Almost Ethical

8/3/2019 Almost Ethical

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y Man has a natural aptitude for virtue; but the perfection of

virtue must be acquired by man by means of some kind of

training.

-St Thomas Aquinas



y Ethical compromise both big or small hurt us, and we

underestimate how much.

y One compromise leads to another; our standard slip.

yOnce we cross one line, we may find it hard to resist crossingthe next.

y Greatest pain is that compromise creates barriers in

relationships.



y Our compromise become all the more of a burden as they erode

our sense of integrity.

y We remember small compromises for years.

y

We can avoid this lowly road- a road we often choose out of ignorance, carelessness or just plain convenience.

y We can choose to spot temptations early and use our new found

awareness as a foundation for skillful ethical decision making.

y Our journey starts by sensitizing ourselves to the range of

compromises we already make, to how deeply caught up in them

we are, and to their long trail of consequences for both our

character and our relationships.



Temptations to lie

y Most ethical transgressions fall into roughly three categories:

deception, stealing and harming.

y Lying is o form of deception, plays a central role in ethical

compromise.y Appears commonly in ethical thinking.

y Lying is defined as telling someone something we know not

to be true with the intention of misleading them.

y It does not include misleading others by mistake.



y Most of us are practical lairs.

y Study of 147 college students reported students telling on an

average of two lies per day.

ySerious lying starts at adolescence and persists in adulthood.

y There are psychological costs to lying. Even if no one else

discovers our lies, we know. Our lies often clash with the

people we would like to be. To reclaim the feeling of

alignment between our values and actions, we may trivializethe lies, breaking down the psychic barriers to bigger lies.

Lies may seem more necessary, less reprehensible.



y Even if we are content living with a soiled self image, lying

can create barriers in relationship because we must be on

guard not to betray our lies.

y

One lie, when discovered, casts suspicion on everything elsewe say.



Statistics on Lying

Telling End Receiving End

y 32% said they lied to avoidupsetting the receiver.

y 62% said lie was justified

y 8% felt the receiver's angerwas justified.

y 4% believed the same as it

was to avoid upsetting the

receiver.

y When on receiving end only

8% said lies was justified.

y On receiving end 57% said

anger was justified.



y If we are the liar, we often understate in our ¶cost benefit·

analysis the potential downside.

y We forget: most people do not like being lied to, regardless

of how smart and caring we are.y The recipient feels manipulated, put in the dark, cheated out

of valuable news about their lives. They feel deprived of

control in choosing wisely.



y Although we employ lies, we often don·t examine them, and

we don·t tote up the total consequences. We don·t see how

we put our interests above those of others. We need to wake

up to our sensitivity, temptations to compromise into

chances to build character and deepen relationships.



Temptations to deceive

y Deception means failing to correct an inaccurate impression,

feigning ignorance, not telling the whole truth, withholding

information, sugarcoating the truth, or overusing tact.

y D

eception is intentionally giving a false impression with orwithout telling a lie.



y Deception can be conveyed with words but also with gesture,

disguise, inaction, or even silence.

y One form of deception is using words to make things sound

better or worse.y Another kind of deception can arise from secrets. A secret in

the same ways as lies changes the relationship between teller

and receiver. Secrets transform information, power and

control to the secret holder. They take it from the person inthe dark. Those who have been left in the dark feel angry.



Temptation to Steal

y Stealing is appropriating property of others without

permission. This includes outright theft, like shoplifting,

embezzlement, or swindling. It also means taking or

accepting something that is not ours, or acquiring another·s

property without permission.

y Just as lying and deception transfer power and control from

victim to perpetrator, so does theft.

y

We risk making decisions disconnected from our values. Thegravest threat, once again comes not from individual lapses

but from letting our habits go unexamined.



Temptation to harm

y Physical harming is the use of or threat to use violence

against another person. It also includes acts that may lead to

physical injury of another. As with stealing, most of us don·t

engage in obvious harming. But we may engage in more

common yet subtle behaviors that fall in this category.waking

up to harm means recognizing which of our actions put

others in harm·s way. Through our actions, we may turn a

blind eye to harm, incite harm, fail to prevent harm, or

deceive others into putting themselves in harm·s way.



The tragedy of Desensitization

y Accounts of Nazi behavior showed practically no limit to

ethical desensitization.

y And this is true not just for soldiers but also highly educated

professionals like doctors engineers, lawyers and managers.y One of the dark chapters were written by the hands of

doctors was the legitimizing of state controlled killing. Five

thousand disabled children were murdered.

y

T4 program to kill adult insane, ninety thousand died.Doctors performed ¶euthanasia·. By poison gas, by injection,

through forced starvation.



Time for an Examination

y Experience shows that too often we live what Socrates called

the ¶unexamined life·. We have within us the makings of

reform. We do have inkling, an inner voice, that speaks to us.

Unfortunately , we don·t always turn up the volume enough

to hear it. We do have an idea of what·s right and what's

wrong. We just don·t listen enough to see compromises for

what they are. The worst of it all we doze through

opportunities foe self examination and growth.



Draw Distinctions

y Kurt Gerstein and his contributions in the Nazi euthanasia

program.

y Gerstein failed to draw distinction between reasoning and

rationalization.y His error , highlighted in the extreme, is that he failed to see

that the lesser of the two evil is still evil.



