Grumpy Bastard on Imperial Ethics
After some time alone, Grumpy Bastard returns to talk about Imperial ethics.
This week I’ve been unfortunate enough to be in the middle of Remembrance Day. In between the white and red poppy virtue signalling as hard as they possibly can. People are too busy trying to work out which wars are the right ones to remember and which ones should be ignored as immoral foreign policy. I guess we’ll just forget the veterans that now live as amputees, are homeless or suffer from PTSD. They’re just the foot soldiers of the military-industrial complex’s attempt to extract all the oil from Iraqistahn anyway and not really worth our consideration. Isn’t it great when you can sum up the causes of a complex geopolitical conflict in just four words?
Moving on to the main topic of discussion this week, ethics at Imperial is almost a joke. The university knows that the majority of the student body just don’t care whether the actions of the university or those of the companies providing sponsorship are moral or not. Most of the people here went through the rigorous selection process of having parents wealthy enough to send you to private school or middle class enough to live in an area where you don’t have to mingle with the riff-raff. This economic insulation, coupled with scientists that sincerely believe their work happens in a vacuum means there is a huge moral disconnect across the university. The closest most of you fucks come to encountering a moral dilemma is whether it’s okay to shark a fresher or not. No one even raises a whimper about the dodgy shit that goes on around here all the time, in the understanding that “hey, at least it’s a prestigious university and will be good for my future career.”
This leaves the unethical fucks with access to top tier talent to recruit from. I sometimes wonder whether Shell would be quite so good at bribing Nigerian governments, or whether BAE would be quite so good at blowing up Yemeni civilians, or whether Amazon would be so good at threatening student newspapers if they didn’t have access to this talent. Who knows? At the end of the day, they all pay rather well, boosting the only thing this university collectively cares about: their graduate earning statistics.
