How quantum physics can make you a more ethical person

During graduate school, I became obsessed with finding the perfect ethical formula; the equivalent of E=mc^2 for the field of ethics. Suffice it to say, human beings are complex and the further I progressed the more I realized any such effort was fruitless. Even the Golden Rule – do unto others as you would do unto to you – which is arguably the closest thing we have to any such ethical maxim, has its limitations. So, I abandoned the search until one afternoon, many years later, when I was walking my dogs in Boston. 

I passed by the apartment of a neighbor who had several sympathy floral arrangements adorning her stoop. She had just lost her sister. It was a tragic loss in a string of tragic losses. Within the previous ten years, she had lost her mother, her husband, and now her sister, all at relatively young ages. I remember feeling overwhelmed and so in awe of her resilience. It had to feel like the universe was stacked against her. How could so many bad things happen to somebody in such a short period of time? 

That’s when the light bulb went on, and I thought back to graduate school.

In our final year on campus, my best friend who was also an ethics student duped me into taking an introductory course on quantum physics to clear our minds from regular coursework. (Side note: quantum physics will blow your mind, not clear it.) In the class, we learned about observing particles and, when observed, how they gather in predictable patterns. 

Imagine you’re standing at the kitchen counter holding a bag of sugar. If you tip the bag over and pour the sugar onto the counter from one steady position, it will form a mountain, or a bell curve if you’re looking at it from the side. 

I realized that events in life are a lot like granules of sugar getting poured onto a counter. Some will end up on one side of the bell curve, some will end up on the other, and most will end up somewhere in the middle. They form a bell curve between good and bad.

In ethics, however, it’s very difficult to define any event as objectively good or objectively bad, hence why it’s impossible to construct a perfect ethical formula. But in the case of my neighbor, the things that happened to her were subjectively bad; she was saddened by the untimely loss of her sister, she was saddened by the untimely loss of her husband, and she was saddened by the untimely loss of her mother. She would undoubtedly consider those granular events as falling to the “bad things” side of her bell curve.

This bell curve theory of ethics is overly simplistic, and any trained ethicist could easily construct scenarios to challenge the idea, but simply put, our lives are a series of events. Some are big, some are small, some are within our control, and some are beyond our control. 

When making decisions, and engaging in active inquiry around those decisions, a helpful ethics measure can be looking at our behavior through the perspective of a person’s bell curve. That is, whenever possible, we should do our best to ensure that the actions we take will cause that granule of sugar to fall on the good side of their curve instead of the bad.

The flowers on my neighbor's stoop were never going to offset or balance out her profound sense of grief. But they were simple events that let her know people cared about and were thinking of her. Those of us in her community had no control over the bad event that had just transpired, but we tried to drop a granule of sugar so that it would fall on the side of the good. If only we considered every decision in a such a manner.

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Co-authored by David Brendel and Ryan Stelzer, Think Talk Create: Building Workplaces Fit for Humans was published by the Hachette Book Group under the PublicAffairs imprint on September 21, 2021. Now available to order!