the ethics of “getting away with”

Mail from a reader:

Very interesting line in a recent post, not sure what to make of it, curious if you could say more (and without comments on the blog, figured email was the only way to get more insight):

“And so too is figuring out what you have and have not been able to get away with over the years. I still think thisis the key to ethics, not systems of ethics and etiquette. It is the permitted violations of these rules, different for each person, that is the core of ethics. I’m increasingly convinced of this. Ethics has never been ‘fair’: certain people consistently get away with certain things that I couldn’t, but the reverse is surely also true.”

There’s not anything more to be said in an email, but this is an important topic that I plan to write about at greater length.

However, some people seem to be reading this theme as some sort of personal confession, and seem to be wondering what secret thing I “got away with”. But in fact, I came up with this theory by observing others getting away with crazy things (I’m speaking here of university colleagues with relatively minor vices, not of criminal types), not through introspection. Only retroactively did I start trying to apply that same question to myself, and with a bit of work I did begin to find some things.

I share this theory a lot in discussions, and people are always interested in it. However, when certain people get too excited about it, it’s always a bit alarming!