Moral Courage in Organizations

Doing the Right Thing at Work

Debra R. Comer, Gina Vega

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317464389
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatik
• Subtopic: Informatik Allgemein

The topic of moral courage is typically missing from business ethics instruction and management training. But moral courage is what we need when workplace pressures threaten to compromise our values and principles. Moral Courage in Organizations: Doing the Right Thing at Work, edited by Debra Comer and Gina Vega, underscores for readers the ethical pitfalls they can expect to encounter at work and enhances their ability do what they know is right, despite these organizational pressures. The book highlights the effects of organizational factors on ethical behavior; illustrates exemplary moral courage and lapses of moral courage; explores the skills and information that support those who act with moral courage; and considers how to change organizations to promote moral courage, as well as how to exercise moral courage to change organizations. By giving readers who want to do the right thing guidelines for going about it, Moral Courage in Organizations: Doing the Right Thing at Work is a potent tool to foster more ethical organizational behavior.

Part I

The Organizational Pressures That Make Moral Courage Necessary

1

A Short Primer on Moral Courage

AL GINI

It is curious—curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.

—Mark Twain

In a colloquial sense, the concept of courage is usually associated with acts of daring deeds that involve danger, risk, and behavior that overcomes seemingly insurmountable obstacles and odds. The word “courage” conjures up images of individuals’ performing difficult actions while risking physical injury or death. A courageous act is one in which the actor disregards concern for personal safety or well-being and exerts himself or herself in the service of another. The courageous act is seen as the heroic act. In popular culture, we use the word “hero” to honor soldiers, firefighters, rescue workers, and, sometimes perhaps inappropriately, even athletes who are severely tested and challenged in the heat of competition. From this perspective, courage is a supra virtue, an extraordinary achievement, and not part of the common repertoire of traits and behaviors associated with the more mundane and pedestrian aspects of our lives.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, Ernest Becker deconstructs our commonsensical definition of courage to mean not an altruistic concern for others but rather a myopic preoccupation with self. Becker argues that the “primary mainspring” of human action is not the pursuit of sex, as Freud proposed, but rather the pursuit of “distractions” that will counterbalance our overwhelming fear of the immensity of eternity and the awareness of our finitude. As a species, says Becker, human beings have a basic existential dilemma: we are both burdened and blessed with a paradoxical nature, half animal and half symbolic. That means that we are simultaneously aware of the possibility of infinity and the absolute certainty that we are finite. We live our whole lifetimes, said Becker, with the “fate of death haunting our dreams” even on the “most sun-filled days.”¹

The idea of death, says Becker, the fear of it, haunts us like nothing else. It is the “motivating principle” of human activity. And all human activity is consciously and unconsciously designed to deny and combat our fear and terror of death.² “The painful riddle of death” haunts us, says Becker, causing us mental and physical grief and despair. Our fear wears us out, and so, says Becker, out of necessity we seek to repress it, sublimate it, take it off the table of our immediate sense of consciousness. We create mental defenses, illusions, myths, stories, tasks, crusades, causes, work, rituals, and bizarre behaviors to distract us from our discomfort and despair. Becker writes that the most dramatic way to deny the terror of death is to act as if fear means nothing to us, as if we are not helpless and abandoned in the world and fated for oblivion. If we cannot beat death, we can at least temporarily ignore and deny it through culturally sanctioned heroic acts as well as outrageous acts of violence and evil. For Becker, it is only in choosing to act that we assert our “being” and, at least temporarily, overcome “nothingness.” Heroism, he writes, “is first and foremost a reflex of terror and death. We admire most the courage to face death; we give such valor our highest and most constant adoration; it moves us deeply in our hearts because we have doubts about how brave we ourselves would be.… Man has elevated animal courage to a cult.”³

Becker argues that the “hero project” is a pose, a learned character trait, a grand illusion, and a “neurotic defense against despair.”⁴ In the “hero project,” we put on the “character armor” (William Reich’s term) of the action hero, “lay away” our fears, and pretend to make the world more manageable. Evoking William James’s notion of acting oneself into being, the hero, through his or her actions, seeks reinforcement of self, recognition, unabashed self-esteem, ersatz immortality, and, if possible, cosmic significance. For Becker, hero acts are neither selfless nor sincere. They are, rather, sublimated forms of escapist behavior.

