Ethics overboard: How to promote integrity in the moment of choice

HIH is the yarn today, but what’s the real, long-term solution to the collapse of ethics among big-end-of-town accountants, lawyers and actuaries? They’re the professionals involved who are meant to have duties separate to those of the companies they service. Higher duties. The workability of current practice – that they work directly for the companies that pay them – relies on strong professional ethics, and the enforcement thereof by peers and their professional associations. That’s broken down. Conflicts of interest aren’t even recognised as such these days. How can we repair the damage?

Should we move to government-employed professionals or panels of private sector professionals chosen by government but paid for by companies?

In September last year I gave a speech to the Corruption Prevention Network’s conference Ethics overboard: No apologies. I asked for your input first, and got some great replies. So today, I thought I’d publish that speech.

Following that, I’ve republished a Webdiary entry called Your ethics which I accidentally removed from the archive before Christmas. It includes some brilliant pieces, including the first piece by our new expat columnist and corporate outrider Harry Heidelberg, and a timely piece by Meagan Phillipson on the ethics of international relations. For other Webdiary discussions on ethics, see Ethics, webdiary9Sep2002, andBuzzword ethics, webdiary19Sep2002.

I’m about to start writing a chapter for a book on media ethics about ethics and online media, with particular reference to Webdiary. Again, I’d love your input. As you’ll see from the speech, your input last time was just what the doctor ordered.

You can access submissions to the HIH inquiry at fairfax.

We ran Scott Burchill’s piece in yesterday’s Webdiary on the rhetoric of war against Iraq off the front page of smh.com.au today, and readers hopped in for their say. Go to yoursay for the debate. As I write, Scott’s piece is the most read article on smh.com.au since midnight last night. We’ve asked the United States embassy if they’d care to respond. No word yet.

***

Ethics overboard

by Margo Kingston

When you think about ethics, by which I mean ‘professional standards of conduct’, your starting point has to be your own.

Just after I started work in the big smoke of Sydney many years ago, the Herald chief of staff told me in confidence that the paper was sending a reporter posing as a prospective student into a Sydney high school to report on the youth of today in today’s public education system. The editor was to pretend to be his father when enrolling him, but was too busy to do so. Could I pose as my colleagues aunt?

Weeks later, while the reporter was still at the school, another reporter stumbled upon the project and leaked it, resulting in political condemnation in the parliament and outrage from our readers and my colleagues. Thus I discovered that journalists in the journalists union were bound by a code of ethics.

This was the first time I’d heard of it. I had a duty, personal to me, to tell anyone I was speaking to for a story what my job was, unless the matter was of such compelling public interest that I was duty bound not to. Everyone in my industry believed that this was not a case where the exception applied.

The shock of the incident marked the beginning of my deep interest in journalistic ethics. I thought about my role in relationship to my readers, and my duties to assert my professional ethics to avoid abuse of power by my industry.

I was trained as a lawyer, not a journalist. I knew my ethical duties as a lawyer: My duty was not only to the client but to the court, and I should never knowingly use as evidence material I knew to be false. So I don’t agree with the idea that ethics are instinctive in all cases. Written principles are required, and they need to be vigorously communicated as a matter fundamental to your career.

I believe the principles should be general, not particular, as particularity breeds legalism and the dangerous belief that technical avoidance equals compliance with ethical duty. Every ethical code should include not only the principles to which adherence is required, but the reasons why. For ethics, in the end, is about ourself in relation to other individuals and to our society.

The elites are in relationship with the people, and professional ethics – by accountants, lawyers, engineers, clergymen, architects – are constraints on abuse of power by the elites. A sellout of ethics for money, power, or survival, weakens the stability of the polity itself.

Example

In the early 1990s, a construction company sued an establishment Brisbane law firm for its costs in a prolonged Federal Court civil action. The firm had acted for a developer, since jailed, who instructed it to resist and delay an action for payment of a debt due for building a shopping centre by alleging fraud. There was no evidence for this accusation. The ethical duties of solicitors and barristers forbid them from pleading fraud without supporting evidence.

When the developer went into liquidation, the plaintiff bought its legal files for a pittance and sued the legal firm. The barrister involved was Ian Callinan QC, since appointed a High Court judge.

So, a former leader of the Queensland bar and a partner in Queensland’s best connected law firm were caught red-handed with their pants down.

The Queensland Law Society, a body backed by legislation to police the ethical standards required by solicitors, would not say whether or not it was examining the solicitor’s behaviour. It was confidential. And the society implied that it only acted on a complaint, not of its own motion. End of story.

The president of the Australian Bar Council, NSW barrister Bret Walker QC, called for an inquiry into Justice Callinan’s fitness to remain a judge. The Senate numbers for an inquiry fell away after veiled threats by the government to target Justice Kirby in revenge. End of story.

