Make an Ethical Difference

Tools for Better Action

Mark Pastin

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781609949112
• eBook ISBN: 9781609949136
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

We are plagued today by a decline in ethical behavior. Scandals come so thick and fast that any attempt to list them is out of date in weeks if not days. But ethics isn't just a matter of headlines; it's a part of everyone's life. We're called on to make ethical decisions, large and small, all the time. This can be particularly tricky in the workplace, where our decisions can affect not just ourselves but coworkers, clients, customers, and even the entire company.
Existing ethics books are of limited use. They generally feature one author's opinions on very specific situations, which may well have nothing to do with the problems we're facing. And anyway, we don't need expert advice. Mark Pastin insists every one of us is qualified to resolve even the thorniest dilemmas ourselves, and in this profoundly practical book he gives us the tools to do just that.
Pastin argues that we all have an innate ethical –he calls it "the ethics eye." The problem is, we're not aware we have it or how to develop it. Here he provides practical tools we can use to open up our ethics eye so that we can consistently see what is right and do it.
Make an Ethical Difference shows how to apply these tools using actual ethical dilemmas drawn from Pastin's decades of experience as an advisor to governments, corporations, and NGOs. The point is not to try to wedge your situation into one of the examples—it's to show how a tool that can be applied to any situation is used in one particular instance. And once you've reached a decision, Pastin offers strategies for building consensus with those who might disagree with you.
People often feel hopeless and skeptical that there is anything they as individuals can do to raise society's ethical level or resolve long-standing impasses. By using the unique tools in this book, we will gain confidence in our innate ethical sense and take actions that will elevate the ethical level of the groups and organizations we belong to and society as a whole.

Chapter One

Know the Rules before You Play

“The master knows the rules without suffering them, the slave suffers the rules without knowing them.”

—Chinese proverb

SITUATION #2 This Land Is Your Land

I once consulted to a company in the “raw land” business. Land is considered “raw” if it is either not currently in use or is used only for farming and has no roads or utilities. Buying such land is highly speculative, because developing the land for residential or commercial use depends on approvals at many levels of government, not to mention someone willing to pay for the roads and other infrastructure. My client had a buyer for a large chunk of raw land, a huge public company whose bonds were rated AAA. When it came down to negotiations, the public company offered a reasonable price, but offered to double the price if my client would accept its AAA rated bonds instead of cash. When the public company’s chief financial officer computed the value of the bonds on offer to my client, he made a huge error in my client’s favor. The only condition the public company put on its offer was that my client decide then and there. My client asked me, “Should I take the cash now or go for the much higher valued bonds?”

How would you advise the client? In formulating this advice, use the ethical decision-making tool that focuses this chapter.

I have spent 40 years as an ethics advisor to organizations of all kinds, ranging from global multinationals to small start-ups. Needless to say, this was not a clever career plan nurtured in my youth. Ethical situations just seemed to find me. In many of these situations, an ethical change was necessary for the survival of an organization. This was often because the organization had been caught doing something unethical, and often illegal as well. I have not always been able to effect the needed change, but over time I have gotten better at it. I have developed tools for ethical change that increase the chance of a positive outcome.

This book distills the lessons learned in hundreds of situations into a practical guide—a set of tools—to use for ethical action and change. In this chapter, we introduce the first of these tools.

The tools provided here can be used to solve ethical problems as well as problems well beyond the domain of ethics. The ways of thinking that encourage ethical action are essential to the sustained success of groups and organizations, whether or not there is an ethical issue. In fact, I have learned that those who can see the difference between right and wrong—and act on what they see—often have other attributes that contribute to their success.

The world will not be free of ethical defect as a result of what is written here. Nor do I pretend to have surpassed the wisdom of the ages in terms of philosophical ethics. Fortunately, you do not have to be a sage to make a positive difference in ethics. Each and every one of us has the experience of doing something right or making something better. Each of us has an innate ability to contribute to ethics, and my goal is to help you find that ability in yourself, trust it, act on it, and make an ethical difference.

BEYOND IDEOLOGY

A person can learn how to make a constructive ethical difference in the groups and organizations to which they belong. If you doubt that this is true, it may be because theologians, philosophers, and psychologists have often mystified ethics to make us think that ethical betterment depends on accepting their views. Those who say you cannot change ethics outside of their favored ideology or discipline do a disservice to ethics, and to people. They are using our desire for ethical betterment to promote the viewpoint they favor.

These same ideologues have been trying to convince us for centuries that ethical disputes are too difficult for us to resolve on our own. We are supposed to believe that the best we can do is to demur to the “great minds” and not ask too many hard questions. But these great minds, despite centuries of effort, have not resolved many ethical issues. And where is it proven that, despite confusions and disagreements, we do not have an innate ability to find the right path? Where has it been proven that we need an ideology to guide us?

We see later that the whole idea of an ethics ideology is ill conceived. While you can and will arrive at ethical opinions and generalizations, they will be built upon your ethics sense—and not upon the dictates of an authority.

ETHICAL CHANGE

If we are going to create ethical change, the first question we need to ask is, “What is it that we are trying to change?”

