Moral Ambition

I've been thinking for a while now about an ethical job. I wouldn't say my job is unethical - I don't work for an oil company or a bank - but I have been getting tired of seeing amoral LLMs everywhere. Enough to make you think fuck it, I'll just go work on a farm or in a bar or something. Then I heard Rutger Bregman on a podcast talking about his book - Moral Ambition, and picked it up directly.

In the book Bregman writes about the ideals of non-financial ambition - the striving not to make money from work, but to make the world better through work. Some of the most talented people in the world - he writes - work in corporate law and finance, making stacks of cash, but not making anything any better. Stressing the need for data-backed work, he talks of groups that are organised around helping as many people as possible. One example he gives is mosquito nets and their crucial use in reducing malaria cases. He writes about civil rights activists, the people who hid Jewish refugees in the second world war, and the people curing and preventing diseases today.

One of the biggest takeaways I had was about the ineffectiveness of ‘awareness' and how it's actually not all that important for people to be aware of the issues. Sharing an Instagram post might make you feel like you're doing something, but it's not really that effective statistically. There's also a really interesting part of the book where he looks into what would happen if you kept your high-paying but terrible banking job, but gave away a lot more money, which was an interesting thought experiment and certainly something I'd considered before.

Bregman is insistent that this is not a self-help manual, and for good reasons. I found very little to help me in here. There's an enlightening education about some of the biggest activists in history, and a cry for high-flying lawyers to apply their minds to something good, but I feel what might be missing is a focus on the average person, on community, and doing something small to help. People have families to feed. It's real big-picture stuff, and I for one can't help but feel small.