Care and Dishonesty - where have our morals gone?

I wonder whether you were as shocked as I was to hear about the latest research findings on the subject of dishonesty.

Our legal system - and indeed the functioning of our society in general - is based on the idea that reasonable and honest people share an understanding of what constitutes a dishonest act. So it is rather dispiriting to find that less than half of women, and even fewer men, think it is dishonest for a care home nurse to put pressure on an elderly patient to change their will in their favour. In fact, it was regarded as only marginally more dishonest than snapping the stalks off broccoli in the supermarket before weighing/paying. More than 80% of these same people think that
it IS dishonest to lie about your age on an internet dating site...

The fear of being frail and dependent is one that haunts many of us as we get older: thinking that a majority of the people you may be relying on for your day-to-day care believe that it's OK to manipulate you in this way is really scary.

Whatever happened to the caring and compassionate society that was supposed to come out of the global economic meltdown? It sounds more like "I'm all right, Jack, devil take the hindmost" - if I can mix my metaphors! Perhaps the people who responded to the survey will change their opinion when they are faced with choosing residential care for their own frail elderly parent (after all, it will then be their putative inheritance that is being redirected) or better yet, themselves.

Certainly, there is an increasing interest in services offering to vet or monitor carers on behalf of the client's family, reflecting the widespread suspicion that not all carers are as compassionate or as altruistic as we would like them to be.

What do you think? It feels as if every time you pick up a paper or turn on the radio there is another story about vulnerable people being let down or exploited in some way, yet at the same time we seem to be enmeshed in more and more legislation designed to prevent these things happening. While inspections involve being able to tick lots of boxes on a sheet, and most of us have such a shaky grasp of basic morality, it is perhaps not surprising that there is such a gap between the standards we allegedly aspire to and what is actually delivered.