The auction that we did in class recently was a great example of how we as a group put prices on certain things that we consider valuable. It was interesting to see that the most valuable thing in our class was a “happy marriage”. It out sold items that I would have considered more valuable such as the “cure for AIDS” and “world peace”. I guess I really should not be surprised because some people do believe that the interests and needs of self do tend to outweigh the interests and needs of others. Also it seems that people who have friends and family that are affected by certain things tend to put more value on them. For example, I am sure a parent or relative of a soldier who is at war would have put down all their money on “world peace”. There are some circumstances that I believe led to some error in this in class experiment. First, we all knew this was for fun, we knew it would not have an effect on real life and more than likely this caused us not to put our full ethical feelings into this. Also, I believe that the fact that a happy marriage was at the end of the list of auction items affected the value that it gained. I noticed that a great deal of people did not bid on anything until the end of the auction.
I felt that I learned a lot of this auction. I learned that it is actually really hard to determine what you value most when you have limited resources with which to obtain those values. I felt like I wanted to help others, but I kind of had this internal thought that “I want a little something for myself too”. This leads me to believe that to be truly ethical and generous you must put all of your personal inhibitions aside and focus on the ethics, needs and wants of others. I don’t want people use utilitarianism, that would be taking too far, but a little selflessness can go a long way to help others.
