by Rushworth M. Kidder

Last week’s revelations about bonuses paid to AIG executives raised numerous questions. For some voters, they were questions about money and finance. For others, they were about law and regulation. But for Barry C. Black, “the issue of Wall Street versus Main Street” is an “important ethical issue,” causing lawmakers to ask, What’s right?

As chaplain of the U.S. Senate, Dr. Black sees his role as “spiritual fitness advisor and ethical coach” to senators. What he’s seen convinces him that the broadest questions facing the future direction of the nation are rarely matters of right versus wrong. Instead, they bring to bear powerful moral arguments on both sides. While partisans may see them in stark right-versus-wrong terms, Black says that by the time such issues “reach the Senate chamber, they are nuanced — they are definitely right-versus-right conundrums.”

A retired rear admiral and former chief of Navy chaplains, Black is the first black American, the first military chaplain, and the first Seventh-day Adventist to hold this position, which was established in 1789. His is not a political post: His five years in the chaplain’s vault-ceilinged, fireplaced, and book-lined office in the Capitol already have spanned a change in parties. So in discussing senatorial decision making during a telephone conversation last month with members of our Institute, he maintained a thoughtfully nonpartisan stance.

No doubt as a result, there’s hardly a moral issue that the senators haven’t discussed with him, including abortion, stem-cell research, gay marriage, Terry Shiavo and the right to life, the question of just or unjust wars, the public expression of sectarian views — and now, of course, the economic stimulus package. One of his tasks, as he sees it, is to help senators “look through ethical lenses” in order to “enable each lawmaker, after voting, to at least be able to explain to the press why he or she voted that way, and give ethical reasons for the vote.”

Sometimes, he says, senators invite his help and counsel on particular topics. Sometimes they attend his weekly prayer breakfasts. Sometimes they visit the Bible study sessions he conducts five times a week. And sometimes they seek him out in his office in more private ways — “you know,” he chuckles, “‘Oh, Chaplain, I was just passing by!’” — and end up coming in for an hour of conversation.

But the core question is always the same: What’s the right thing to do?

While Black sees “a tremendous amount of faith on Capitol Hill,” he’s not blind to the temptations senators face. As humans, he says, we sometimes “tend to move toward the darker angels of our nature” and “avoid the ethical narrow road.” Politicians in particular, he says, can get caught up all too easily in “the things that accompany power.” When “you start believing the news clippings, you start believing the accolades,” he explains, it sometimes becomes “easier to see the ethical lapses of others than your own.”

I asked Black how he himself negotiates the fine line between helping others find their own way and simply telling them what he thinks they should do — especially when the vote on which they may be seeking guidance could have what he calls “incredibly challenging and negative unintended consequences” if his advice were wrong.

“I find if you are not doctrinaire and dogmatic,” he says, “and if you delay providing your perspective until you are certain that the individual has used some of his or her creative juices, then by the time you get around to making some suggestions or observations, you are pretty much helping an individual solidify a position that he or she is already leaning toward.”

In his ethics training work, he explains, he helps the participants understand that different ethical perspectives — all of which are “right” — can produce very different conclusions. But “by encouraging them to do their own thinking, and to arrive at their own conclusions using certain ethical constructs as a springboard for their reflection, inevitably it’s not going to be my decision. It’s going to be theirs.”

That, to my mind, is a singularly important lesson these days. Given the explosion of polarizing opinions made possible by a pop culture of ubiquitous blogging and anonymous call-in shows, it can take true moral courage to formulate a position slowly and carefully. Where blaring self-assertion so often rides roughshod over judicious reasoning, the very act of stepping outside without an opinion sometimes feels like standing naked in a hailstorm. Yet if Black is right — if the toughest issues facing our global future have powerful moral arguments supporting each side — the best counseling will not be to tell people what to think. It will be to teach them how to think.

Which, I suspect, is why Black is so effective. If even a fraction of those serving in Congress are willing to factor ethics into their decision making — and if people like Black are there to help them along — that very fact may be a strong leading indicator pointing the way out of the financial crisis. It may not end the outrage expressed last week by a frustrated nation. But it certainly offers hope that, at the highest levels of government, the bedrock moral causes of the current ethics recession can be addressed.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

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