Taking Ethics Seriously

Why Ethics Is an Essential Tool for the Modern Workplace

John Hooker

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351578677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Ética empresarial

This book develops an intellectual framework for analyzing ethical dilemmas that is both grounded in theory and versatile enough to deal rigorously with real-world issues. It sees ethics as a necessary foundation for the social infrastructure that makes modern life possible, much as engineering is a foundation for physical infrastructure. It is not wedded to any particular ethical philosophy but draws from several traditions to construct a unified and principled approach to ethical reasoning. Rather than follow the common academic practice of seeking a reflective equilibrium of moral intuitions and principles, it builds on a few bedrock principles of rational thought that serve as criteria for valid argumentation. It develops the ideas from the ground up, without presupposing any background in ethics or philosophy.

Epistemologically, the book views ethics as parallel to mathematics, in that it relies on generally accepted proof techniques to establish results. Whereas mathematics rests on such proof paradigms as mathematical induction and proof by contradiction, ethics can be seen as relying on proof by applying consistency tests, such as generalizability and respect for autonomy. Utilitarianism also plays a key role, but it is reconceived as a deontological criterion. This approach obviously requires that these criteria be formulated more rigorously than is normally the case. To accomplish this, the book begins with the classical idea that an action is distinguishable from mere behavior by virtue of its having a coherent rationale, where coherence requires passing certain consistency tests such as generalizability. An action is therefore inseparable from its rationale, and generalizability is defined in terms of consistency with the rationale. A utilitarian criterion receives a similar treatment with respect to a means-end rationale. Respect for autonomy is grounded in a carefully developed action theory that takes into account such concepts as joint autonomy, implied consent, and the permissibility of interference with unethical behavior. It provides an account of responsibility that is both practical and theoretically satisfying, and it yields a novel solution of the much-discussed trolley car dilemmas.

The book is written for a general audience and strives to be as readable and engaging as possible, while maintaining rigor. It begins by dispelling a raft of misconceptions that trivialize ethics and block its development as an essential tool of modern life, such as the notion that ethics is just a matter of opinion without rational foundation. After presenting the ethical principles just described, along with many examples, it provides several chapters that analyze real-life dilemmas, many obtained from the author's students and professional workshop participants. One cannot understand physics or chemistry without seeing how their principles are applied to real problems, and the same is true of ethics. These chapters demonstrate that a unified normative theory can deal with a wide range of real cases while achieving a reasonable level of objectivity and rigor.

1

The Central Role of Ethics

The departure area for my flight was noisy and crowded as passengers boarded by zones. My boarding pass was marked Zone 2, so I stepped back to allow the Zone 1 passengers to enter the gate. But they kept coming. A suspiciously large fraction of the crowd boarded before Zone 2 was even announced. I couldn’t help noticing that most had bulky suitcases in tow.

I thought about how the airlines created a demand for more cabin luggage space when they began charging fees to check bags. The result is a scramble for overhead space every time passengers board a plane, not to mention the headaches for the flight attendants who must make sure the overhead doors shut. The advantage of boarding early is clear.

I managed to spot a couple of the boarding passes carried by Zone 1 passengers. They were not marked Zone 1. Apparently, the gate agent was lax about enforcing the zones. When I finally entered the plane, I noticed that the early boarders were sitting throughout the cabin, not in the back or along the windows as one might expect from an efficient boarding system. Perhaps the airline rewarded frequent fliers with early boarding, regardless of their seat location. But this many? I also noticed that the overhead space was nearly filled with large carry-ons.

Imagine that we debrief some of these passengers in a focus group. Those who dutifully boarded with their zone would doubtless defend their compliance, although they might regret the hassle that resulted. Those who boarded early would be equally vigorous in their defense. I can hear the arguments now: It’s the airline’s responsibility to enforce its rules. The airline created this situation, not me, by its ridiculous practice of charging for checked luggage. The airline gives me the option of a carry-on bag, and if I must board early to find space, that’s the airline’s problem. Besides, why shouldn’t I have as much right to the space as anybody else? And on and on.

