Learning to act right, and some right actions (1)

Learning to act right, and some right actions (1)
Torrey Orton
February 9, 2010
When I was a rising '60's adult I was known as the preacher, and earlier in boarding school as "Straights" (straight arrow – an accusation of excess rectitude which I am pleased I failed to honour in full, but I understood the dubbing*). I had a leaning towards moral certainty and confidence in the rightness of my ethical insight, which I also felt free to share whether an audience was willing or not. More recently, I've been told by some of my peers that I am intimidating in similar ways. I am about to preach and certainly want to get your attention.
A few months ago I wondered to myself what habits our younger generations might be picking up from the world as we now know it. Habits are the products of real efforts directed at the same outcome over significant periods of time. Some of them are essential to successful conduct of important aspects of life – they are, in a sense, life-making for us. The various evidences of moral/ethical slippage in our times make the shortage of appropriate habits increasingly noticeable. An overall theme of inappropriate habits in the industrial economies is excess. That a principle source of this slippage (landslide?) is my generation amplifies my concern.
'How do we learn to be ethical?'
I think this new theme is 'How do we learn to be ethical?' It will capture some of the complexity of real moral situations. Only in a lifetime punctuated by such situations – often unpredictable – can acting ethically be learned. The ethical response has to be a gut response in the first place - automatic, systemic and heartfelt. It is this which tells us serious life altering opportunities are before us, or all around us.


Lacking that feeling, applications of 'rational thinking' will not make up its absence. A lifetime spent, on the other hand, in the bonds of disregard for any question of limitations except religious ones yields potential membership in a fundamentalist sect, or in nihilist occupations with a faith-based tinge. Gambling comes to mind.
For the rest of us, those bonds are already systemically supported because their organisational exponents – churches, sects, etc. - don't, with honourable exceptions, take on serious social matters at the grassroots level. The fading public participation in middle of the road religious organisations in lands of plenty expresses their lack of convincing and binding day to day directions for living.
The flight simulator training standard
We live in times where it is regularly proposed that ethical lapses or outrages can be prevented by training courses for companies and ethics units in MBAs. Consider by contrast what training really means for serious skill acquisition – the flight simulator in which pilots are regularly and persistently grilled in high pressure challenges. Repeated failures in simulators can be fatal to careers, as they should be.
What would a finance industry executive simulator look like and who would pay for it or bind the participants through untouchable assessments open to public view??? Not bloody likely, I hear whispering in the night airs. Where would we get our corporate Sullenbergers? Certainly not at B Schools devoted to the tastes and touches of our times. Those without them could not hope to survive in the corporate sector. Can the corporate sector survive without them? They shoot whistleblowers don't they?
A good place to start is with a look at my own learning of ethical responses, and my failures to learn! I am also moved to try out this recall to remind myself of the prevalence of opportunities to engage, and my inclination to avoid, ethically demanding situations. This should amount to a conscious effort to re-energise or sensitise my moral faculties, as they were once called. There are so many places to start. Late boarding school came to mind a few days back…
* But I also, all those years before, used small powers I had to assist less interested classmates to survive the rigors of boarding school disciplines - a fact also recognised by some of those who titled me "Straights". It was always a source of wonder among us that anyone could have thought I was an appropriate person to put in charge of Sunday church attendance records for the whole school. It seemed as if there were some in power who accepted my public image. On the other hand, I now realise, perhaps they understood the complexity of daily life through which we have to both accept responsibility and decide how and where it is best applied. So appoint a 'straight' guy to a discretionary rule monitoring task!? Who would think to question the outcomes?
Important and discretionary rules
This was also the period in which I practiced the difference between important rules and discretionary ones. E.g. – not drinking, smoking and such (a broad grouping) were rules which we all (the boarders) knew were relatively groundless, or seriously debatable – that is, just generational, hence discretionary, even if also with standing in the statute law of the period. Others, important ones like truth-telling, were more foundational; even we could see some sense in them for the structuring of our daily lives, the coherence of relationships and their reliability. I, like some others of my leading peers, broke the circumstantial rules wilfully (smoking being the main candidate for breakage, with alcohol a quieter second – this was 50 years ago!).
How we got away with smoking in our dorm room in year 12 is also a wonder, as I now know that smoke hangs around with a half-life of months for non-smokers. Our in-room ashtrays were the four hollow steel legs of the bunk bed - about five feet long by 2 inches square – capped with a removable cover. Probably our main salvation was the resident floor master (a single male teacher with rooms on the floor), a thoroughly compulsive smoker himself, to whom a cig's olfactory half-life was imperceptible. On the other hand, we were daily modelling the discretionary nature of many rules for the year nine kids on the floor we ran! Our class had the reputation as the most "negative" in living memory (the 15 years post WW-II); not that we knew it but the cynicism and rigorous doubting of foundational values was persistent and extensive.


Invitation to share…
Learning to act right, and some right actions will be a host to investigations of actual ethical learnings across generations, genders, cultures and a full range of classical ethical dilemmas, great and small. The second and following pieces in the series will be devoted to single events. I welcome your participation by offering pieces or suggesting domains which you would like to see explored. If the theme develops I see a publication not far off.