Tales from Beyond Frick Park IX: Goodwill Hunting
Ihad never intended to be a wicked woman. Indeed, wickedness had always struck me as exhausting: between the disposal of bodies, conversations in loathsome cellars, and the obligation to remember which lies one has told which person, it’s a wonder anyone chooses to pursue it at all! My ambition following university was merely to inhabit a place in which the bed and kitchen were separate rooms. This was once a modest dream, I am told.
Now, it places me somewhere between Napoleon and Caesar on the scale of mortal ambition. It was in this humble pursuit that I encountered Grimsby, Filch, & Slaughter. Their career fair stall stood between those of the Red Cross and the United States Air Force, distinguished from the latter chiefly by the absence of a sergeant and the former by the presence of money. To that effect, a placard advertised a starting compensation of six hundred thousand dollars. At this point, my higher faculties ceased and my lower organs let out the slightest trickle of excitement.
Before I knew it, I was shaking the hand of Mr. Archibald Gudge. A pink and prosperous gentleman, his laugh frequently startled roosting pigeons. That first meeting, he explained the Moral Adequacy Act required companies to contribute to a joint pool for all harm caused. To release that money, a company could either undo the harm or produce independently certified evidence of an equivalent amount of good. All of this was maintained in a central, audited registry. Neat and simple, it seemed, but the law had neglected to specify what exactly good is. A utilitarian might condemn what a deontologist endorsed, a shareholder might regard both as financially irresponsible, and, similarly, the American legal system would be concerned chiefly with the depth of each party’s pockets. Thus, a hundred-and-one accredited ethics boards thus issued competing valuations. It was our job to arbitrage that.
He illustrated all this with a planned airstrike. It had recently been called off because of a fuel price hike. The original Kantian auditors gave the cancellation no credit whatsoever. They rightly pointed out the motivation had been wholly economical. A utilitarian bank, however, was willing to pay handsomely for thirty-seven lives saved. Thus, we were able to purchase the good act for the price of a modest Manhattan luncheon and sell it to the bank for a price more eye-popping than your average Bugatti. The thirty-seven villagers were of course delighted to have been of service and to remain alive, or they would have been if we had enough time to inform them of it. But money called, and we were eager to answer.
My own first triumph involved a munitions firm which announced plans to bomb twelve orphanages. It nobly cancelled eleven so a particularly eccentric board of consequentialists could classify the affair as humanitarian relief. In this manner, we dabbled here and there for months, the business and my pockets flourishing.
However, no good thing can last forever—a fact those in the business were especially aware of. Eventually came the disagreeable catastrophe of agreement; in other words, the market worked too well. Boards began comparing judgements. This meant prices converged and our spreads vanished. The death knell was a child rescued from a burning house in Topeka: every conceivable philosophy judged this action rather just, and equally so at that. When Gudge bought up the deed, he found no one to offload his ten-million dollar mistake onto. If only you could have seen him that day! His face was Ferrarired, his mouth spewing spittle and lamentations, and his hands seemed to be conducting a dissonant orchestra.
The cure (to agreement, not to his blood pressure), naturally, was to subsidize argument. We endowed chair after chair across disparate factions; we paid a journal to prove intent was everything and its rival to prove intent was a bourgeois superstition; we went so far as to bribe the Pope into issuing a decree declaring the Pope was not infallible. This was a funny sort of paradox, the arguments more amusing still, and all of this was compounded by its effects on indulgences. In sum, quarrels broke out and our trading desks rang with the merry music of price differences.
And that, of course, is also how we got Derrida.