Morality and AIG's Bonuses

The discussion right now about AIG paying bonuses with bailout money has a moral tone to it, no doubt. People are "outraged." The condemnation of the paying of these bonuses has been intense and widespread.

Additionally, there have been demands that those who received the bonuses must give them back. The sense of the "must" there is the moral sense. Our moral intuitions seem to suggest that it would be right to return the bonus money; that it ought to be returned.

So people's judgment of the behavior falls within the moral domain, the domain of things having to do with morality. It is not just a case of what's legal or what makes good business sense. It's a matter of morality. (Additionally people's suggested course of action, what they think ought to happen has certainly fallen in the moral domain.)

But what can be said about the moral domain itself? Rather than whether the bonuses violate some sense of justice, this post at The Frontal Cortex considers the sense of justice itself.

Jonah Lehrer, author of "Proust was a Neuroscientist," develops an idea relating our sense of justice and fairness to results from psychological experiments surrounding the Ultimatum Game. Read it and please leave a comment here.

Here's a taste:

After witnessing this injustice, the monkeys earning cucumbers went on strike. Some started throwing their cucumbers at the scientists; the vast majority just stopped collecting pebbles. The capuchin economy ground to a halt. The monkeys were willing to forfeit cheap food simply to register their anger at the arbitrary pay scale.