Ethics Newsline®

by Rushworth M. Kidder

The other day a newspaper editor rang up. She was writing a preview of the coming year and wondered what ethical hotspots I saw emerging in 2008.

Great question. But as I thought about her request, I realized that ethics is less about places and events than about characters and ideas. The real question is, What overarching ethical trends are developing in 2008, and what moral qualities will be needed most as we move forward?

Glancing over the columns I’ve written this past year, I’m struck by four themes.

1. An increasingly upbeat view of human progress. According to the latest “State of the Future” report from the World Federation of United Nations Associations, life expectancy, literacy, and gross domestic products per capita are increasing, while infant mortality and global conflicts are decreasing. And the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics finds greatly reduced drinking and smoking among U.S. high-schoolers, who are less apt to be sexually active than in prior decades and are having far fewer babies. They commit fewer crimes, are less apt to be victims of crime, and are less subject to maltreatment. Conclusion: While there’s plenty of bad news, there are real signs of hope.
2. Sober warnings about ethical lapses. Two reports last fall sounded alarms in sports and in business. George Mitchell, in his report on performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, popularized the phrase “the steroids era.” He was describing a 20-year period during which “an environment developed in which illegal use became widespread.” And the latest National Business Ethics Survey from the Ethics Resource Center found that after several years of progress, “ethical misconduct in general is very high and back at pre-Enron levels.” Conclusion: While there’s plenty of good athletics and business activity, there are real signs of moral danger.
3. Increasing technological ferment. Readers responded vigorously to a column on the ways in which inconsiderate public use of cell-phones subjects us to the unrestrained intimacies of perfect strangers. Yet this was also the year that news flowed out of Burma during a crackdown by the regime — not through formal news channels, which were banned, but through the efforts of citizens using cell-phones to transmit stories and pictures to editors in the West. This year, too, a teenager in Missouri committed suicide after being lured by an adult into a relationship with a fictitious boyfriend on MySpace. Conclusion: Technology magnifies both the good and the bad in human character, simultaneously providing new solutions and new dangers.
4. A failure of non-consent. The MySpace story illustrates what happens when teenagers have not been taught to resist dangerous situations. That failure of non-consent also characterizes the millions of person-hours wasted in following the lurid details of the Anna Nicole Smith story last spring — or the inability to summon up outrage over drug use in professional sports, cheating on high-performance tests in schools and colleges, or the barely legal but morally indefensible tactics used to produce so many subprime loans. Conclusion: The only defense against the downward gravitation of unethical behavior is our own self-defense. If we don’t change ourselves, nothing is going to change us.

As these trends carry forward, what are the most important moral qualities we’ll need in the coming year? What New Year’s resolutions can we commit to for 2008? Here are my three:

• Civility. This coming year will require a willingness to outgrow the shallow notion of ethics as right-versus-wrong and replace it with a thoughtful clarity about right versus right. During his confirmation hearings, U.S. attorney general Michael Mukasey quoted Supreme Court justice Robert H. Jackson, who wrote that “the issue between … a right and a wrong … never presents a dilemma,” but that “the dilemma is because the conflict is between two rights, each in its own way important.” The challenge to ethics in public and corporate life is to replace a rule-bound, compliance-based, right-versus-wrong way of thinking with a values-based, right-versus-right reasoning. Resolution: I won’t resort to a rule when a value will make the point. And I will refuse to reduce the great debates of our day to the polarizing, I’m-right-and-you’re-wrong language of talk radio and blogosphere rant.
• Vigilance. We’ll need watchfulness coupled with moral readiness. To spot ethical temptations but have no way to resist their subtle allure leaves you dangerously exposed. But never to recognize temptations in the first place is, in effect, to give your consent to them and be manipulated by them. Don Imus, the sharp-witted talk-show host who was sacked in April from his $10-million-a-year job by CBS, apparently was so acclimated to personal slurs and moral slights that he failed to withhold his consent when an egregious insult about the Rutgers women’s basketball team tripped off the tongue of his on-air colleague. Resolution: I won’t merely drift along with the passing moral currents. Instead, I will maintain control of my own conscience and have the moral courage to stand up against unethical behavior.
• Fairness. We’ll be called upon to express new levels of equity, expressed through the principles of democracy. The test of a nation’s character lies in how it treats its aged and teaches its young. The growing disparity of income between the rich and the poor effectively shrinks resources toward the middle-aged and away from both the young and the aged. Resolution: I will not replace deep compassion with benign neglect, genuine respect with ritualized hand-wringing, and individual responsibility with buck-passing collectivism. Instead, I will argue at every turn for the ethics inherent in democracy, and for the democratizing power of ethics, not only at home but around the world.

Those are my three. What are yours?

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

Questions or comments? Write to newsline@globalethics.org.