Neither Becker’s description of courage nor our colloquial understanding of it captures the essence of “courage” or “moral courage” accurately from an ethical point of view. To paraphrase the words of Winston Churchill, moral courage is the first of the human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees all others.⁵ Courage is not an extra or a supernumerary virtue, but rather a critical human quality that serves as a necessary precondition for all other forms of moral conduct. Moral courage is the readiness to endure danger for the sake of principle.⁶ Moral courage rejects voyeurism and seeks engagement. Moral courage is a stimulus, a catalyst for action. As Nelson Mandela has suggested, moral courage is not the absence of fear; rather, it is the strength to triumph over one’s fear and to act.⁷ Moral courage is the ability to transcend fear and endure risk to put ethics into actual practice. It means standing up and standing out in defense of a principle. Without it, ethics would simply be a naming noun, and not an action verb. Sadly, however, as Robert F. Kennedy so poignantly phrased it, “moral courage is a more rare commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality of those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.”⁸

The Problem of Ethics

It is not a lack of moral reasoning that causes so much unethical behavior, but rather a lack of moral engagement, or a lack of moral courage.⁹ There is insufficient willingness to take on ethical issues and questions, to extend ourselves, to put ourselves in harm’s way because we are concerned about the well-being of others.

Publicly, we may live lives that are economically and electronically interconnected and interdependent, but privately, we are emotionally and ethically withdrawn, insensitive to the wants and needs of others. If we care about anyone else at all, it is only after we have first taken care of our own self-centered desires and interests.

People find it hard to do the right thing because they find it hard “to stand outside the shadow of self.”¹⁰ Ethical behavior is possible only when we are able to step away from ourselves or, to borrow a phrase, “to forget [about] ourselves on purpose.”¹¹ We must be able to see beyond our self-contained universe of personal concerns. We must be able to become, if only momentarily, more selfless than selfish. Ethics requires recognition that we are not alone or at the center of the universe. Ethics is always about self in the context of others. Ethics must be open to the voice of others; being ethical begins with having the courage to stand outside of the needs of self and to talk and listen to others.

Without moral courage to propel us forward, we become captives of our own needs and desires. We become prisoners enclosed in the fortress of self. Getting free of self, overcoming our natural tendency to put ourselves first in our interactions with others, is the central problem and paradox of communal existence. Although the terms “narcissism” and “narcissistic type” do not often come up in conversations about ethics, these concepts neatly encapsulate why it is so hard to get free of the shadow of self.

Narcissists do not see past their own needs and wants. They have a heightened sense of self-importance and grandiose feelings that they are unique in some way. They consider themselves special people and expect special treatment. They always want their own way and are frequently ambitious, desiring fame and fortune. Their relationships with others are fragile and limited. They are unable to show empathy, and they feign sympathy with others only to achieve their own selfish ends. Interpersonal exploitation is commonplace. The narcissist is totally self-absorbed and either cannot or will not focus on or imagine the needs of others.¹²

Ethical decision making requires us to look beyond the immediate moment and beyond personal needs, desires, and wants to imagine the possible consequences of our choices and behavior on self and others. In its most elemental sense, moral imagination is about picturing various outcomes in our interactions with others. In some sense, moral imagination is a dramatic virtual rehearsal that allows us to examine and appraise different courses of action to determine the morally best thing to do. The capacity for empathy is crucial to moral imagination. As Adam Smith wrote, “As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the situation.”¹³

According to philosopher Patricia H. Werhane, a failure of this capacity—an inability to imagine and to be sympathetic to the needs, passions, and interests of others—is the main cause of moral ineptitudes. To sympathize is to place myself in another’s situation, “not because of how that situation might affect me, but rather if I were that person, in that situation.”¹⁴ Using moral imagination allows us to be self-reflective, to step back from our situation so as to see it from another point of view. In taking such a perspective, says Werhane, a person tries to look at the world or herself from a more dispassionate perspective or from the point of view of an impartial, reasonable person who is not wholly absorbed with self. Within this perspective, which Werhane calls “a disengaged view from somewhere,” these questions become obligatory:

1. What would a reasonable person judge is the right thing to do?

2. Could one defend this decision publicly?

3. What kind of precedent does this decision set?

4. Is this decision or action necessary?

5. Is this the least worst option?¹⁵

What Werhane is suggesting is that one must, in making an ethical decision, determine the answers to some crucial questions: What is at stake? What are the issues? Who else is involved? And what are the alternatives? Moral imagination allows us the possibility of addressing these questions from a perspective that is both inside and outside the box, a perspective that focuses on self and others.

Without the ability to see beyond...