The Slippery Slope of Ethical Collapse

Scientific American has an interesting article (sorry if it is pay-walled) titled, The Slippery Slope of Ethical Collapse—And How Courage Can Reverse It.

The gist of the article is that ethical collapse is self-reinforcing. Biologically. 

Researchers at University College London have described one biological basis for this habituation. While in an fMRI scanner, study participants played a game in which they could enrich themselves by deceiving others. The more people lied to other players, the more exaggerated their lies were likely to be the next time around. These habitual liars also showed reduced activation in the brain’s amygdala, which is involved in emotional arousal—and the lower their amygdala activation, the more flagrant their lies were in the next round of the game. The researchers believe gradual neural adaptation is at play: the more times people lie, the less emotionally distressing lying feels, which allows for increasing comfort in dangerous moral waters.

This I believe is what happens so often within family court. A lawyer skirts the edge of fraud thinking they are advocating for their client and then crosses the line. Once they do so, it becomes a habit. The same with judges and litigants. 

Unfortunately the normal way of operating in family court, as well as much of the legal system overall, has become unethical and often straight up criminal. 

However there is hope. The process works in the opposite direction as well. 

Yet moral snowballing can also happen in the opposite direction. Surprisingly, just as neural habituation can drive ethical collapse, it can also drive escalating spirals of virtue, in which one honest or brave action makes the next one easier to carry out. And because our brains adapt to repeated behaviors, movement in a given moral direction can persist—making it all the more critical to pinpoint where and how that movement begins.

Unfortunately the legal system will never reform on its own. How can this be changed? It isn't that hard. Laws and ethical rules which are already in place simply need to be enforced. If lawyers who commit fraud are disbarred and litigants who commit perjury are punished, we will quickly see a surge in ethical behavior.