Ethics Newsline®

Ethics and Earthquakes

Jun 2nd, 2008 • Posted in: Commentary

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Those who think ethics is merely an option — one of life’s electives, rather than an essential for survival — need to look closely at a photograph from last week’s news. It shows a pile of post-earthquake rubble in China’s Sichuan Province. Taken by a New York Times photographer, it captures all that is left of Xinjian Primary School, once a four-story building in the city of Dujiangyan. According to the accompanying story, several hundred children died in its May 12 collapse.

What makes the photograph remarkable, however, is not the rubble. It’s the two buildings flanking the pile. One is a kindergarten some 20 feet away. The other, a 10-story hotel, stands behind the site. Neither was seriously damaged. Nor was the Beijie Primary School, a five-minute walk away. Beijie, however, is for the children of the elite. Xinjian was for poorer children.

Last week, parents whose children died at Xinjian rose up in anger at government officials. They suspect something went terribly wrong not just in the delayed relief efforts but in the school’s original design and construction. They point to poor-quality steel and to concrete weakened by too much sand and too little cement. As one of them told the Times, “This is not a natural disaster.”

Are these parents right? Yes, in the sense that while violent events are natural, they only become disasters through human failure. These failures sometimes are charged to specific areas of study — engineering, architecture, hydrology, economics — or to related technological and logistical arenas, like transportation, emergency response, or building inspection services. But the real problem lies in the human application of ideas and practices within these areas. Hundreds more children could well be alive today if over time these applications had been managed rightly.

So what went wrong? In a word, ethics. It would appear that whenever nature breeds wholesale disaster, ethics already has failed to some extent among those in charge. It’s probably safe to say that before a single floor collapsed at Xinjian or a single pillar buckled, there already had been an ethical collapse, a buckling of integrity. These moral failures are most visible in three ways:

Negligence. In its tamest and subtlest form, moral failure begins with well-meaning managers and officials who are so beleaguered and overwhelmed that they neglect their obligations. When the tyranny of the immediate pushes the potentially devastating into the background, the polite phrase is deferred maintenance. In reality, what’s happening is the slow, impersonal, hardly visible assembly of a time bomb. The Xinjian Primary School apparently had a history of problems: Some years earlier one wing had been declared unsafe, torn down, and rebuilt. In hindsight, those in charge should have allocated more funds to reconstruction — and demanded results. If ethics is about fairness, neglecting Xinjian while building higher-quality schools nearby is profoundly unethical.
Incompetence. If the negligent knew they were inviting disaster, they still might be vigilant. Incompetence, by contrast, is more dangerous, simply because those in charge usually know they lack the requisite knowledge and skill yet push forward anyway. Globally, a lot is known about designing safe schools in earthquake-prone areas and establishing standards for their construction. If laborers are hired despite not knowing how to implement those standards, that’s an irresponsible tolerance of incompetence — especially if the laborers are only there because they’re someone’s relative, neighbor, or loyal lackey. Find wholesale incompetence and you’ll also find the lack of another core ethical value, responsibility.
Corruption. Neither negligence nor incompetence is necessarily unlawful, and each can be corrected by knowledge. Corruption, by contrast, is the worst kind of unethical behavior. It wallows in illegality, recognizes its own evil, and has no desire for correction. It can destroy even the most dutiful and competent organizations. Bribery, shakedowns, graft, and other pocket-lining ploys of the powerful — these unethical behaviors, according to the World Bank, cost the global economy more than $1 trillion annually. The parents in Dujiangyan had every reason to be suspicious that someone, somewhere, was paid off to build a substandard school — a towering dishonesty that no one could call ethical.

Negligence, incompetence, and corruption, then, sit along a rising scale of unethical action. But they have one thing in common: Each can kill widely and indiscriminately. Consider the roots of death and destruction in the Chinese earthquake — and in the Indonesian tsunami in 2004, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the Myanmar cyclone in early May. Then consider the still-fashionable canard that ethics is merely an option, having no important place among the toughest issues of global governance, economics, or security. That anyone in the twenty-first century could hold both of those considerations simultaneously and still be considered wise is simply bizarre.