If this little matter doesn’t generate enough heat, we could ask passengers in a cramped economy cabin whether it’s okay to recline the seat all the way back, assaulting the knees and computer screen of the person behind it. Some would say that it is rude and selfish to make another person miserable for the slightly greater comfort of a reclined seat. Others will defiantly insist that their ticket gives them the right to use a certain seat, and that seat has a recline button. Everyone has the same right, and those who don’t like this arrangement can take the train. I’m not making this up, as these are arguments I lifted from an online forum on the subject—minus the insults and hate speech that are always found in such places.

REACHING AGREEMENT

Perhaps airlines have a way of bringing out the worst in us, but I see these little disagreements as evidence of a larger phenomenon. If we can’t agree on how we should board a plane, or even adjust a seat, can we agree on what to do about wealth inequality, immigration, or terrorism? More broadly, can we agree on how to manage the complex, interlocking systems that shape the world around us?

The complexity of modern life is no more evident than in the workplace. Whether we work in a business corporation, a healthcare facility, or a government agency, we find ourselves enmeshed in a vast web of social practices: commercial markets, legal regulatory frameworks, political discourse, media publicity, and the online world. We must not only somehow deal with these complex and conflicting forces, but we must rely on them to get anything done.

We all know that physical infrastructure is essential. Without energy supply, transportation, communication, and far-flung supply chains, we would quickly perish. It is no different with the social infrastructure that underlies everything we do. The physical systems themselves would collapse in an hour without the social cooperation on which they depend. We would not be able to turn on the light switch were it not for countless individuals who come together to finance, build, and maintain the power grid.

Making the parts of physical infrastructure interact properly requires a certain kind of know-how, which we call engineering. Maintaining social infrastructure likewise requires know-how, but there is a big difference: We are the parts that must work together. This means that we must all know what to do. Much of this knowledge is technical and domain specific. A banker must know how to assess a loan application, and a construction contractor must know how to write specifications for a supplier. But a broader type of knowledge is necessary. We must know how to agree on ground rules that make these social practices sustainable. We must agree on how much information should be shared in negotiation, what kind of competitive practices are allowed, what duties we owe our clients and customers, when employees can be fired, what we should post on the Internet, and what we can dump into the air and water. Fortunately, there is a field of study that provides guidance in this area. It is called ethics.

Some say that regulating conduct in the world of work is a task for lawyers and legislators, not ethicists. A legal framework is extremely useful, to be sure. But it is only part of the solution. To begin with, we must decide which laws are ethical and just, and this requires ethical judgments. Beyond this, after a moment’s reflection, we realize that real life is far too intricate to be governed by the ponderous mechanisms of the law, particularly in the complex and rapidly changing world we inhabit today. A lawsuit or legal prosecution is an expensive undertaking that requires months of tedious evidence gathering and sometimes years for resolution. Only the most egregious transgressions can be regulated in this way, and the legal system is already overwhelmed with them. The day-to-day operation of our social systems requires that the vast majority of us voluntarily comply with norms of conduct that we agree are reasonable. Reaching this kind of rational consensus is precisely the task of ethics.

WHY WE ARE SOMETIMES UNETHICAL

Even those who acknowledge the importance of ethics often see the main problem as getting people to be ethical, rather than deciding what is ethical. This comes out in professional ethics workshops I lead. Many participants are impatient to get past normative analysis and move on to the issue of what to do about unethical coworkers and bosses. To be sure, there are plenty of unscrupulous people out there. More often than not, however, unethical behavior in organizations stems from an inability to identify and defend what is right, rather than from a failure to do what we know is right.

