The Gospel according to Dr Witmol*

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of attending my client's national conference where the closing address was delivered by the Reverend Tim Costello, head of World Vision Australia (and brother of former Federal Treasurer Peter Costello).

The reverend was an excellent speaker, articulate and engaging, and covered topics from the outcry against executive bonuses, to poverty and climate change. In rolling out the figure that thousands of people (I believe 400,000) died because of the GFC, he said we're now living in a Global Ethical Crisis. However, he argued that the world has lacked certain values all along but it's only because of recent events that we've been able to see them, and that at the furore over excutive bonuses was really just "haggling over the price tag".

[His example was the movie 'Indecent Proposal' (where a millionaire offers a struggling couple a million dollars if he can sleep with the wife) and an anecdote attributed to George Bernard Shaw where Shaw offers an attractive lady 10,000 pounds to spend the night with him. After agonising over it, she agrees. He then offers her a shilling and sixpence. "Mr. Shaw! What do you take me for?" "We have already established what you are," Shaw replies. "Now we are merely haggling over the price."]

I'd beg to differ that whether or not you are buyable equates to a lack of ethics and the amount was just about haggling over price. In any transaction there's a sacrifice on both sides, whether that's money, dignity, values, services etc. While I don't disagree with the reverend about the fact that most of the world has been missing certain values (regarding human lives, the environment etc) all along, if you only look at the direct transaction, you miss the context of why events occur.

For example, an otherwise chaste woman sleeps with a man for $300. Is she a prostitute? Has she sold out on her ethics? Well, what if she were desperately poor and needed the money to buy her child medicine? In this case, the transaction was not actually sex for $300 but sex for health of a child, in effect.

Costello's address was all about interdependency so it was interesting that he did not seem to demonstrate that price tags themselves have interdependencies. In my view, what needs to happen is a good hard look at those interdependencies, identifying what they are and changing things so that we can get more direct correlations between actions and impacts.

But overall, I did agreed with his premise, that we should not be outraged about how much executives are being paid, but rather question on what basis they receive them, considering the social impact certain behaviour has wrought worldwide.

* Please note that I am not a doctor, medical or otherwise. The history of my handle 'Dr Witmol' came from a conversation I, aged 13, had with a friend, whose mother was completing a PhD. Me: "What does PhD stand for?" Her: "Doctor of Philosophy." Me: "Like, 'what is the meaning of life?'"