‘everyone cheats’, ‘everyone gossips’. The media makes celebrities of the worst of us, and subsequently, over time, people feel excused to drift into moral grey areas, asking ‘Why bother being good when everyone else is bad?’. Well if we can’t answer that question, we’re heading for a very dark world indeed, and so that’s the question I want to answer in this article. Why bother being good?

Being Decent

DonVon's picture
IB
(King Kong, 1,914
 
Points)
 on 7/30/12 at 10:30am
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Good morning all.

Hope everyone had a swell time at the WSO conference. Wish I could have made it out, but that'll unfortunately have to wait until next year. I don't doubt that it was a great time.

Today I'm going to be talking about something that isn't heavily related to finance, recruiting, or anything of that sort...but it's an integral part of life in general: being a decent human being.

Is it wrong for a student to sleep with an employee for a job

wallstreetinvestmentbankingmonkey's picture
(Chimp, 9
 
Points)
 on 3/14/12 at 4:24am

Is it wrong for a student at a university to sleep with an employee at an investment bank and he help her get a job there?

A morality question

trazer985's picture
ST
(King Kong, 1,746
 
Points)
 on 11/15/11 at 9:46am

Ok so i think its fair to say that of us hate insider traders, and find it the most heinous of crimes and wouldn't do it.

But would you consider it in the following situations:

You need money for an operation for yourself which is life critical: Either potentially fatal or significant quality of life (i.e. leg restructuring).

A friend/family needed such an operation, and you were not asked for money but were aware that the person was unable to meet the costs themselves. What if you were asked?

What if your house was going to be repossessed?

To put your kids through private school (assume the best school around)?

How do you feel?

blackstone's picture
IB
(Monkey, 64
 
Points)
 on 5/29/11 at 11:14pm
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After reading this forum for the last couple of days, I see that how bright, motivated and determined all of you are. Some are working at bulge brackets making lots of money, some are at ivy leagues, some that are at non-targets that are determined more than ever to get a high GPA and build on extracurriculars and all to break into the industry - and my main question is what drives you to do this?

Ethics and the Downfall of "PC"

OnTheTrack's picture
(Baboon, 119
 
Points)
 on 4/21/11 at 10:34pm

In the coming years, the zeitgeist of political correctness will erode away and the elite will once again reign over the masses with contempt.

We will realize that it is more efficient to improve the quality of our own lives than it is to devote time to others who could not possibly ever return our generosity.

Morality on Wall Street

Edmundo Braverman's picture
ST
(Human, 14,379
 
Points)
 on 7/7/10 at 6:19am
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Is there a place for morality on Wall Street any more? Niall Ferguson doesn't think so, at least since Siegmund Warburg died in 1982. Ferguson believes that regulation won't clean up the Street but that bankers need to be taught morals. For those who don't know, Siegmund Warburg founded investment bank S.G. Warburg & Co. after WWII and ran the firm through the 1970's. The firm was eventually sold to UBS in the mid-90's, and Warburg was famous for "relationship banking".

Right now, Wall Street seems pretty far away from Warburg's ideal of high moral standards and ethics. Bank CEO's openly joke about the culture of greed, with Blankfein's "doing God's work" comment and John Mack's admission that, "We cannot control ourselves." These are the guys at the top. What I'm curious about is where morality fits into the lower levels of banking. Is it possible to work in the culture of greed and still consider yourself a "moral" person?