To illustrate this fact, look no further than one of the most famous case studies in the annals of professional ethics. In the early 1970s, the Ford Motor Company began to receive reports that its budget car, the Ford Pinto, occasionally burst into flame after a rear-end collision. Serious injury or death frequently resulted. Investigation revealed that even a low-speed collision could cause studs protruding from the rear axle housing to puncture the fuel tank, resulting in an explosion. Ford could have fixed the problem at a cost of $11 per car. But it decided against the fix, on the ground that the cost outweighed the benefit. As the problem became more widely known, Ford finally redesigned the gas tank in the 1977 model, but it did not recall earlier models until the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration declared them defective in 1978. Meanwhile, a spectacular 1978 crash that killed three teenage girls attracted media attention, and an Indiana grand jury indicted Ford on a criminal charge of reckless homicide. Ford escaped a conviction, but its executives were widely condemned for what was seen as a callous decision.

We have rare insight into this case because one of the Ford managers who supported the company’s decision, Dennis Gioia, wrote an honest and self-critical article about the affair.^* After leaving Ford, Gioia became a business school professor and summoned the courage to use the Pinto case study in his MBA classes. While at Ford, Gioia was convinced that he made the right decision, and he practiced what he preached by driving a Pinto himself. He remained convinced for several years while using the case study in his classes, even though some of his students were outraged by his conduct. He eventually changed his mind, but what is relevant here is that his article gives no clear reasons for this change. This suggests to me that there was no solid rational basis for Gioia’s view either before or after he changed his mind.

Gioia neither was, nor is, a “bad person.” Quite the opposite. His article tells us that he went into the auto industry with a strong desire to make a positive contribution to society, and one can presume that he entered academia with a similar motivation. What is needed here is not better character, but a better intellectual framework for deciding such issues. We will find in Chapter 12 that the Pinto dilemma is actually fairly straightforward to resolve, after the necessary conceptual equipment is at hand. Gioia’s article goes to on analyze the organizational and psychological factors that influenced this thinking, which are important, of course. We ought to shape organizations and habits of mind that lead to ethical choices. However, we cannot do this until we know which choices are ethical. An essential part of shaping ethical institutions is building a capacity within them to identify and defend the right decision.

DOING ETHICS WITH OUR BRAINS

It’s not obvious how to resolve ethical issues like Ford’s, but it’s not obvious how to drive a car, either, and yet we learn to do it. With training and practice, we can all learn to think about ethical issues in a rational and objective fashion, and work toward consensus. Then why don’t we do it more often?

I think it’s because we don’t know it’s possible. Popular culture tells us that ethics is a matter of gut feeling, simplistic platitudes, or personal values, with no objective way to resolve issues. Few of us have ever been exposed to rigorous ethical argumentation, and so we naturally have no idea what it is like. This is despite our centuries-old heritage of ethical reasoning, developed by some of the smartest human beings who ever walked the earth. We have forgotten this tradition. As the world becomes increasingly crowded and complicated, with an increasingly urgent need for rational consensus on how we are going to live together, we have cast aside the very tools our forebearers developed for this purpose. We have forgotten how to do ethics with our brains.

That’s why I wrote this book. I attempt to lay a conceptual foundation for ethical analysis that I believe has the best chance of building rational consensus. It draws on insights from the past but goes beyond the classical theories by refining them and integrating them into a unified framework. This doesn’t mean the framework allows us to turn a crank and get the right answer. Rather, it sets out requirements that any valid ethical argument must satisfy. To get results, we must take these as a starting point and work toward an ethical consensus.

One might think this is a job for professional philosophers and ethicists. The professionals preserve and develop our intellectual heritage, but unfortunately, they have largely failed to knit together ethical theory and practice. The theories provide insight but are typically too general to apply to messy, real-world cases. Even in the field of normative ethics, which focuses on the resolution of practical dilemmas, the dominant mode of reasoning is to seek a reflective equilibrium of moral intuitions and principles, an approach that cannot resolve fundamentally differing intuitions. This leaves us no alternative but to take on the ethical task ourselves. It has to be this way in any case, because ethics, unlike physics, biology, or mathematics, can’t be left solely to the professionals. We must all be ethicists, because we are the parts of the system that must work together.

