WEDNESDAY JUNE 10TH, 2009

(Rockland, Maine, USA) The Institute for Global Ethics announces that HarperCollins will publish a second edition of Institute Founder Rushworth M. Kidder’s popular 1995 book, How Good People Make Tough Choices: Resolving the Dilemmas of Ethical Living (Tough Choices). It’s been almost fifteen years since the first edition was published and a number of cultural changes have occurred since then.

What are these changes? When Tough Choices was first published, many people had not given much thought to the importance of ethics. Ethical considerations were not deemed particularly urgent, and the idea of shared values was not widely accepted. Since then, however, given the likes of Enron and Bernie Madoff, most people readily see that these occurrences, and the recent economic implosion, are due as much to unethical thinking and actions as to anything else.

In the first edition of Tough Choices, a major assertion was that technology leverages ethics and amplifies ethical decisions in new ways. Of course, this continues to be true, but an even more sobering consideration is that while we may gradually find ways to improve society’s moral barometer, technology develops at a much steeper and faster pace, threatening any gains made on the plus side. This disconnect desperately needs to be corrected.

We’ve also learned over the years that there is more to ethics than changing individual behavior, as important as that is. Even though an organization is made up of separate individuals, the organization itself has a way of influencing the behavior of those individuals through its traditions, history, and hidden practices. In response to this understanding, the Institute for Global Ethics has worked steadily to develop practical processes and tools to help professionals shore up the ethical foundations of their organizations.

The second edition of Tough Choices has an added preface and a new last chapter. Also, many of the statistics used in the first edition have been updated, a daunting process at best. The Institute will begin taking advance orders for the book in early fall.

pjones@globalethics.org