Ethics

So, in class tonight, we watched Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.

Wow. Just ... wow. Okay, I know Enron has made the news more than once and its fall from grace has probably been reviewed and rewritten about a million times, but up until today, I really didn't know just what happened. I'm sure I still don't have all the facts, but the documentary has some really interesting information that I never knew before. Things about the California Energy Crisis, politics, deregulation and building houses of cards atop gasoline storage tanks. Or something like that.

The scary thing is how far it spread complicitly - not in the illegal sense, but in the number of people who should have known something was wrong but just ... didn't do anything about it. Ethics is such a grey area in a lot of ways of course. It wouldn't be such a philosophically interesting area if it wasn't. But I can't help but think that if I were in the same situation as most of those folks, I'd have done the same thing.

Which is truly frightening.