But worst of all for me, the profession split on whether the two men had done anything wrong. Legal academic Professor Greg Craven, for example, said everyone did it, so why worry?

That meant the ethical edifice was a sham. It shot to pieces lawyer’s claims of effective self-regulation, stripped the trust shown by judges to lawyers on the assumption they were not abusing process, and allowed rich people to waste limited court time to wear down litigants with a just cause.

***

The ethical duties of a professional engineer, architect, lawyer, doctor or accountant – whether working in business or for government – are a counter-balance to the exploitation of others by organisations and individuals who have no ethics and care only for short term self-interest. Break these down, and the system is in crisis. Witness Enron and Arthur Anderson. Enron and investment banks. Enron and political figures.

The dominant neo-liberal ideology has helped trash those values in our society which cannot be quantified to a cash figure. That rules out or at the very least severely compromises ethical imperatives, as all the system’s incentives promote the glorification of individual freedom to pursue self-interest and a contempt for values other than bottom-line cash.

Ideas for reform

I’ve been trying for ages to think of a way to enforce journalists’ ethics without government legislation. I can’t. Only journalists belonging to the union have a duty to comply with its code of ethics,and many aren’t in the union. The bosses have no such duty unless they voluntarily sign up to a company code of ethics, and can and do employ people not in the union. In any event, ethics should be seen as ideals to strive for, ideals that can be highly nuanced, and easily forgotten.

Ethics are also a group standard, meaning they requires constant discussion and thought between colleagues, and that requires openness.

So what I’m thinking of is framework legislation, to cover all jobs with ethical duties. It could require all professions to have an ethical oversight body comprised of a chairperson and directors agreed to by consensus between the profession’s leaders and consumer groups, and if consensus cannot be reached, by election. Membership of the professional body would be compulsory to work, and members of the oversight body would have legal protection against defamation and the like.

The group or individuals on it would give advisory opinions to members in a bind. These would be regularly published in a pro-forma way. If a professional accidentally breached an ethical duty, apologies could be lodged, and published. The body would look at complaints it judged worthy of consideration or those it found out about independently, in open session. It would seek the views of members. It would publish reasons.

Except for extremely serious matters, like a psychiatrist sleeping with a patient, there would be no penalty or a reprimand on proof of a first breach. What I’d be looking for is an ongoing conversation, a genuine engagement, for the profession, not a penal system. Because the system is not penal, the person under investigation would be required to speak for him or herself.

The law partner in my example would be called to account. Both he and the barrister would have had access to authoritative advisory opinions if they had doubts. And what happens when someone in breach of professional ethics is made a judge before disclosure of the breach? Only parliament can sack a federal judge for not being fit for office. To strip the politics away as much as possible, a judicial oversight body would investigate and present a report to parliament. It could take it from there.

***

This week I asked Webdiary readers what they thought about ethics. I’d like to read from an email from Harry Heidelberg, a nom de plume to protect his career.

I’ve faced several ethical dilemmas in my working life. In one I was involved in the audit of a government bank in a developing country. It was clear to me that the financial statements of the bank were the proverbial croc of shit. I made this known to all involved and suggested massive asset write downs. I came to this conclusion about many assets – all basically worthless or certainly worth a fraction of their book value. Millions of dollars were involved. Lots of vested interests. Lots of big fish in a small pond.

How did I process the above? I convinced my boss in the developing country that we had no choice but to convince the bank to agree to massive asset writedowns or refuse to sign the audit. He was overruled by the developed country headquarters of our firm. I resigned but “came back” on the condition that I would not sign anything associated with that audit. The end result was that relationships were poisoned by my failure to tow the line of Big City, Developed Country, Big Accounting Firm. My career in that firm was never the same again. It’s hardly a Hollywood ending but I’m still glad I did that. My reward was internal. I could live with myself.

I later learned that everyone in that country’s administration was corrupt and later the bank collapsed. I did my job, or at least tried to. What a pity others didn’t. I suppose I could and should have done more. I made my personal protest, but I admit that by not going public, I weaken my superficially pure stance. This is a good reason why we need sound whistle blowing systems. A whistle blower should not have their life destroyed. A career setback is one thing, but not a destruction.

In another case, I was working for a foreign multinational. We had a particularly good year. We had way past what we needed for all senior management to get their bonuses. I was asked to cover up GOOD financial news. The idea was that we should report all we needed as revenue and profits in one year to get to the bonus level and then give the following year a kick start by shunting the part we “didn’t need” into the following year. I had some of the worst professional arguments I have ever had over that one.

I can be pragmatic as anyone but I would never have done what they wanted me to. In effect I would have been telling the headquarters (and for that matter the Australian authorities – tax and ASIC) that our revenue and profits were MUCH lower than they actually were. It was millions, again. All around me they were saying it was harmless because we were only “delaying” good news into the next year. It was just a timing thing.

