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.

The argument for an ethical approach

The argument for an ethical approach to life is simple. You need to consider your actions, even minor ones, in the clear light of the most likely result. Emotions are a poor guide. They tempt you to exchange short-term pleasure (seeing the hated colleague in trouble) for long-term problems (when he or she finds cleverer ways to mess you up in revenge). Rules, even moral ones, rarely cover more than a narrow range of situations. Besides, most people are good at reinterpreting the rules to allow them to do whatever they want; and act as injured innocents if they’re caught.

An ethical approach to life and work depends on standards of thinking and acting you impose on yourself, to free yourself from anxiety and regret and increase your satisfaction and happiness. No belief that you will receive any reward. No one other than yourself to approve what you do or tell yourself to do better next time.

Is it worth it?

Only you can answer that, though there are obvious reasons to believe that the answer will be “yes.”

Suppose everyone lied. What kind of a world would we live in? You could trust no one, not even your closest family. You would never know what to expect or be able to rely on others. Imagine how anxious and fearful you would be all the time. The lengths you would need to go to discover anything correct. The effort you needed to produce your own lies while trying to see through the lies of others.

Would you like to live in such a world? Would it make you happy? Would if offer you a good life?

This is the rationale for approaching life from an ethical standpoint. However you imagine what life would be like without ethics, the result is fearful. If you imagine a life where everyone behaved ethically (even though this is equally unlikely), the picture offers more happiness and freedom than we have today. Ethics are their own reward, not in the abstract sense of being right, but in the practical sense that a life without them would be unlivable.

Technorati Tags: choices, ethics, decision making, personal standards, happiness

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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?

Getting the right balance between loyalty and initiative isn’t simple.

Teams are good for support but bad for encouraging initiative and truth-telling. We need people who are ready too look with different — even disloyal — eyes and bring uncomfortable reality into the open. At the same time, we need the sense of acceptance and stability that comes from being able to trust those around us.

In today’s wider world, faith (which is only another word for unquestioning belief and loyalty) often seems to be prized more highly than curiosity and thought. Thought is uncomfortable and can lead to questioning things we’re relying on and don’t want to look at too closely. Skeptics make us irritable when they challenge what we have come to believe. Yet how will we be able to test our beliefs, and distinguish those worth holding onto from those we should let go, if we prize faith so highly that any kind of questioning is seen as unacceptable?

If our unthinking assumptions are about to break under the weight of change, shouldn’t we be grateful to people who draw them to our attention in time? What about the ‘disloyal’ whistle-blowers who alert the authorities to hidden corruption and deceit? Aren’t they important and valuable people, often moved by a stronger sense of moral duty than the rest of us?

Ethics make for sound principles, not unquestioning faith

There is a way to reconcile loyalty with openness to uncomfortable truth. It’s based on substituting ethical choices for unquestioning loyalty. When people think through the ethics of trust and support for boss and peers, they can usually see where the balance lies between being honest (even if that involves dissent) and being truly disloyal. Sometimes what the boss most needs is to hear the truth, before he or she says or does something that will bring harm. Sometimes what a country needs is to be jolted out of its complacency by a bitter taste of reality, before it’s too late to make a successful change.

Few things in life are black-and-white, however much some people try to make them so. A culture that prizes loyalty above all else soon produces fear of doing or saying anything that might suggest ideas that are outside the accepted orthodoxy. Our intellectual and personal freedom is too important to sacrifice to allow other people — especially those in positions of power — to feel free from any discomfort caused by dissent.

Technorati Tags: loyalty, faith, unquestioning belief, supportive attitudes, whistle-blowers, when to speak out, true patriotism, ethics, follwoing your principles

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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.

Maybe this trust is misplaced:

Almost 9 percent of 2,012 scientists from 605 institutions who were surveyed by the Office of Research Integrity, a monitoring agency for science research, said that they had witnessed some sort of fraud or misconduct in the past three years. ORI estimates that every year, there are three incidences of fraud for every 100 researchers.

Sadly, scientists are no less affected by the pressures to advance themselves by tooting their own horns than the rest of us. They must compete for research grants and tenure-track positions in universities. If they work for commercial organizations, such as pharmaceutical companies, they find themselves facing the same kind of profit-based targets as everyone else. They need to justify their positions and prove their worth on a continual basis.

Probably, much of the low-level fraud goes unnoticed: the ‘forgetting’ of inconvenient data; the quiet playing down of drawbacks and hyping of successes. Some of the highest-profile cases are caught and hit the headlines. Others are fudged and hidden, lest profits or grants be affected and institutions’ reputations lowered.

Just as with the current financial standards, those involved resist external regulation, claiming that they can police themselves, In the same way, we should be skeptical of such claims. Self-regulation demands strong ethics, constant watchfulness and a situation in which maintaining trust will always trump making profits or advancing your career. In today’s world, with its ‘winner-takes-all’ attitudes, the idea seems hopelessly idealistic.

As the IHT article concludes:

The reality is that we are not likely ever to be rid of scientific fraud: The pressures to make a name for oneself and the temptation to cut corners will always exist. Ultimately, science is a human endeavor, and human shortcomings are part of its story. We just have to do a better job in recognizing this — and putting more safeguards in place.

It seems that failing ethical standards, even amongst the most ‘objective’ professionals, is just one more cause for feeling depression nowadays.

Technorati Tags: research fraud, scientific standards, ethics, business ethics, scientific credibility, trust

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.

I think he puts his finger on the main source of today’s moral and ethical blindness when it comes to handling money: a shifting away from ‘bourgeois, middle-class values’ like being thrifty, staying honest in your dealings with others, and paying your own way in the world.

