Facing choices in life and work

Ethics are needed where we face choices and there’s no one but ourselves to see what we do. If there are rules to follow, the choice is between compliance and rebellion. That isn’t an ethical matter. It depends on fear of punishment versus desire for whatever lies outside the rules.

If you face shame or scandal if you’re caught, that isn’t an ethical decision either. Prudence or fear decide the outcome. But if you face nothing beyond your own thoughts about living as you wish to live, you’re confronting a purely ethical decision.

The decision to gossip and pass on a rumor that will embarrass someone; the choice to go easy on a task and cut yourself some slack; the time spent chatting around the water cooler; using office phone lines, computers or stationery for your private needs; all are ethical decisions. No one will know what you’ve done (or they’re doing it themselves and in no position to point the finger).

These small, everyday instances of ethical decisions–are no different from the decision to win a deal by misleading the buyer, cheating a little on an expense claim (everyone does it, right?), or dropping a few words into a meeting that you know will mean someone you dislike will find him or herself under suspicion.
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Is loyalty always admirable? Is faith always a virtue? Perhaps not.

An Antebellum era (pre-civil war) family Bible.
Image via Wikipedia

Loyalty has long been prized by leaders of every kind, from business moguls to politicians and church leaders; to be disloyal is typically seen as an obviously negative trait. Yet too much emphasis on loyalty can cause real problems, like stifling dissent, dulling people’s willingness to tell the truth and blunting their creativity. If no one is willing to rock the boat by pointing out problems or suggesting new ideas, how many opportunities, mistakes or instances of questionable practice will be missed? When does loyalty become misplaced?

It’s a problem of balance. Too much disloyalty is disruptive and destroys trust. Too much loyalty — especially of the unquestioning kind — means important questions may be ignored or suppressed until it’s too late. Should you put loyalty above ‘outing’ misbehavior or dishonesty? Should you stay loyal to a polticial party, a candidate, or a point of view even if you now believe they have it all wrong?

What about patriotism? Is ‘my country, right or wrong’ an admirable attitude — or one that prevents nations from making the changes they need to protect the very values they claim to stand for? What if my country is wrong? Isn’t it more loyal, in the true sense, to stand up and say so, than keep my mouth shut out of misplaced qualms about what others may think? Continued

A world without trust is a world most people don’t want to live in

Part of what makes life livable is a sense that there are some people whom you can trust pretty much all the time. We all know that there are cheats in the world, as well as confidence tricksters, liars and many other kinds of untrustworthy people. Nevertheless, we have to trust others to make it possible to trade, govern and be governed and know what to believe and how to live our lives. If no one is trustworthy, any kind of civilized life becomes impossible.

That’s what this report by The International Herald Tribune on the incidence of scientific fraud in the United States is so worrying (“Scientific Fraud: There’s more of it than you think”). Most of us believe that one mark of being a ‘professional’ is adherence to a set of ethical standards. Scientists are honor-bound to report their results truthfully, abide by proper standards of research and objectivity, and provide an honest statement of their findings. Since their findings can have a massive impact on many aspects of people’s lives, from health to career direction, we need to trust them. Indeed, in our technology-obsessed world, people and governments seem to place almost an unquestioning reliance on the statements of the people in white lab coats. Continued

Moralists have long been too obsessed with sex when handling money is often far more obscene

Image via WikipediaIn today’s New York Times, David Brooks writes a powerful piece lambasting the way tht the United States has slipped from being “industrious, ambitious and frugal” in handling prosperity into losing any social conscious about financial inequalities and the way people are seduced into excessive debt (“The Great Seduction”).

Here’s a sample of his views:

The United States has been an affluent nation since its founding. But the country was, by and large, not corrupted by wealth. For centuries, it remained industrious, ambitious and frugal.
Over the past 30 years, much of that has been shredded. The social norms and institutions that encouraged frugality and spending what you earn have been undermined. The institutions that encourage debt and living for the moment have been strengthened. The country’s moral guardians are forever looking for decadence out of Hollywood and reality TV. But the most rampant decadence today is financial decadence, the trampling of decent norms about how to use and harness money.

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Most people today strongly advocate sincerity. Here’s an opposing viewpoint

I recently came across this challenging viewpoint in an article on a British blog called “Stumbling and Mumbling” (“Against Sincerity” ). The writer bases his point on the idea that what’s true is true, regardless of what anyone else believes about it. Taking the argument round the other way, what’s false is simply false, even if you believe it to be true.

I can’t help agreeing that there’s altogether too much emphasis being based today on personal belief — faith, if you like — as the basis of correct actions. It’s obvious that even the strongest belief can be mistaken, where truth is always true (if it’s mistaken, it’s no longer truth). Using belief as justification absolves people from the need to seek further after what is factual. It erects emotion as a sign of correctness (belief is, after all, as much or more emotional as rational). It removes much of the need to find firm evidence to support what you assert. Continued

If you can’t trust the evidence, there’s nothing left

I hope others are as concerned as I feel about this article, from The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Journals Find Fakery in Many Images Submitted to Support Research”), giving examples of where Photoshop or similar programs had been used to fabricate or manipulate images to support research conclusions.

Editors at scientific publications are, it seems, having to act more like detectives to test the images supplied with articles for signs of tampering. The root of the problem, I guess, is the ease with which modern software allows images to be manipulated and ‘enhanced’, coupled with researchers’ desire to present compelling evidence for their conclusion (even when it doesn’t quite exist). Continued

Can trust really be quantified?

In a provocative piece for Harvard Business Review’s blog area, John Baldoni asks whether there is a way to find out just how trustworthy a business leader (or anyone else in a leadership position) might be (“How Trustworthy Are You?”).

His question is provoked by a new book called The Trusted Advisor by David Maister, Charles M. Green and Rob Galford. One of those authors, Charles Green, has now gone a step further by presenting an online self assessment that measures an individual’s “Trust Quotient.” Continued

Is being authentic and sincere always such a good thing?

One of the mantra’s of self-help gurus today is a constant emphasis on authenticity and sincerity: being yourself, whoever that may be, rather than putting on an act. It’s interesting to hear a slightly different point of view — that ‘excessive’ sincerity can become a license for all kind of unpleasant behavior and may need to be tempered with the a kind of artificial, ritualized way of interaction to allow for some kind of stability.

That’s the suggestion from a new book called Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity reviewed by Genevieve Maitland Hudson wriitng in The Guardian’s ‘Comment is free’ section “The value of insincerity”).

She writes:

. . . ritual should be understood as a space in which the inevitable imperfections, difficulties and differences of life are left behind for an “as if” world where regulation and peace are momentarily possible. Ritual does not ignore the difficulties of life as it really is; on the contrary, it accepts these difficulties, and indeed it is only necessary because of these difficulties.

So for instance, when we say “please” and “thank you” we may be acting ritually rather than sincerely. We don’t always mean it but that doesn’t matter. We don’t have to mean it. The point is that we are acting “as if” a world in which we were always properly polite to one another could exist. We are creating a common social space in which we treat one another respectfully regardless of how we are really feeling at any particular point in time.

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