Bullshit. Accounting is all about timing and if you can’t get the timing right you may as well give up. In effect we really had to say that inventory which was SOLD was still in our warehouse. They dressed it up in fancy language but that was the substance of it. My boss said that we had to do as we were told. I said no we don’t and I won’t. He asked whether I would resign if they went ahead with this plan and I said I would. I was under IMMENSE pressure. Not sleeping, filthy looks in the corridors etc etc.

That’s the part that stinks. Why should I resign for doing my job?

How did I process that one? I had a contact in headquarters I trusted. I told him about it and he said to do the right thing. Much to the fury of local people, I DID do the right thing. In the process I lost my most valuable staff member. He resigned in the midst of it because he too was ethical and couldn’t bear it anymore. I tried so hard to convince him to stick with me and that I would fix it.

In the end I got my way, I fixed it and the right results were reported. Again, relationships were poisoned.

Don’t believe existing bodies when they say they have it covered. I belong to one which has a members ethical counselling service. A mate of mine went to them in dire need of advice earlier this year and they were hopeless. They offered no help at all. The whole thing is window dressing crap. When you really need them, they won’t be there for you.

This mate of mine had to resign from his job to get out of his ethical dilemma and endure three months of frightening unemployment. Some people may treat this lightly but I think it is outrageous that a well known professional body has a so-called ethical counselling service that failed so abysmally. In the case of my mate it was serious stuff. His employer was on the verge of bankruptcy and hadn’t paid “group tax” (ie the pay as you earn tax deducted from employees) in nearly a year. No one cared for him. He’s a good guy and no one cared or listened. He could only trash himself to survive and sleep at night.

The new company I work for has an inspirational CEO. I know, I hear you moaning already. The days of inspirational CEOs are over. Not really. The right CEO for today is an ethical one. Long term interests of all companies and organisations are to behave ethically. Really.

The CEO of the company I now work for has established an “ethics ombudsman” in the headquarters. I suspect this move is a reaction to recent corporate scandals and a realisation that an internal process is required. Internal audit is hardly enough. We saw in Enron that internal audit questioned the practices but it did not help. Something more is needed. Something at a very high and very independent level. My current CEO should be commended. She is totally committed to ethics.

The idea of an internal “ethics ombudsman” is a great initiative, but Margo I think your idea is a great addition. You can have an “internally independent” process but ultimately you need something which can be totally pure in the sense of giving more than just the appearance of independence.

It has to be pure independence in fact, not just appearance. An internal process will always be seen as something which is more easily compromised.

All of us in the corporate world need to pause and reflect. Mere tinkering is not enough. A revolution is required and startling initiatives are urgently needed. I want to be startled. I want to be energised by something totally new. Faith and confidence in the system is key. That can’t be regained without substantial, far reaching changes.

Training is needed. Some have forgotten and need to be retrained in the ways of ethics. Some of it is indeed nuanced. That is why a discussion is helpful. We can never have enough discussion about this. It will never go away. I’m no saint and I’m all ears. I have become somewhat jaded, but live in hope.

Finally, I say show no mercy to those who act unethically. Absolutely none. A bit of carrot is nice but I reckon only a lot of potential stick will be the thing that will get some people acting ethically. Sydney’s full of crooks.

More people like Fels in this life would be good. A man with a mission. Less of the eastern suburbs set would be even better.

We urgently need a long, open and detailed debate on ethics. We did NOT learn the lessons of the 1980s. Are we to learn the lessons of the late nineties and early 21st century? We have to or the system will not recover

An ethics ombudsman in every big company! Wow! A place to go anonymously, if the ombudsman is an Alan Fels, for people like Harry, to nip unprofessional conduct in the bud.

Webdiarist Daniel Boase-Jelinek wrote:

I suggest that the problem with encouraging ethical behaviour is not that people don’t know what it (ethics) is, but that they don’t know how to respond without losing their jobs.

A couple of years ago I was invited to run a workshop for Environmental Engineering students at the University of WA. Environmental Engineers face ethical dilemmas all the time because their employers generally are companies that wish to promote projects that inevitably cause environmental destruction, and the environmental engineers are being used to justify this destruction and put a public relations gloss on it.

I used the research of Sharon Beder, professor of science, technology and society at the University of Wollongong, in working through a whole lot of issues with these idealistic students, searching with them to find a balance between protecting their integrity while keeping their jobs.

The outcome that they arrived at was that people working alone as whistle-blowers rarely and rarely succeed in getting their message out.

The students realised that the only alternative to becoming cynical was to work very hard to develop a community of support within and outside the organisation and to search collaboratively for ways to protect their integrity.

***

Ah development, where big money reigns supreme, where corporate donations buy political influence, where councillors and mayors and staff paid peanuts can be asked how much their integrity is worth and be paid it, where local government are so few expert reports must be taken at face value. The imbalance of power is too great. Communities feel powerless, no matter who they elect.

