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  3. Nearly everybody cheats, but usually only a little. That is one of the themes in Dan Ariely’s new book The (Honest) Truth About

Nearly everybody cheats, but usually only a little. That is one of the themes in Dan Ariely’s new book The (Honest) Truth About

admin2021-09-17  77
问题    Nearly everybody cheats, but usually only a little. That is one of the themes in Dan Ariely’s new book The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty. Most of us think we are pretty wonderful. We can cheat little and still keep that "good person" identity.
   Ariely had one blind colleague and one sighted colleague take taxi rides. The drivers cheated the sighted colleague by taking long routes much more often than they cheated the blind one, even though she would have been easier to mislead. They would have felt guilty cheating a blind woman. Ariely points out that we are driven by morality much more than standard economic models allow. But I was struck by what you might call the Good Person Construct and the moral calculus it implies. For the past several centuries, most Westerners would have identified themselves fundamentally as Depraved Sinners. In this construct, sin is something you fight like a recurring cancer—part of a daily battle against evil.
   But these days, people are more likely to believe in their essential goodness. People who live by the Good Person Construct try to balance their virtuous self-image with their selfish desires. They try to manage the moral plusses and minuses and keep their overall record in positive territory. In this construct, moral life is more like dieting: the Good Person isn’t shooting for perfection any more than most dieters are following their diet loo percent. It’s enough to be workably suboptimal and a generally good guy.
   Obviously, though, there’s a measurement problem. You can buy a weight scale to get an objective measure of your diet. But you can’t buy a scale of virtues to put on the bathroom floor. And given our awesome capacities for rationalization and self-deception, most of us are going to measure ourselves leniently: I was honest with that blind passenger because I’m a wonderful person. I cheated the sighted one because she probably has too much money anyway.
   Ariely suggests you reset your moral gauge from time to time. Your moral standards will gradually slip as you become more and more comfortable with your own rationalizations. I’d add that you really shouldn’t shoot for goodness, which is so vague and forgiving. You should shoot for rectitude. We’re mostly unqualified to judge our own moral performances, so attach yourself to some exterior or social standards. And as we go about doing our Good Person moral calculations, it might be worth asking: Is this good enough?
   
The author prefers "rectitude" to "goodness" because_____.
选项 A、goodness is difficult to be concretely defined
B、rectitude is a greater virtue than goodness
C、the sin nature can hardly be eliminated
D、exterior standards are more adaptive than moral codes
答案A
解析 推断题。根据题干中的关键词rectitude和goodness定位到第五段。作者在该段指出“我们不该以‘善’为目标，而应该努力做到‘正直’”，并说明原因： “善”本身模糊且宽容，我们没有资格对自己的行为做出道德判断，所以我们应该转而寻求外部标准来约束自己、让自己做到“正直”。可见，作者建议我们将“正直”作为努力的目标是因为“善”本身难以界定，缺乏具体的标准。因此答案为A项。
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