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Overview of THE ETHICS RECESSION
The book's first section, titled “The Ethics Recession,” focuses sharply on the financial crisis itself—where it came from, how we can understand it, and how we get out of it. Here, Kidder reflects on our progress in redefining ethics away from mere compliance and into values, and he comments on the sudden jolt that has shifted moral progress from an evolutionary to a revolutionary process. He calls on us to respond to the crisis not simply by creating more ethical individual leaders but by building more ethical organizational cultures.
His opening chapter—“It’s the Culture, Stupid!”—lists ten attributes of a “culture of integrity” essential for helping corporations and governments regain the public’s trust. The closing chapter—“Fighting Ponzi with Ponzi?”—asks whether we are capable of “building a self-sustaining, steady-state economy,” or whether, like the eponymous Charles Ponzi of the 1920s, we are “shackled to a requirement for constant growth as the only way to keep our system afloat.” Among our most useful tools, Kidder argues, may be “a caveat of inexplicable wealth—an instinct, intuition, or hunch that sends up warning signals whenever things look too good to be true.”
In Section 2, “Ten Challenges,” Kidder identifies some specific mental constructs that impede our ethical progress:
“Until we get a handle on each of these challenges,” he writes, “we will not have addressed the fundamentals that drove us headlong into the ethics recession.”
Section 3, “Why Integrity Matters,” offers some reflections on what makes us care about ethics in the first place. It starts with a reading of the falling moral barometer, followed by a pair of chapters on two central questions for our age: “Is Ethics Futile?” and “Why is the News So Negative?” The chapters that follow seek to provide positive answers to those questions by sharing examples—some as large as Hurricane Katrina, others as small as a Maine garage—that elevate integrity, expand openness, and contemplate the possibility of perfection.
Rushworth M. Kidder
Prior to founding the Institute in 1990, Dr. Kidder was senior columnist and features editor for The Christian Science Monitor. His seminal 1995 book, How Good People Make Tough Choices, was praised by President Jimmy Carter as “a thought-provoking guide to enlightened and progressive personal behavior.”
Of an earlier book, Shared Values for a Troubled World: Conversations with Men and Women of Conscience, Bill Moyers wrote that “only Rush Kidder would have made this odyssey, and only Rush Kidder could have returned with such a valuable cargo of insights.”
The Library Journal, reviewing his 2005 book Moral Courage, observed that “Kidder links sophisticated theory and research with colorful, sometimes gripping examples of people displaying the ‘courage to be moral,’” and noted that “this book, like one candle in the darkness, belongs in every place of learning – and every library.”
A graduate of Amherst College with a Ph.D. from Columbia University, he appears monthly as part of an ethics panel in O: The Oprah Magazine, and places op-ed pieces in such periodicals as the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The Boston Globe. He is represented by the Washington Speakers Bureau.
Institute for Global Ethics
The Institute for Global Ethics is a nonpartisan, nonsectarian 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting ethical behavior in individuals, institutions, and nations through research, public discourse, and practical action. Clients include major corporations, government entities, academic institutions, and nonprofit organizations in the United States and abroad.