In cases where expert reports are required by legislation for the purposes of important decisions about our land and the financial state of our companies, these rampant conflicts of interest and imbalances of power must be fixed.

Here again, I’d go the legislative framework solution, with the professional bodies’ members to take charge of the process. You’d have a panel of acknowledged experts, all independent practitioners. The company would be allocated a relevant expert to prepare, say, an environmental impact statement as required by law, and pays his or her fees. If the company disagrees with the assessment, it could employ any expert it chose, and if the results materially differed, a panel of experts would decide which was right, the panel’s costs to be paid by the company. This system should also apply to auditors, who could not be chosen to audit a company from which thier firm earned non-audit fees.

In short, I want to empower professionals in all fields working in the public and private sectors to assert the values of their professions, and take pride in fulfilling their duties and maintaining their professional integrity. I want the ethics debate, and the rebuilding of the power of ethical standards to be conducted with reason and genuine engagement.

I want to rebalance the scales, so that many good people are able to insist on being ethical and not suffer for it, indeed to be thanked for it, and perhaps even promoted. I want ethics – integrity in the moment of choice – to become commonplace.

***

Your ethics

Ethics, huh? Great topic, great responses. Over to you.

1. Ethical moments: Rosie Young and Harry Heidelberg

2. Impossible odds: Daniel Boase-Jelinek and Jozef Imrich

3. What are ethics?: Karl Zegers, Nick Jans, Tony Kevin, Chris Kuan, Peter Woodforde, Helen Lawson-Williams

4. The sunshine test: Allison Newman

5. Ethics in international politics: Meagan Phillipson

***

Recommendations

Martin Canny recommends John Ralston Saul’s latest, On Equilibrium, for examples of ethical dilemmas.

James Woodcock suggests Ross Gittins’ article “Yes you can legislate for morality”, especially:

“The funny thing is that, in their double standards towards blue-collar and executive crime, the pollies have got it pretty much the wrong way round. They profess to believe (along with the shock jocks and the untutored masses) that more police on the beat and tougher sentences are the obvious solution to all manner of sexual and property crimes.

“But where people act in the heat of the moment, or under the grip of some overpowering emotional kink in their makeup, or to feed a drug habit, the likelihood of their being deterred by the size of the penalty or even their chances of getting caught would seem to be small.

“In the case of corporate crime, however, where emotion plays a secondary role to calculated greed – where they’re just doing it for the money – you’d expect the size of the penalty and the chances of apprehension to have a big effect on people’s behaviour.”

***

1. Ethical moments

Rosie Young

On Friday my 23 year old daughter, a gardener, had her first vehicle accident – the tray of her ute sideswiped a brand new stationary Peugot. In all her distress she immediately wrote a note with her details and left it on the car.

Subsequently several people tried to convince her she had done the wrong thing and told her to go and remove the note. She began to query her actions, but fortunately did not take their advice. I believe that as soon as the accident occurred she had a spontaneous attack of ethics!

Perhaps ethics are a bit like the “quality” which cannot be defined, as written about in Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance – we recognise quality but cannot define it, and we recognise ethics but cannot define them.

It seems we have a little meter inside us which always give a true indication of how things are or how we should behave, but as soon as we try and rationalise the situation we get lost in a complex mass of pros and cons.

PS: My daughter has to pay $800 excess and we have sent some household items off to auction to cover the cost – nevertheless, ETHICS rule OK? !!!

***

Harry Heidelberg (nom de plume to avoid damage to the writer)

For me, ethics are something deeply internal and individual. I think they are something quite fundamental, formed at a very young age, and best imparted by parents and older role models.

For some, even those who are taught well, the ethical compass goes haywire later in life. Greed and self interest are the biggest enemies of ethics. It’s mainly for money but it can also be for sex or power.

Failure to act ethically is at once a betrayal of another person or of a system/institution. Ultimately I believe it is even a type of self-betrayal of the individual who behaves unethically.

In one way or another, those who act that way will pay an individual price. The price may be one of emotional turmoil created by a complicated life or something as simple as the stress of being afraid of discovery. Nothing in this life comes for free. Except the truly priceless, good things (like happiness, love and trust)!

I became hated. I recall in one instance when we tried to value a bank asset of a resort in a hopeless location where nobody ever stayed. I was deeply suspicious. I said to a mate who had lived in the country for years, “How much do you think that hotel is worth”?. His answer was “How much is a big house worth in that area?… It’s worthless as a hotel”. I came to this conclusion about many assets – all basically worthless or certainly worth a fraction of their book value. Millions of dollars were involved. Lots of vested interests. Lots of big fish in a small pond.

