“There’s an evolutionary imperative why we give a crap about our family and friends. And there’s an evolutionary imperative why we don’t give a crap about anybody else. If we loved all people indiscriminately, we couldn’t function.” House, M.D. (2015)
There’s something uncomfortably honest in that quote. A blunt acknowledgment that empathy, like energy, has limits. But perhaps that’s where ethics begins: not in perfection, but in awareness. To ask what is good or bad is really to ask, what do we choose to value when no one forces us to? Because ethics, like freedom, collapses when it is imposed.
The Greeks were the first to formalize that tension between instinct and thought. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics teaches that virtue is cultivated through repetition not decreed, but chosen. He distinguished between extrinsic and intrinsic value: what is good for its function, and what is good in itself. Wealth, medicine, and law serve ends; love, beauty, and knowledge simply exist. Even then, virtue was never about obedience. It was about alignment, the harmony between reason and desire freely attained.
Two thousand three hundred years later, we still orbit the same questions. Kant attempted to standardize morality through the categorical imperative, a rule meant to guide all action. Yet for me, its weakness is precisely its certainty. Freedom cannot be formulaic. To act rightly only because one must is to remove the very choice that gives virtue meaning. A good action done without freedom is an empty gesture; it satisfies form, not conscience.
My father, a philosopher by both nature and discipline, says that the truest ethics are the ones that can survive in isolation when no one is watching, and there is no reward. I think of him when I read Plato and Socrates, those masters of the examined life. Their dialogues weren’t rules; they were rooms of thought. And maybe that’s what freedom really is the ability to stay in that room long enough to find your own answer, even if it contradicts the crowd.
Environmental ethics, too, needs this kind of freedom from the anthropocentric story that everything exists to serve us. We call it ecocentrism now, but it’s really a return to humility. What if the planet’s worth is not derived from its utility but from its being? What if “good” is not obedience to human need but alignment with balance itself?
As we step deeper into the Fourth Industrial Revolution, this age where algorithms predict even our impulses I can’t help but wonder whether we’ve traded moral choice for mechanical convenience. Economics, once the study of human behavior, risks becoming the study of its automation. Yet the most valuable things still resist quantification: air, time, trust. Freedom itself has no price, only cost.
That paradox is what draws me to the intersection of ethics and economics. Can the intrinsic worth of the planet be reconciled with the extrinsic systems that govern it? I look to three thinkers for conversation, not instruction.
E.F. Schumacher, in Small Is Beautiful (2010), insists that sanity lies in scale, that the closer a system is to human size, the more moral it becomes.
Thomas Piketty, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), shows how inequality multiplies when returns on capital exceed the growth of labor — a kind of moral inflation that drains social balance.
Noam Chomsky, both political and linguistic, reminds us that the words we choose to describe power shape the limits of our imagination.
Together, they form an uneasy trinity of caution: our systems are efficient, but not wise. We have learned to assign price to everything, and in doing so, we risk erasing the concept of worth. The ethical economy I imagine or perhaps dream of is one where value is not extracted but recognized. Where freedom is not a loophole but the very terrain on which ethics is built.
Freedom, like capital, compounds. Each honest choice enriches the next. But when we trade freedom for certainty moral, economic, or political we bankrupt the very source of value itself. Ethics without freedom is compliance; freedom without ethics is chaos. The task is not to choose between them, but to make them inseparable.
Maybe that is the good Aristotle meant not a law, not a command, but a life lived in deliberate awareness. One that allows for error, for paradox, for change. The kind of life that measures progress not by accumulation, but by coherence. Not perfection. Not control. Just the freedom to become good and to decide, freely, what that even means.