Ethics Newsline®

Summer’s end invites reflection. With vacations past and a new season beginning, we naturally ask, “What’s ahead?” The most important answers concern our moral future. As we drift toward the new millennium, what high-leverage, first-intensity issues will most impact our values and challenge our ethics?

Here’s my take on it, under the heading of six trends:

1. Technology leveraging ethics. New technologies in communication, transportation, weaponry, and health care will vastly increase the reach and impact of single decisions. Clear, values-driven actions will have an unprecedented potential for good. But unethical decisions by single individuals can now create world-class disasters that will make Chernobyl look like small potatoes.

2. Rights giving way to responsibilities. The golden anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reminds us that we’ve had fifty years of rights talk. Look for increasing emphasis on the commensurate responsibilities — social, economic, politic, and moral — that must accompany those rights. Done poorly, this trend could cause real backpedaling from the hugely important progress in human rights in this century. Done well, it could launch a whole new wave of commitment and accountability, moving from a “Gimme mine!” to a “How can I help?” mentality.

3. Linear thinking ceding to networking. The explosion of the World Wide Web is but a metaphor for this trend. The movement will be from the stepwise, vertical logic of reasoned cognition to the horizontal gathering of information through intuition and relationships. This may suggest a move from what writers like Carol Gilligan (”In a Different Voice”) see as a male-oriented ethic of justice to a female-oriented ethic of care. That’s good if it replaces the testosterone of competition with the compassion of sharing, bad if it undercuts rational insight with woolly psychobabble.

4. Stasis overcome by mobility. Symbol: the mobile phone, whose numbers have no fixed address. Evidence: a global flux of individuals, some pushed by forced migration but most drawn by economic or political allure. Requirement: to focus education not on career skills and job markets, but on core values and competencies, preparing students for immense, regular, and accelerating change. Moral challenge: to provide a sense of stability no longer available from the values of place, family, and cultural traditions.

5. Compliance yielding to trust. The old ethical model emphasized obedience to regulations. With the pace of innovation, there will be no time to develop regulations before the next generation of issues arrives. Nor will there be enough policemen to put behind every post to watch every employee, politician, parent, and professional. We’ll be forced to develop new levels of trust — becoming more trustworthy, and creating a world in which we can be more trustful. The Reagan-era mantra, “Trust, but verify,” will take on new significance as we see even the most tightly lawyered contracts coming apart when the character of one or more partners is ethically flawed.

6. Patients becoming customers. As managed care turns medical practice inside out, the age-old braid that united in a single individual the patient (who needed help) with the customer (who paid the bills) is unraveling into its twin strands. With customers now calling the shots, the ethical dilemmas facing caregivers, families, and the patients themselves will rise by orders of magnitude. And managed care is but a metaphor for pervasive change wherever there is a “professional” delivery of services — from education to investing, from law to lawn-mowing. Side effect: huge new data banks of personal information, now recombined into profiles designed “to help us serve you better.” When savings in costs collide with invasions of privacy, the resulting moral turbulence will spin off more ethical twisters than La Niña.

What to do about these trends? First, be aware of them. Spotting nascent change lets you address it before it reaches maturity.

Second, see them as right-versus-right issues. There’s a lot of good in the way things were and in where they’re going. Any moral system that tries to fit these trends into a right-versus-wrong mold is too unsophisticated to deal with 21^st century dynamics.

Third, go to school on our New England ancestors. They used well sweeps — those long poles with buckets on one end and counterweights on the other — to make gravity itself cancel the downdrag of a heavy load of water coming up the well shaft. Which provides another metaphor for our age, reminding us that survival depends on working with and not against the forces that impact us.

(c)1999 by Rushworth M. Kidder