How did I process the above? I convinced my boss in the developing country that we had no choice but to convince the bank to agree to massive asset writedowns or refuse to sign the audit. To cut a long story short, he agreed but was later overruled by the developed country headquarters of our firm. I resigned but “came back” on the condition that I would not sign anything associated with that audit. The end result was that relationships were poisoned by my failure to tow the line of Big City, Developed Country, Big Accounting Firm. My career in that firm was never the same again. It’s hardly a Hollywood ending but I’m still glad I did that. My reward was internal. I could live with myself.

In the case above, the situation was dire and people were involved in covering up bad financial news. I now know some were criminals. This is the classic scenario.

That’s the part that stinks. Why should I resign for doing my job?

In the end I got my way, I fixed it and the right results were reported. Again, relationships were poisoned. This story has a happy ending. Well, sort of. The headquarters contact arranged for a promotion and transfer for me to the headquarters. He was later screwed over in a merger by dirty politics and both of us have since left the company.

Oh joy.

The idea of an internal “ethics ombudsman” is a great initiative but Margo I think your idea is a great addition. You can have an “internally independent” process but ultimately you need something which can be totally pure in the sense of giving more than just the appearance of independence.

It has to be pure independence in fact, not just appearance. An internal process will always be seen as something which is more easily compromised. I am not trashing internal processes. They are the first line and the most important defence. That said though, something more would be really nice.

Why not? All of us in the corporate world need to pause and reflect. Mere tinkering is not enough. A revolution is required and startling initiatives are urgently needed. I want to be startled. I want to be energised by something totally new. Faith and confidence in the system is key. That can’t be regained without substantial, far reaching changes.

And don’t believe existing bodies when they say they have it covered. I belong to one which has a members ethical counselling service. A mate of mine went to them in dire need of advice earlier this year and they were hopeless. They offered no help at all. The whole thing is window dressing crap. When you really need them, they won’t be there for you.

This mate of mine had to resign from his job to get out of his ethical dilemma and endure three months of frightening unemployment. Some people may treat this lightly but I think it is outrageous that a well known professional body has a so-called ethical counselling service that failed so abysmally. Sure, it may be an isolated case but it should never happen. In the case of my mate it was serious stuff. His employer was on the verge of bankruptcy and hadn’t paid “group tax” (ie the pay as you earn tax deducted from employees) in nearly a year. No one cared for him. He’s a good guy and no one cared or listened. He could only trash himself to survive and sleep at night.

I have become somewhat jaded, but live in hope.

More people like Fels in this life would be good. A man with a mission. Less of the eastern suburbs set would be even better.

We urgently need a long, open and detailed debate on ethics. We did NOT learn the lessons of the 1980s. Are we to learn the lessons of the late nineties and early 21st century?

We have to or the system will not recover

PS: An open discussion on nuanced issues would also be nice.

***

2. Impossible odds

Daniel Boase-Jelinek

I suggest that the problem with encouraging ethical behaviour is not that people don’t know what it (ethics) is, but that they don’t know how to respond without losing their jobs.

You might wish to look up the work of Sharon Beder in researching your talk on ethics. Dr Sharon Beder is Professor of Science, Technology and Society at the University of Wollongong.

I used Sharon’s research in working through a whole lot of issues with these idealistic students, searching with them to find a balance between protecting their integrity while keeping their jobs.

The outcome that they arrived at was that people working alone as whistle-blowers rarely survive, and rarely succeed in getting their message out.

***

Jozef Imrich

Ghandi warned us of the dangers of living in an age characterised by:

Politics without principle

Wealth without work

Commerce without morality

Pleasure without conscience

Education without character

Science without humanity

Workship without sacrifice

***

3. What are ethics?

Karel Zegers

Too many confuse ethics with ideological opinion. Some want us to believe that anyone not agreeing with their particular ‘ethics’ (read dogmas) is un-ethical. Which in reality is taking away the freedom of speech and opinion under threat of being discredited and labelled.

***

Nick Jans

Like you, I’d like to think that I would have exposed the truth in the children-overboard affair. But few can be confident that they would actually follow through with their convictions.

I want to mention a cartoon on ethics I once saw in the New Yorker around Watergate time. Sleek business executive presses a button on his desk, barks into the intercom: Miss Jones, send me in a man who can tell the difference between right and wrong.

Seemed funny at the time, but I think I was (probably still am) naive.

***

Tony Kevin in Canberra

To me (and these are not original thoughts but distillations of thoughts of others) ethics and ethical behaviour relate directly to respect for the dignity and worth of every other human being or, if one wants to extend the point this far as Peter Singer does, to sentient pain-feeling animals.

Ethics is thus almost entirely about conduct in society – how one deals with other human beings. It would have little if any meaning to a person who was living in total isolation from others – Robinson Crusoe before Friday turned up – and therefore has no meaning to a psychopath who cannot empathise with others outside himself.

On this definition, ethics comes into everything – whether it would be how to define a “just war” against Iraq (an attack in which huge numbers of Iraqi civilians would die), the ethics of company honesty towards shareholders and employees, the ethics of border protection, sexual relationships, friendships – it is all about respecting other people and being aware of it when one’s actions hurt other people.