Interlude: What Ethics Is—And What It Isn’t

When we think about living in a world where the unethical often succeed, it is common to bemoan the loss of an inner ethical compass, a personal integrity, which is somehow no longer getting installed in folks. This, of course, assumes that you and I have this inner compass and that we recognize its absence in others. When you live in the middle of ethical disputes, you quickly learn that all parties to the dispute have this “I have it; you don’t” belief about an inner ethical compass. In fact, as you read this, you are probably pretty sure that you have this inner compass and wonder if the author of this book has any ethics. Who is the author to tell me anything about ethics at all? In other words, you have it, and maybe I don’t. I have never yet met a person who told me (except with tongue in cheek) that he or she was below average in ethics or completely without ethics.

The only way to break out of the I-have-it-and-you-don’t circle is to understand what ethics is. I emphasize that knowing what ethics is is not the same as knowing what good ethics is. Ethics is our topic, and we need to understand the topic before we sort out good ethics from bad ethics, right from wrong. And it will help us figure out why it seems that each of us thinks we have ethics while others may not.

All sorts of entities can be said to have (or lack) ethics: people, companies, agencies, even countries. Start with people.

A person’s ethics is no more or less than the set of principles that the person will not breach, except under extreme duress. (A parent who is ordinarily truthful may lie to save their child’s life. Truthfulness is still part of the parent’s ethics but the duress is extreme.) If you want to know about my ethics, you want to know what you can expect of me in various situations. If you lend me money, can you trust me to repay it even if it is difficult for me to do so? If you leave your kids with me, can you trust me to treat your kids as well as my own? If you share information with me at work, will I use it to make myself look smarter than you? The answers to these questions will tell you a lot about my ethics. We can summarize this by saying that a person’s ethics consists of the ground rules, which determine what that person will and will not do. These are the principles that guide a person’s actions except when the person is under extreme duress, such as when the survival of the person or a member of their family is perceived to be threatened.

A person’s ethics is somewhat like a computer’s operating system. The operating system does not do many tasks itself, but it determines what tasks a computer can and cannot do. When you use a computer, you usually don’t notice the operating system. But if the computer constantly locks up, it is time to look at the operating system.

In the classic cult movie Repo Man, actor Harry Dean Stanton plays “Bud,” an elder statesman of repo men, people who repossess cars when the owners miss payments. Bud takes an apprentice, Otto, played by Emilio Estevez, under his wing. At one point Bud admonishes Otto to honor the “repo man code of ethics.” Even though this is played for laughs, it makes sense. You can imagine the repo man code of ethics including such pearls as, “Avoid situations in which your actions are likely to provoke violence” and “Take only what you are authorized to repossess.” Even endeavors as ugly as repossession have ground rules.

A corollary of seeing ethics as ground rules is that what a person says about ethics may have little to do with his or her actual ethics. Everyone knows what they are expected to say about ethics. If I tell my new neighbor that I am not interested in him as a person and that I am interested only in the tools I can borrow from him, that neighbor will not be my friend. If I tell my co-workers that I am only interested in looking better than they do to the boss, they will keep their distance. You have to choose your ethical words carefully. I should say to my neighbor, “If you need anything, just ask.” I should say to my co-workers, “I always take a win-win approach with my colleagues.” I may not expect to be believed when I say these things since I am just saying what is expected. But I will at least show that I know what is expected.

Another corollary of defining ethics as ground rules is that a person’s ethics, their ground rules, are normally stable. These are the rules that determine everything else the person may or may not do, but these rules are themselves seldom subject to change. Even when we are not aware of ground rules, they guide our judgments of right and wrong, better and worse. That is not to say that ground rules cannot change, or even that it takes a big effort to change them; it is just that in the ordinary course of events, a person’s ground rules are stable and unquestioned.

Even though ethics is not normally defined as ground rules, I believe this is what we mean when we talk about ethics. When I want to know about someone’s ethics, I am trying to predict what they will do in certain situations. Knowing their ground rules helps me do that.

Organizations and groups have ethics too—some good and some not so good. Just as with people, an organization’s ground rules help us predict how it will act. We often think of the ground rules of organizations that have failed in one way or another. For example, it is hard to think about the Gulf oil spill and not conclude that British Petroleum was “talking green” while operating on the ground rule, “If something goes wrong, blame someone—anyone—else.” But there are also positive examples of organizational ground rules. Nordstrom has built an empire by acting on the ground rule, “Treat a customer returning a pair of shoes just like a customer buying one.” Just as with individuals, organizational ground rules tend to be stable and unquestioned.

If we see ethics as ground rules, ethics are not so mysterious. Different theories about ethics can make ethics seem mysterious, but it all comes down to what people will and will not do. That is what we are interested in. Once you realize this, you can quit worrying about ethics as some sort of mental state, brain wave, or mystical experience. These things may influence your ethics, but they are not your ethics. Even if you achieve some sort of beatific mental state, when you cheat me on a contract, you are a cheater. On the other hand, if you are impeccably honest in dealing with me, I couldn’t care less about your brain waves.

