Many years ago there was a BBC children’s TV programme called Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead?. Its aim was to encourage kids to spending their summer holidays helping grannies across the street or litter-picking rather than lying on the sofa filling their faces with cheese puffs. If I’m anything to go by, it didn’t work.
Moral Ambition is Why Don’t You? for grownups, written by a Dutch historian but deploying psychologically sophisticated nudge techniques, shaming devices and a hectoring imperative mood to encourage clever if spiritually bankrupt people like you (no offence) to do something beyond making mortgage payments by means of a job you hate. Don’t you realise that the average worker will spend 80,000 hours at their job and, judging by the look of you (again, no offence), 79,999 of those will involve doing things that are of negligible ethical value – such as helping tech firms avoid tax, cold-calling for loan consolidation companies, or writing Observer book reviews?