Ethics on this basis can be based either in religion (“we are all of equal value in the sight of God”) or on secular principles ( “we all share our common humanity”). The result in terms of conduct is the same (Raymond Gaita).

I don’t think ethics is all that complicated to think about. But living it is a lot harder.

***

Chris Kuan

When I was going through an idealistic phase a few years back, I grabbed some information from the St. James Ethics Centre. I noted a distinction being made between ethics and morals: ethics is concerned with one’s conduct towards others, whereas morals is (are?) concerned more with inward-looking behaviour.

So morals might relate to issues of right and good (e.g. justice *being* done) while ethics might relate to issues of accountability and transparency (e.g. justice being *seen* to be done)

PS: You mis-typed “etymology”. “Entomology” is concerned with insects. And while I’m quite prepared to believe that epithet is oft-applied to journos, I think we can keep this discussion on a more civil level 🙂

***

Peter Woodforde in Canberra

You ask: What are ethics and what is ethical behaviour? I was gonna say “Geez, where do I start?” But the real question is: where do you finish?

Few of us face, very often, the ethical dilemma of, say, a Catholic priest who follows the party line on abortion, but is morally, intellectually and emotionally opposed to the view that you should tell hundreds of millions of poorly educated, desperately poor, often superstitious women that they will burn in hell for eternity should they employ contraception. He knows it isn’t nice.

So where does that bloke end up? His Church is an instrument of some good, after all. Hopefully, he will end up comforting the afflicted and maybe, just maybe, afflicting the comfortable somewhere. His ethics might take him outside the church, and he might even end up with dependents or a partner rather than a flock.

It doesn’t matter that he is no longer selling his soul to the devil, or setting out each day trowelling together a pastiche of ad hoc personal misery.

What does matter is the notion of a conscientious step forward, rather than sideways or backwards, or even the moral marching on the spot currently so fashionable. A conscious feeling of personal moral progress, not merely a sort of ritual cleaning of personal defilement.

One of the weird things about ethics is that there does not seem to be any way of punishing another person for “a beach of ethics”, which has the air of getting inside Winston Smith’s head.

Thank Christ for good ol’ law, which saves us the trouble, even if it gives us the sternal stiflement of too much order.

***

Helen Lawson Williams in Sydney

I recently completed my PhD thesis in this area, looking at personal value systems and how they influence people’s responses to ethical dilemmas they witness at work. Apart from amassing miscellaneous quotes from terribly credible people (see below), here are some random thoughts on what business ethics might be, and what that might mean for businesses.

1. From any cursory look at the business ethics literature, I’d argue that no objective formulation of what is ethical and what is unethical can be derived (despite the conceptual tools offered by the teleological, deontological, stakeholder and “folk” approaches). As Aristotle himself argued, ethics can’t be an exact science.

Ultimately, the decision about whether a given action is ethical or not will rely on a value judgement, a decision as much based on internal, personal values as on external, objective rules for what is important or right. That is, it’s impossible to exclude the subjective from any study of ethics, and so our understanding of it has to focus on how such subjective evaluations are made – according to personal value systems, which tend to be fairly consistent within defined social groups.

2. However, the philosophical literature offers several very useful points, the most important of which (I believe), is that nearly all discussions of ethics share the common theme of priorities. No teleologist ever denied the right of a decision-maker to benefit herself or her company, as long as the decision brings no greater harm to others; no duty-bound deontologist would fault her for doing the same, as long as she can do so within the bounds of her duty to others.

In other words, no approach to ethics would deny the right or necessity of businesses to make a profit. It’s only when that profit comes at the expense of great harm to others, or to the detriment of duty, that it’s termed unethical. And in fact the empirical research I did backed this up – it’s the issue of fairness, of having got the priorities wrong, which most often made people angry enough to confront a supervisor who they felt had made an unethical decision, or leave an organisation where they felt unethical decisions were the norm.

3. But the big question is, why should organisations go to the trouble of trying to act ethically? The answer offered repeatedly, though not always explicitly, by business leaders in their discussions of business ethics is that “[a]s corporations, we live at the sufferance of the public” (Butler, 1997). That is, organisations operate in many ways as any other entity within a social group, and thus may be considered subject to similar rules of conduct.

Indeed, at least one definition of morality concerns the rules or sanctions used to classify behaviours which are considered right or wrong within a particular social group, and the understanding that these are applicable to all who regard themselves as members of that group or society (Reber, 1985).

The argument, in other words, is that for a business to survive in the social world, it must play by the rules. Which is really all ethics is about, for me – it’s setting the ground rules for how we need to behave in order to live together as a society, and ensuring that those who choose to play by other rules are firmly but gently reminded of how interdependent we all are.

