We open this section with an example in which we face an ethical dilemma.
Leadership? It’s in your DNA!
BrainCompass is a Dutch platform, located in Rotterdam. Together with a scientific board, they developed a method to assess employees in the field of leadership competencies. It is the view of this platform that talent is not only a combination of someone’s mind-set and environmental factors (in other words: how someone is raised/nurtured). BrainCompass argues that we also need to go back to our basics in order to get a full view of someone’s potential (how we are born). This can be found in our DNA. Therefore, individuals are assessed by an online development assessment and a DNA test. The first is the more ‘traditional’ way of assessing people regarding their professional competencies. The last method is rather revolutionary: the DNA test will tell you how your biological systems work, based on five hormonal features. For instance, someone with a naturally high level of dopamine will generally respond quicker to things that happen in his environment, and be more sensitive to such stimuli. As a result, someone with a high hormonal level of dopamine will be more qualified for a job in the sphere of sales management (Hakker, 2016).
The example ‘Leadership? It’s in your DNA!’ can lead to discussions and is food for thought. The fact that someone’s body is used to assess that person regarding his professional competencies may lead to different and conflicting opinions and is therefore a controversial topic. Some might consider this a serious violation of someone’s physical integrity and privacy, while others may see this as just another method to assess someone on a voluntary basis.
This case can raise various questions that relate to ethics in various grades of complexity. For example, a journalist once called me to pose the following question regarding this case:
- ‘Is it ethically right to use DNA research as an assessment tool?’
However, formulating a question like this is perhaps too easy: it will lead to an unrealistic simplification by suggesting the answer could be either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. If I understood that journalist correctly, he expected me to give the answer ‘no’, since physical integrity is considered by many people to be more important than assessing people for professional purposes. Using someone’s DNA for such reasons makes people feel uncomfortable. I strongly felt that the reason why he called me is that he wanted to substantiate this feeling by arguments from the ethics discipline. However, I did not give him such arguments.
Instead, I kindly told him that ethics as a discipline does not necessarily agree on something or rejects certain things. Ethics explores morality on a structural level, as we will see in the next section. It helps us to reflect on what we consider as morally right or wrong, but does not necessarily prescribe what is right or wrong. There is not a single correct answer, as we might find in a discipline such as statistics. Instead, the answer is usually very personal.
The added value of studying ethics is that it helps us structure our moral reasoning, and it gives us the opportunity to try and understand different ethical viewpoints regarding a certain ethical dilemma. This helps us better understand the world around us, and may give us a more sophisticated opinion on complex issues, such as the ethics in technological innovation. DNA research used in assessing people could be an example of this.
Since the quality of the answer is as good as the quality of the question, it all starts with asking the right question first. When you truly want a reflective and useful answer in ethics, just make sure the question you ask is specific enough to go in-depth, and open enough to allow various viewpoints reach the surface.
Therefore, in the context of our DNA case a much more relevant question would be:
- ‘Under what conditions is it morally acceptable to use DNA research in the assessment of individuals regarding professional competencies?’
Or, alternatively:
- ‘How far may a company go in requesting (potential) employees to undergo an assessment in which analysing their DNA is part of the procedure?’
Both questions are not simply answered with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. Although we might have to reflect on formulating an answer for a while, asking a question like this will definitely lead to more in-depth answers that are more useful and do more justice to what is actually at stake.
If you really want to know: I answered the journalist that there are at least two ways of looking at this. The first is that physical integrity is a very important value that cannot be set aside too easily. There are less drastic ways to assess people than to ask them to make their bodies available for scientific research. While (potential) employees might participate on a voluntary basis regarding such assessments, it remains to be seen if an employee can truly say ‘no’ to such a method when his next career opportunity depends on it. The second way of looking at the issue is result-driven: in the end, alternative test methods in which we do not use someone’s DNA sample will probably lead to similar conclusions. However, they are much more costly, time consuming and intense for the (potential) employee. Using a DNA sample, as long as privacy is guaranteed, is a cheaper, less time-consuming and less intense way of figuring out whether someone matches a certain job profile. In essence, everyone – including the owner of the DNA – is better off in the end. As we will see in chapter 3, this is the classic difference between deontological and consequentialist ethics. To his credit, the journalist in his article included both of my answers, concluding that there are more viewpoints from an ethics perspective, greatly depending on how such DNA samples are specifically processed.
