Learning to act right (4)… a dilemma of ethics.

Learning to act right (4)… a dilemma of ethics.
Torrey Orton
March 10, 2010


"The hole in the system's heart", Malcolm Maiden says, is the unaddressed ethical issue in the analysis of the GFC. It cannot be addressed simply by "reregulation" he notes, quoting UNSW law professor Justin O'Brien. On the same day in the Financial Review (pg 62), Peter Wilson, President of AHRI, reviews the latest moves in CorporateSocialResponsibility – the re-engineering of the old MV&V (mission vision and values) and TBL (triple bottom line) "mantras" into separate business results objectives and "core internal values"...as if being "core" and "internal" makes the values any more resistant to the corrosive effects of mis- or unmanaged conflicts which occur naturally.


Wilson hopes this will revitalise ethics in the workplace and markets. I doubt the same was said about MV&V two decades ago when its consultant-pushed run began, following on decades earlier tools like MBO (managing by objectives). The research on strategy is clear that having one doesn't mean acting strategically. How can "core values" be anything without sound underlying ethical principles and practices??? Similar plaints dot the comment pages of major papers and websites across the Anglosphere.


Virtues always entail vices


I suspect that what condemns us to endless returns to these concerns, that we do not get much better at the issues except over generational lead times, is that many virtues underpinning organisational effectiveness are a bit suss for registration among the ten commandments and other sources of our ethical wherewithal. These virtues include decisiveness and action taking, driven by focus with obsessiveness.


A noticeable characteristic of these virtues is that only one side of them is lauded, while the collaterals are left unspoken. Simply, action means doing something and not another thing. In this movement people, places and purposes are often damaged – a cost we must endure to live, entailing a responsibility we fear to take. See Up in the air for a bone grating evocation of this split personality which is our late modern culture.


A story that might have been…


Here should be a story which a colleague in another hemisphere told me. I cannot present it because it gives a glimpse inside complexities of trying to act right, where making the effort may be damaging to those we're trying to do right by!! Telling the story of this itself offers a likely fall into the same danger, taking with us others who might be tainted by implication while themselves caught in the same systemic dysfunctions as the exemplary story portrays.


This is a practical dilemma of ethics learning: to learn we need real practice, and much real practice is itself in domains so touchy and entangling that their public discussion in real cases is marginally to maximally unethical. To do so, to discuss publicly could embroil participants in recriminations or revenges, moderated by claims of unfairly, untruthfully, in fact scurrilously, disclosing their compliance or collusion with bad actors and systems!!


This is more than a theoretical observation, much as I'm inclined to the latter. I pre-posted this now archived article to him as the last step before blogging it. A quick response refused permission to post with no exceptions because of the turmoil, systemic and personal, which could ensue. Worst among the possible results would be the unveiling of others caught in their own version of our dilemma while still under the institutional care and guidance of their peers and structural betters! Some are still there. The whistleblowers' dilemma!


Doing the right thing may unavoidably produce conflicting results – collateral damage as the military expresses it. While others may seldom die from our well placed shots at ethical complications, for those of us of thinly guarded sensibilities, an implicit disparagement feels like a death sentence socially. This appreciation lowers the likelihood of taking the risk of exposure in the first place…and the field for ethical innovation is enclosed a little more.