Some quotes:

Aristotle: Our account of [ethics] will be adequate if it achieves such clarity as the subject-matter allows; for the same degree of precision is not to be expected in all discussions; it is the mark of the trained mind never to expect more precision in the treatment of any subject than the nature of that subject permits; for demanding logical demonstrations from a teacher of rhetoric is clearly about as reasonable as accepting mere plausibility from a mathematician.

G.E. Moore: Ethics is the general enquiry into what is good.

Arnold Schopenhauer: Compassion is the basis of morality.

Bertrand Russell: Without civic morality communities perish; without personal morality their survival has no value.

Thomas Jefferson: It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately.

***

4. The sunshine test

Allison Newman

Aahhhh! Ethics is such a tricky concept! Or is it?

It needs to be said that there is no such thing as universal ethics. This distinction is important, because ethics are something that must be assessed in a societal conflict.

As Margo’s Ethics piece suggests, it is impossible to legislate for ethical behaviour, and any attempt to do so would be counter-productive. This is directly related to ethics being tied to societal values. Societal values are malleable, they change with time. No legislative framework could hope to keep up with such malleable values.

Fortunately there is another option Margo alludes to. In discussing ethics there is one overall “test” to determine whether behaviour is ethical or not. It is known as the Sunshine Test, and the idea is that you ask yourself if you would be happy for your friends and peers to know what you are doing. If the answer is no, then it’s a fair bet that what you are doing is unethical. The beauty of the test is that it implicitly takes into account society’s values (as expressed by your friends/peers).

In a practical sense, this Sunshine Test can be taken out of the realms of thought experiment, and enacted in real life. This is the type of thing Margo’s proposed body to investigate unethical behaviour would achieve. Because the hearings would be public, public censure would result if any unethical behaviour was uncovered. The threat of having a spotlight turned upon your internal affairs would certainly be something to give many a CEO pause for thought, as they considered applying the letter but not the spirit of the law.

Of course there are problems with the system. The reporting would have to be handled to ensure that the finally published results were equitable (if only one side of a story is presented in the media for example, then someone might suffer public censure without ever receiving a “right of reply”). And of course, with the cynicism of the modern age, public censure has lost some of it’s bite. Look at the last election. The Howard Government was caught out LYING to the public about children overboard mere days before the election, and they still got comfortably elected.

In fact, probably the only censure of any meaning is that CEOs might find it a bit more difficult to acquire lines of credit from banks, or to achieve trust in their business dealings. Then again, they might not, because in reality, the only thing that interests other commercial interests is your ability to generate money. In the society of a CEO’s peers, the overwhelming importance of money over all other things would have a major impact. Someone would be censured far more for losing money than for behaving unethically as society at large might see it (as opposed to how a board of peers would see it).

So both the hardline (legislative) approach, and the softly softly (public hearings approach) have substantial problems. This is probably one of those situations where a feedback mechanism (punishment for behaving unethically, reward for behaving ethically) is not going to work.

In engineering terms, an open loop system might work better. This basically means that you drum into children what ethical values are so that they will live by them in future life, with no need for enforcement (compliance is automatic, they can’t even consider not behaving that way). In years gone by this is precisely what the Church used to do. Nowadays there is no institution providing such a service, and the result is a proliferation of Jodee Rich’s.

We do still do this to a certain extent. For example, Australian society teaches its young that it is unacceptable to just throw rubbish on the ground. To a large extent this approach is successful, to the extent that Australians are shocked on visiting places like London to see people just dropping their rubbish on the ground. Australians find it nearly unthinkable to do the same thing. When they do litter, it is done so furtively, away from scrutiny.

In Australia, the Sunshine Test would be an effective way of controlling litter because of the lessons taught to us as children. In London, the same test would completely fail to change people’s behaviour, because it has become socially acceptable to litter.

You now get to have the fun of deciding just what values you are going to choose to teach the young. It could make for some interesting Civics classes!

***

5. Ethics and international affairs

Meagan Phillipson

It’s easy to give a descriptive of ethics/morality and how you personally relate to a system of it in your own, life but quite a different matter to attempt to understand its application in a social or political context. In a society, who decides what is ethical and what’s not? Just look at the ethical problems arising from the Israel/Palestinian conflict. One person’s freedom fighter is another person’s terrorist.

Because it is such a subjective issue, it’s more fascinating to look at the juncture between personal morality and collective morality rather than an individuals view on how they relate it to their life.

I have included an essay I wrote this year on whether morality and justice can mix. Although it’s a little formal in places, it is my view on morality/ethics and its possible place in society. Hope it helps.

Collective morality

By Meagan Phillipson

When approaching whether morality and justice can relate meaningfully to international politics, it is important to firstly clarify the approach to be taken in analysis. Without clarification, the elevation of the personal can be negative, as too much faith can make the analyser blind to flaws. Conversely, too much cynicism can make them blind to potential.