Power of Distinction

y In decision analysis , the most basic distinction we make is

simply our choice of words, the building blocks of our

thinking. They are the basic units for helping us to

discriminate between one thing and another.

y Word choice matters It highlights some elements of a

thought and disguises others.

y Words can paint pictures, they put somethings in the

foreground and some in the background.



y Eg: ¶Do you favor killing babies for research·.

y Do you favor using fetuses in stem cell research·

y Consciously using the distinction provided by words iscrucial to all varieties of decision making.

y There are several distinctions that are essential in skillfulethical thinking. These include distinction between:

y Prudential, legal and ethical dimensions of actions

y Positive versus consequences-based ethics

y Action based versus consequence- based ethics

y Ethical reasoning versus rationalization.



Prudential, legal or Ethical

y To assess the ethics of any action, it is useful to separate three

dimensions of the action: prudential, legal and ethical

y Within the prudential dimension , we distinguish between

what is prudent or not prudent: and within the legaldimension we distinguish between what is lawful or unlawful

; and within the ethical dimension between what is right or

wrong.



y An action is raises questions in the ethical dimension when itpertains to our predefined standards of right behaviour. Theprinciple issues in the ethical dimension are lying, deceiving,stealing and harming.

y An action raises questions in the prudential dimension when it

pertains to our self interest. We usually tell we·re dealing with theprudential dimension when we balance one issue with another,trade off pluses and minuses and weigh opposing risks, to decidewhat is smart thing to do.

y An action raises question of being in the legal dimension if it

pertains to the law in the prevailing social system. Illegal actsobviously include prohibitions such as committing assault,speeding, murder, possessing banned drugs and spitting in thesubway.



y We often fail to distinguish the three dimensions of an action

and thus confuse and complicate decisions.

y When we become practiced at drawing the distinction

between prudential, legal and ethical dimensions, we noticesomething surprising: we encounter ethical dilemmas²only

rarely.



Negative or Positive?y The second useful distinction for skilled ethical reasoning is the

difference between negative or positive ethics.

y Negative ethics are prohibitions that take the form ¶You shallnot«· Negative ethics take little or no energy to fulfill.

y Another characteristics of negative ethics is that they create brightlines. We can easily determine whether we have cheated on a test.

y Positive ethics are obligations that take the form ¶You shall«·Positive ethics require virtuous behaviour and energy to fulfill.Take ¶You shall feed the hungry.·

y Negative and positive ethics should be though about differently.

We need to be sure to separate in our minds the ¶shall nots· fromthe ¶shalls·. This lead to more judicious articulation of ourprinciples.



Actions or Consequences?y Moral philosophers take many viewpoints, they divide ethical thinking

largely into these tow schools. The first articulated by Immanuel Kant atthe end of the enlightenment in the 1700s and the other by JeremyBentham and John Stuart Mill in the late 1700s and 1800s.

y In action based ethics, we might choose as our ethical rule to never lie.We would always tell the truth no matter what we felt the consequencesmight be.

y In consequences based ethics, we might choose to always tell the truth because honesty generally provides the greatest goo for the greatestnumber.

y In both situations we are put in ethical dilemma. But he responsibility of our action always lies with ¶US·. Because our responsibilities derive fromwhat we can control and the decisions we can make.



Reasoning Versus Rationalization

y Reasoning is the process of analysis for forming judgments. It

clarifies the distinction between right and wrong action.

y Rationalization is a process of constructing a justification for

a decision we suspect is really flawed-and often one that wasarrived at through a mental process characterized by

contrivance and self dealing. Rationalization purposely blurs

right or wrong.



Test for Rationalization

y Front page test

y Role model test

y Loved one test

y Mother·s test



Draft Your Code

y A successful code helps clarify yourself your ethical

principles. It helps you resist temptations, especially those

most relevant to you, your profession, your weakness, and

your aspirations.

y Three steps we follow to write our code

y Drafting standards

y Testing Standards

y Refining the code to make it practical.



Drafting Standard

y To get started with our code: the easiest approach is to focus

on the three principle categories of ethical wrongdoing:

Deceiving, stealing and harming.



Testing the Code

y How do we know our code is worthwhile? Is it academic

theory or a practical tool? Several tests help us find out:

y Check the logic: Will our standards hold up to tests for

reciprocity and universality?

y Check for focus: Have we included too many ethical

statements, making the code unmanageable?

y Test drive for usefulness: How well do our standards operate

in everyday life? Are they practical?D

o we really meanthem?



Check the logic

y Two principles of logic guide the construction of durable,

thoughtful codes. The first is universality. The second is

reciprocity.

y When we draft an ethical standard , we should ask, ́ Would I

want other everyone to follow this and ¶Would I want other

people to apply the same rule to me?·



Check for focus

y We should test to be sure we have winnowed the list of

ethical topics to a manageable number. Scores, sometimes

hundreds of items populate our ethical thinking. We need to

cut the list to a dozen or two by dropping unimportant ones-

the least bothersome, unlikely to happen or most trivial.



Failure Factors

y Using loaded language: we fail to express ourselves in value

neutral language.

y Judging the actions of others : We forget that our codes is to

help improve our own behaviour, not judge others behaviour.

y Basing ethics on the judgment of others: We mimic the inner

voice of others instead of listening to our own.

y Making praiseworthy but not livable statements: We make

statements of aspirations we cannot possibly meet.

compiled by

Abhishek Anand

Almost Ethical

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