The poor have never been much inclined to follow such values, since their focus is on survival and staying one step ahead of total destitution. They have no time for abstractions. The rich never thought much of middle-class values either. They see handling money as their god-given right and grow up with access to all the people and techniques to help them do it successfully. Who needs thrift when you can make money from others by persuading them that they don’t need to be thrifty or careful either.

Moralizing over sex is a tired set of attitudes. Becoming more socially conscious about protecting the environment is today’s fashion. What’s missing is a robust set of values around the way the rich deal with money and the rest of us have to put up with the consequences.

Perhaps we need laws against under-age investing, polygamous involvement in hedge funds, and seducing the poor and the financially ignorant for immoral financial purposes.

Technorati Tags: moral decadence, financial ethics, dishonesty with money, exploitation of the poor, middle-class values, financial probity, corporate ethics, honesty, financial crisis

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.

Still, a statement like this is always going to be controversial:

Things are true or not whether I believe them or not. What matters are ideas and evidence, not my beliefs. And given that I — like everyone else — has bounded rationality and limited knowledge, the overlap between the two is, ahem, imperfect.
     The idea that a person’s opinions matter in themselves is an aspect of our egocentric “me” culture - the notion that we are all special people, entitled to respect. But we’re not. As Rumsfeld said, people are fungible.
     Blair, as in other ways, embraced this culture. In his resignation speech, he said: “I ask you to accept one thing. Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right. I may have been wrong. That is your call. But believe one thing if nothing else. I did what I thought was right for our country. ”
     But it doesn’t matter what you thought was right, matey. What matters is what was right.

It’s certainly the case that putting too much emphasis on sincerity as a human attribute causes you to link the person and the argument so closely together that any problem with the first (and all people are human enough to have skeletons in their cupboards) critically undermines the second — even though, logically, even the worst of people might have ideas that are both true and useful.

I suspect that the media are somewhat to blame for any tendency we now have to personalize everything, including ideas or arguments that ought to be decided solely by their merits and the evidence to support them.

Still, the question remains: is sincerity to be accepted as an excuse for making a mistake? Is it to stand as a proxy for evidence and rational discourse? Those are big questions that are surely well worth asking.

Technorati Tags: truth, sincerity, belief, faith, evidence, judging what’s true, avoiding mistakes, evidence-based reason, reason versus emotion

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).

It’s not an isolated phenomenon either. The author of the article, Jeffrey R. Young, says:

Ten to 20 of the articles accepted by The Journal of Clinical Investigation each year show some evidence of tampering, and about five to 10 of those papers warrant a thorough investigation. . . (The journal publishes about 300 to 350 articles per year.)

We all tend to assume that scientific papers are paragons of objectivity and accuracy. After all, human lives might depend on what they report, given the tendency for other scientists to draw on previous work to substantiate their own claims.

The reality is that some ‘cleaning up’ of data is nearly universal and the temptation to clean up some fuzzy image may not seem wrong to a generation reared on the use of software to improve even family snaps. In the past, I encountered several reputable scientists who would cut ‘outliers’ from data without a second thought, based on the comforting grounds that they were “almost certainly” random mistakes. Were they? Maybe, but there’s no doubt they made the data presented look rather more compelling than if they had been present.

Unless there are some thing in life we can trust, more or less implicitly, there will no longer be any route to the enhancement of knowledge. Trust is such a fragile thing that even a fear of being mislead can destroy it. Like Caesar’s wife, our scientists need to be above suspicion or they will forfeit much of their credibility and claims for funding.

Technorati Tags: honesty, credibility, trust in science, ethics, ethical research standards, truthfulness, trust

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.”

Charles defines trust via four attributes: credibility, reliability, intimacy and self orientation.

Credibility rates “what you say and how believable you are to others.” In other words, you must be credible if you are asking others to follow your lead.

Reliability measures “actions, and how dependable you appear.” Can you be counted on? People need to know that their leaders will come through for them.

Intimacy considers “how safe people sharing with you.” So often leaders do keep their emotional distance from their followers, but when you are presented with confidential information, you need to keep it so.

The fourth characteristic, self orientation, refers to personal focus, e.g. yourself or others. Too much self focus will lower your degree of trustworthiness. It is important to demonstrate a strong ego but if your power is all about you, then few will follow.

You can dominate, trick, manipulate, cheat and hurt others without bothering about trust, but you cannot lead them; nor can businesses develop stable relations with customers or suppliers, if those people don’t find them trustworthy to do business with.

Today’s macho management style undervalues trust — if it thinks about it at all — which is one of the reasons why corporations continually resort to sleight of hand and hype to cover their essential dishonesty. That’s way some way to start talking seriously about what trust is and how you can understand it more fully seems to me to be extremely timely.

Technorati Tags: trust, honesty, relationships, openness, leadership, trustworthiness

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.

In other words, we need some insincerity and acting to play the role of social lubricant and allow us to behave in a more civilized and pleasant manner than we may feel at the time.

Politeness is not a virtue much valued today in much of Western society. In throwing out the stiff, formalized manners of the past, we are in danger of letting go also of an important part of what it means to show compassion: the willingness to act ‘as if’ the other person wasn’t annoying us by claiming our time and attention for something we probably think isn’t so important anyway.

As Ms. Maitland concludes:

Excessive sincerity has a way of licensing personal arrogance. Ritual activity is more modest since it places our emotions in a wider social context. Through ritual we accept that a working society is going to require the constant repetition of small signs of goodwill that may not always be heartfelt. We acknowledge that engagement with others is not simply about each individual “me” jostling for position; it is about many of us queuing politely and waiting our turn.

In a world that sometimes seems given over entirely to the cult of ‘me first’ and unfettered individualism, some time spent standing quietly and politely in line could be good for all of us.

Technorati Tags: politeness, compassion, sincerity, ritualized behavior, authenticity, saying what you think