When we say that many folks no longer seem to have an inner ethical compass, we are saying that we cannot rely on their ground rules to ensure truthfulness, honesty, and concern for others. It is a mistake to rely on their ground rules in personal or business relationships. Because ground rules help make actions predictable, we do not find much predictability in dealing with one another. For this reason, we try, mostly without success, to restore predictability through a landslide of laws, regulations, and complex contracts. This is not a revelation; it is the defining mark of a world with ethics in decline.

There are other ethical words that we have to understand to pursue ethical change. These include morality, integrity, and character. These words are easier to understand in terms of ground rules. For example, we can now see that a person’s integrity consists of acting in accordance with his or her own ground rules. Thus, even a person whose ground rules are questionable can have integrity in living up to those ground rules. Character has several meanings but one of them is that a person has character if they follow their ground rules even when it is extremely difficult to do so. Morality is a matter of having ground rules, specifically, ground rules that match what we consider to be right and wrong from the perspective of our own ground rules.

Once we see ethics as ground rules, being an ethical change agent seems to be no more or less than changing the ground rules of a person, group, or organization. You might think a good behavioral psychologist would be in the best position to help us bring about ethical change by manipulating punishments and rewards. And this, I believe, is what some influential thinkers such as B. F. Skinner, the father of behaviorism, have thought. For them it all comes down to the carrot, the stick—and the ass between them.

This misses this point. While we have a working definition of what ethics is, it does not tell us what good ethics is or what bad ethics is. Even if the carrot-and-stick approach worked, it would not give us the faintest idea of which ethical changes to pursue. Another way of putting this is to say that not all ethical change is good. Indeed, one of the things that motivates us to pursue ethical change is the sense that there has already been ethical change—and not entirely for the better. So our question is, How do we know which ethical changes to bring about? What actions will allow us to make an ethical difference in a positive sense?

EASY TO SEE: HARD TO DO

While it may seem impossibly hard to figure out just what ethical changes are for the better, this is often not the case. When an organization asks me for ethical advice, I am not there to make things worse. And it is seldom hard to tell what would be better. An example:

SITUATION #3 Outside Looking In

The board of directors of one of the world’s largest financial services companies hired several consultants to help with an ethical issue. The issue turned out to be in the executive suite, and to some extent in the bedrooms of those in the executive suite. The CEO of the company had put a lot of trust in a younger employee with whom he was having an affair. Unfortunately, the younger employee abused this trust in a way that might soon become public. Or so the board feared. The board brought in the outsiders, including me, to “gain perspective” and “contain” the problem. While the board knew that it would have to make changes in the executive team, it also knew that the story would be a juicy one in the media. The board asked, “What will our employees think once they see what their leaders have been up to?”

The consultants’ task was not to undo the wrongdoing. Too late for that. Our job was to keep the rot from spreading from the top down throughout the organization, thereby creating even more ethical problems. When the employees of an organization learn that the CEO made huge business blunders on the advice of his lover, they often conclude that the whole company is corrupt and lower their own expectations of ethical conduct.

It came down to this. When executives set a bad example, the ground rules of an otherwise decent organization may shift. Employees may feel betrayed in their commitment to doing the right thing when the folks at the top clearly aren’t. This organization was a basically honest company. So the task was to keep the ground rules from slipping as a result of the soon-to-be-disclosed scandal. Doing this was a matter of some complexity, since you can’t just say, “Your CEO is a bum but we don’t want you to be bums.” It was important not to compound the internal damage to the company by trying to convince the employees that what they would inevitably hear was not true. You can destroy the integrity of an organization by lying about the wrongdoing of its leadership. It’s the old adage about the cover-up being worse than what is being covered up. So the problem was how to communicate with employees in a manner that neither hid the truth nor demoralized the company.

The consultants recommended that the board clean house in the executive suite in as short a time as feasible without leaving the company rudderless. Almost everyone in the executive suite had some inkling of what was going on and either aided and abetted it, or at least tolerated it. In this way, if the issue did become public, the company would already have taken action. Employees would see that the improper conduct was handled decisively and that the board would be viewed as taking strong action to protect the reputation of the company.

The board initially rejected this advice instead trying to salvage more of the company’s leadership team. The CEO got wind of the advice given to the board and had the consultants fired. (It is the job of an ethics consultant to be fired in such situations i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Better Action
• Chapter One: Know the Rules before You Play
• Chapter Two: Navigating the Minefield of Interests
• Chapter Three: The Ethics Eye
• Chapter Four: Not in My Backyard
• Chapter Five: Uncommon Sense
• Chapter Six: Ethical Action Means Ethical Agreement
• Chapter Seven: Yes, We Can Agree on Ethics
• Chapter Eight: A Few Words about Big Issues
• Chapter Nine: Ethics and Laws
• Chapter Ten: Ethics-Based Healthcare Reform
• Chapter Eleven: Move Forward with Confidence
• Resources for Action
• My Ethical Workplace: An Organizational Assessment Tool
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Working with the Author