The "ethical" school, which essentially followed the historical school, advocated a pro-cartel attitude since cooperation (cartel-like behavior) was, viewed from an ethical angle, a socially superior stance than "egoistic individualism". Proponents of free markets arguably promoted this theory.
But before those in the so-called 99% start feeling ethically superior, consider this: Piff and his colleagues also discovered that anyone's ethical standards could be prone to slip if they suddenly won the lottery and joined the top 1%.
Early birds aren't ethically superior.
Are we so ethically superior then?
Lissaman continues: "Was local production ethically superior to distant production?
Is a quiet creep of prices ethically superior to a leap, announced by a warning shout?
The long read: Misunderstanding the Holocaust has made us too certain we are ethically superior to the Europeans of the 1940s.
So, for a brief period, we felt richer — planeloads of us went to Mannahatta and bought up everything in sight — and ideologically and ethically superior.
Largely because we have lost all respect for politicians, bankers and most other traditional standard bearers of public morality, we no longer regard Britain as ethically superior to other nations.
"There are many homophiles who, like me, find the homophile married life so much more preferable, ethically superior, enjoyable, exciting, less responsibility-ridden," he wrote in his wry essay.
There is little reason to think that we are ethically superior to the Europeans of the 1930s and 1940s, or for that matter less vulnerable to the kind of ideas that Hitler so successfully promulgated and realised.