A possible solution to this problem may be to call for a balance between the two extremes, yet it would be more appropriate to remove the presence of faith in this particular question. For within the context of international politics, faith is redundant as it calls for assumptive reasoning in a landscape of constant change and hidden agendas.

That said, the absence of faith does not necessarily mean that the perceptual viewpoint falls completely into the realm of cynicism. Rather, it would be better to replace faith with hope, as the latter does not assume the future will be a certain way but rather merely allows for the possibility that the future can be a certain way.

In such a framework, cynicism can be tempered with enough hope to sidestep assumptions while opening perceptions to potentials for positive change in the future.

On an individual level, moral judgment is an aid to determining one’s position in relation to an objective situation or abstract concept. In this sense, morality is a subjective construct influenced by the external world view an individual is immersed in, with each individual shaped by their own interpretation and adoption of what they perceive to be right and wrong.

Because of the subjective nature of morality, it holds true that the morality of a situation is dependent upon the viewpoint through which it is being perceived and can therefore never truly be universal. That said though, it could be argued that morality can be shared collectively on a domestic level if the issue is polarizing a state against an outside force, such as is the case in war.

Yet even then, the result is not universal but rather majority led, as seen in America’s War on Terror, which is supported in moral principle by a majority yet not universally supported by all American citizens.

Above the individual level, the state acts with the agential power it has been imbued with by the people and so is a concentration of the collective will of the majority into one instrument. Therefore, the power of the state to act is much stronger than that of an individual but, in order to maintain power, the state actors should behave roughly in accordance to the moral appropriateness of the collective. Even in undemocratic cases of power being held by force there is a need, however more slight, that the moral will of the people be reflected for fear of power been swept away by revolution.

Yet attempts by state actors to behave in accordance with the perceived collective morality of the domestic constituency highlights the problematic inherent in the individualistic nature of morality. Namely, whether in the binary of citizen/state or state/international system, the application of reflected morality by the state is at best a guessing game and, at worst, open to some degree of partisan ends-orientated exploitation.

The failure of moral universality on the domestic level is transposable to international politics, as not all states hold the same set of morals just as not all individuals do within the overarching structure of a state. Nevertheless, morality in all its awkward diversity still has a role to play in International politics because it holds the possibility of bringing order to the system by helping to define generally accepted boundaries of behaviour.

If these boundaries of moral behaviour are not followed, there is a crucial need to act against individual state offenders – otherwise there would be little deterrence for other states not to act similarly. Because of this, justice is closely connected to morality and the desire to create and maintain order within international politics, as it creates consequences for moral aberrations.

Justice can be narrowly defined in international politics as morality in action through legislative, militaristic and economic means. More broadly, justice also encompasses the attempted realization of abstract morality into the lives of all global citizens and not just a select few. The moral key to such ambition is equality – between genders, races, north and south – as well as fairer distributive justice in relation to the world’s resources.

Applying morality in an objective way within international politics is near impossible because individual actors work within their own frameworks of vested interest and ends-orientation. The subjective nature of morality and its application within international politics is highlighted in the battle over the world’s resources being fought by civil society, governments and corporations alike.

Further complicating the issue is that moral benchmarks are been flouted by stronger state/non-state actors with virtually no ramifications because of the high level of interdependency within international politics. A weaker state dependent on a stronger state for growth would find it politically difficult to call the stronger state on a moral issue because there may be a threat to personal interests and continued relations. As an extension of the problems raised by inequitable power relations and the subjective nature of morality, the application of it through justice is flawed because even the most objective of laws are still interpreted and applied by subjective individuals.

Note also that moral responsibility and commitment to justice is not necessarily bound to international legal obligations. The adoption of moral judgment and a commitment to justice norms by an individual state is voluntary, yet usually adopted in order to gain legitimacy and recognition amongst like-minded peers on the international stage. As a result, there is a danger that issues of morality and justice will be supported in theory by the state for gain yet, in practice, barely adhered to for fear of loss.

Thus, a commitment to certain modalities of morality and justice have the potential to become little more than a mask individual states assume in order to garner legitimisation and form strategic alliances. Because of this, the acceptance of moral codes out of a desire for acceptance amongst peers should not be considered as a viable alternative to legal obligations as the non-binding nature means that the inherent potential is merely complimentary rather than successional.

In summary, morality and justice within the context of international politics is like mixing oil with water because of the complicity of self-interest and the subjective nature of the two concepts. Yet, for the sake of humanity, universal agreement and adoption of minimum standards in morality and justice must be striven towards. Whether this will ever be fully achieved or whether instruments of morality and justice within international politics will progress beyond current points of influence is an issue of great interest and perhaps even hope.

WebDiary Archive

Ethics overboard: How to promote integrity in the moment of choice

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Archive of Margo Kingston's WebDiary from the Sydney Morning Herald