The heart of ethical reasoning lies in constructing arguments for why one choice is right rather than another. This requires more discipline than one might think. It is not enough for me to conjure up an argument that I think is convincing, because it probably won’t sound convincing to someone with a different perspective. We humans are very talented at rationalizing our behavior, which means it is vital to distinguish mere rationalization from correct analysis. The only way to make progress is to agree on a few bedrock principles of ethical reasoning that everyone can accept before any specific issues are considered. Then we must stick with these principles when we analyze a dilemma, even when we don’t like the outcome. We do this in other fields and we can do it in ethics.

WHAT IS IN THE BOOK

The book develops three conditions that an action must satisfy to be ethical: generalizability, utility maximization, and respect for autonomy. It then shows how to construct arguments by checking whether the act in question meets these conditions. No other kind of argument is allowed, even if it sounds convincing.

I didn’t invent these conditions. They are based on ideas that have been discussed in the ethical literature for centuries. I think you will find them inherently reasonable, because they are grounded in the logical structure of action itself. The book refines and reinterprets the conditions so that they fit into a coherent framework and have the power and subtlety to deal with real-life dilemmas.

The book next illustrates ethical reasoning by applying it to a variety of ethical dilemmas taken from real life, especially in the world of work. Many of them were experienced by my students or professional workshop participants. I begin with small, everyday dilemmas that don’t engage our emotions or egos, to provide practice. In later chapters I gradually move into more challenging issues that require greater intellectual discipline. Many of these deal with buying and selling, job hunting, issues on the job, and organizational policy. There are also chapters on educational ethics, medical ethics, and the ethics of artificial intelligence. At no point do I pretend to supply the final answer. My intention is to illustrate ethical reasoning and contribute to our collective effort to reach consensus.

I tried to keep the book short, because I know you are busy. I present the theory as concisely as I can without compromising its depth and subtlety. I analyze a representative sample of dilemmas, rather than aim for encyclopedic coverage. A more comprehensive collection of dilemmas can be found on my blog (ethicaldecisions.net), along with analysis. You can post dilemmas anonymously yourself, or help with those posted by others.

Despite its brevity, the book discusses a wide range of ethical concepts and controversies at one point or another, often in the context of specific dilemmas. These include responsible consumerism, self-interest versus altruism, career choice, “white” lies, study drugs, resumé padding, sexual harassment, fiduciary duty in business, sourcing from sweatshops, price gouging, manipulative advertising, obligations to future generations, behavior toward immigrants and religious minorities, killing to save lives, Internet privacy and content, refusing vaccines, end-of-life decisions, the rights and duties of autonomous machines, and many others.

I have also tried to make the book accessible to a broad audience by presenting the concepts as straightforwardly as I can. Yet I never dumb down the material. I use the degree of rigor and sophistication necessary to deal with the issues at hand, at times reaching a level that professional philosophers will find challenging. Life can get complicated, and when it does, ethics must be complicated enough to deal with it.

My focus is almost entirely on the Western ethical tradition. I would love to cover other ethical traditions, as this is a major part of my research. Having lived and worked in ten countries on six continents, I fully appreciate the importance of cross-cultural understanding in today’s world. However, to supply the necessary cultural background for other ethical traditions, even in outline, I would have to write a far longer book, and so I leave this to another occasion.

We have achieved remarkable success at collective reasoning in fields such as physics, biology, and mathematics. We have not done so well in ethics, where it is particularly crucial. I believe this is due partly to a whole raft of popular misconceptions peculiar to ethics. The first order of business is to dispense with them.

*    D. A. Gioia, Pinto fires and personal ethics: A script analysis of missed opportunities, Journal of Business Ethics 11 (1992): 379–389.

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