* RADIO RANT: Carrot-&-Stick Ethics

A relatively new commercial on the radio seems innocuous enough: it's for http://www.getgoodkarma.org, and asks one to be "civically active"—to vote, to volunteer, etc. But the "goodkarma" part of the URL is the sticking point for me. Why be civic-minded, ethical—ultimately, GOOD? Well, you'll be rewarded for it, for "stay[ing] on the universe's good side," as the web site tells us. Or punished for being "bad," apparently: "So play nice. You won't like the universe when it's angry." This is merely a New Age/Asian metaphysical version of good-old-fashioned Christian theology, which says to the unwashed masses: "Be good—SO you can get to Heaven. Don't be bad, or you'll earn eternal damnation." I'm against any such carrot-and-stick ethics because it is just a grander displacement of the child's early "ethical" development: be good, and Mommy will hug you! Be bad, and Dad'll beat your ass! This isn't being ethical at all; it's being a pawn of operant conditioning. (Thus Freud saw Western religion itself as part of an earlier, "childish" stage of human evolution.) At least from Kant on, philosophers have spoken of an ethics for its own sake as the real "Good," in contrast to behavior dependent upon an external set of reinforcers. In sum, how is volunteering at the homeless shelter—to guarantee some good karma for yourself—in any way ethical in a fundamental, intrinsic sense?

(An objection: "Maybe the 'karmic' discourse of this whole web site is just good-naturedly tongue-in-cheek, just tryin' to get people more positively involved." Well. Okay. . . . Or IS it okay, to "play" willy-nilly with such serious things as worldviews, as if they were mere Pepsi or Coke t-shirts to be donned and doffed at will in this postmodern era? I don't have a sense of humor in this realm. [Geez, I'm becoming a curmudgeon, as the Minnesota Twins continue their losing ways!])