They might accuse you of being a do-gooder or naive. Thinking about the common good is not in vogue. The human species is going through times of war, hatred, and division, and a rich menu of existential threats makes the future fearsome. In this despair, some of the most powerful rulers and entrepreneurs on the planet resemble fictional villains more than the heroes who made us dream: they prioritize excessive power and brute force over negotiation, cooperation, and shared rules. Good is trading low.
Read more 50 years of ‘Who Can Kill a Child?’: the other boom of horror cinema in Spain
“The way out of all the threats and challenges we face will be by doing more things together and committing to a common and more cohesive life. There is no other alternative,” political scientist Jorge Tamames tells this newspaper. If God and bell-bottoms are coming back, why shouldn’t ethics? Some are already concerned about it. It is possible, they say, to do good within the system, within companies, in one’s own work or, as we will see, by establishing a compulsory social cooperation service. Several recent essays argue that ethics is not a relic, but a political and social necessity of our time. It is about recovering the discourse in times of cynicism, irony, competition… and even badism.
The German philosopher Markus Gabriel is not a revolutionary: he does not want to tear down the system, as has so often been attempted only to make things worse, but to implement an ethical capitalism (he does not believe it to be an oxymoron) in which “the business of business is to do good.” That is, it is not about humanity entering a kind of angelic mode where everyone acts virtuously, but about achieving an organization of the world that makes good profitable. Gabriel proposes, no less, a New Enlightenment based on these principles.
This is what is read in his book Doing Good. How Ethical Capitalism Can Create a New Social Contract (Pasado & Presente), which follows the path of previous works such as Ethics for Dark Times. “We need a new ethic (…) whose function is to regulate our economy upwards so that it meets real human needs and those of morally more progressive future societies,” writes Gabriel. This is what he calls the reconciliation of moral and economic value, in which coercive state regulation (and not goodness by magic) has much to say, but also self-regulation in companies. At times it recalls the Green New Deal, which proposes making the fight against climate change an economic engine, and also wants to link economic interest to moral interest.
From “bullshit jobs” to moral ambition
Then, in the capitalist system, there are “bullshit jobs,” as the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber famously coined, which are not those that are poorly paid or have bad conditions — which they also are — but those very well-paid, with bombastic, prestigious, and desired names… but which contribute nothing to society. This was based on a 2015 YouGov survey in the United States in which 37% of respondents stated that their job made no significant contribution to the world.
Against this drift, some urge us to act to change the world. This is the case of the Dutch essayist Rutger Bregman in Moral Ambition (Península): he focuses on the number of intelligent and well-prepared people who are wasting their talent in search of wealth or prestige — sometimes doing harm — when they could contribute to making a better world. “Of all that we waste in these wasteful times, the most important is wasted talent,” he writes.
Bregman advocates for ambitiously combining personal development with social action. If Markus Gabriel explains how companies can profit by doing good — ethical capitalism — Bregman translates this to our work and daily activities: we can also have something like ethical career success. It is not enough to be good in private life; we can work for good, something that, according to the writer, is not abundant in sectors such as banking, marketing, consulting, or technology. The truly ambitious goal is not to climb to the top of the social ladder, but to do so by trying to solve the problems afflicting society in our time.
Read more This adjustable travel pillow helps prevent neck strain during the journey
For this, radical compassion is necessary: “We want to extend our compassion to help as many people and animals as possible,” writes Bregman in his decalogue for moral ambition. “Like the abolitionists [of slavery] and suffragettes before us, we try to move the boundaries of humanity’s moral circle. We care about future generations and want to be good ancestors.”
Why don’t we do it together?
If we remain within the system, some propose to somehow standardize this commitment to society. This is the case of political scientist Jorge Tamames in Something We Did Together (Círculo de Bellas Artes / Lengua de Trapo), which starts from a simple question: “When was the last time you did something useful and valuable for others?” Inspired by things as disparate as Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction or David Graeber and David Wengrow’s essay The Dawn of Everything, and starting from his initial question, he advocates for a “universal and compulsory civil service” — a kind of social and solidarity military service — through which ordinary citizens can address collective care or the environmental crisis.
As Tamames puts it, it would also have something of a life experience, where “people from different backgrounds are brought together, erasing hierarchies and distinctions.” The poor and the rich, the boss and the employee, those from here and those from there, would work side by side, on equal terms. In short, it does not differ much from the neighborhood work done in villages. In his text, he does not ignore the possible objections (some quite bro-like) that would be made to it, from the rejection of its compulsory nature to the label of “woke military service,” passing through criticisms from the left, which might see it as a replacement for the welfare state. He answers all of them. “I believe that the general tone of the era is quite optimistic, and I wanted to write in a somewhat more utopian, though also pragmatic and realistic, register,” he says, not in vain the book won the ‘Utopias that fit in the Official State Gazette’ award, which seeks precisely that: utopias that can be brought down to our daily lives.
These are all proposals to act from ethical reflection and change the system from within and within the realm of the possible. Although perhaps the social mood is the opposite: malism (in opposition to buenism), which the artist Mauro Entrialgo described in a book of the same name, Malismo (Capitán Swing, 2024). “It is a communication strategy that consists of confessing desires or acts that traditionally would have been reprehensible in order to obtain some kind of benefit,” says the author.
There are different degrees of malism: from the names of “rascal” bars and severe juries in talent shows to social media troll gangs (a perfect breeding ground for malism), and, above all, the attitude of certain unashamed rulers who boast of unethical behavior, such as doing “nothing” to facilitate access to housing or forcibly dismantling homeless camps. It is no coincidence that many of the great characters in 21st-century audiovisual products are not heroes but villains: perhaps that is where the malist fervor comes from.
Ultimately, one might think that these initiatives for addressing the common good, despite their pragmatic will, are absurd in a super-individualistic and disoriented (as well as malist) world, but perhaps the true naivety lies in believing that the great problems of our time will be solved without a renewed idea of the common good.
Read more The portable fan that is a hit on Amazon: grows more than a meter and works without a plug