The Trouble with Ethics Awards
Oct 19th, 2009 • Posted in: Commentary by Rushworth M. Kidder
LAKE WORTH, Florida
“What do you think of ethics awards?”
The question popped up at a meeting of community leaders here in Palm Beach County the other day. If each year we recognized an individual or organization of outstanding integrity, I was asked, wouldn’t that help promote ethics, especially when our community needs visible moral role models?
The questioner was right about the need. Headlines in the local paper, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, sadly refer to this place as “Corruption County,” and for good reason. Five local politicians — three former county commissioners and two West Palm Beach city commissioners — have been sentenced to prison terms recently, brought down by an FBI operation launched several years ago. The area’s former congressman, six-term Republican Mark Foley, left office in 2006 over a sex scandal involving teenage pages working at the Capitol.
What’s more, convicted financier Bernie Madoff played out his giant Ponzi scheme on investors who lived in the same exclusive Palm Beach neighborhood where he had a home. And last week Florida governor Charlie Crist called for a statewide grand jury to investigate what he called “a culture of corruption,” predominantly in South Florida. At his press conference, he noted that he has suspended or fired 31 public officials since he took office early in 2007.
To their credit, the citizenry here is exercised over these matters — part of the reason this community meeting was convened. Are they fighting a hopeless battle? I don’t think so. History is on their side. In the nineteenth century, when New York City fell into the clutches of Tammany Hall, it took 80 years to break the corruption of the Democratic Party’s political machine. By the end of the twentieth century, Hong Kong took only several decades to do it: After a siege of corruption so notorious that firemen at burning houses refused to turn on the water until the owners paid a bribe, an Independent Commission Against Corruption, set up in 1974, helped Hong Kong become one of the cleanest jurisdictions in the world. And just this year, former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich was thrown out of office in a matter of months over his efforts to sell the Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama to the highest bidder.
All of which should make the case for ethics awards. Shouldn’t the investigators, reformers, and leading citizens in these cases be honored? Shouldn’t those with the moral courage to stand up and fight be celebrated? Shouldn’t a thoughtful award committee be able to determine the best candidates?
In theory, yes. But before rushing into it, the good citizens of Palm Beach County might look across the state to Hillsborough County and its county seat, Tampa. There, a moral courage award sponsored by the county commissioners and named for Ralph Hughes, a prominent local anti-tax campaigner, has just come a cropper. After his death, the IRS billed his estate for nearly $70 million in unpaid levies, and the U.S. Department of Justice is suing the company he owned to recover $300 million in back taxes. Perhaps because this embarrassing story was featured in a page-one Wall Street Journal story several weeks ago, the county won’t be making an award this year.
The problem with such awards is that ethics is not an inoculation, but a process. It’s something you measure over time. And that measurement can be difficult. To be sure, community leaders may engage in specific acts of undeniable moral courage. In a given instance, they can speak truth to power, defend noble but unpopular causes, or publicly announce their own mistakes. But what if, after they do so, they descend into blatant moral idiocy? Does their later history invalidate their earlier integrity? Not unless new facts have come to light. Then don’t they still deserve the award? That depends on the purpose of the award. If the honoree is plagued by subsequent moral failings, how effective will the award be in inspiring a new generation? Should we hold up as a moral exemplar someone who, one cold winter night, stood up for the homeless — only later to become a notorious wife-beater?
The problem is that we can’t — and shouldn’t — compartmentalize ethics. There’s no such thing as “political ethics” that is separate from personal ethics or business ethics or legal ethics. There’s only ethics. It’s part and parcel of everything we do. Most awards in the business or community arenas don’t have to rise to that high standard. They can focus just on leadership or excellence in innovation or skill in athletics or the arts. Yet even there, ethics is inherent in every award. Should a baseball Hall of Fame recipient be removed if future investigations discover that he excelled only because he used illegal steroids? Should we honor a CEO of the Year if we later learn she cooked the company’s books to win the prize? Should a highly praised new author be admired if he’s later found to have plagiarized? No in each case, we say — not because these people didn’t have outstanding records, but because the ethical lapses compromised everything they did.
Ethics awards are inviting, to be sure. And I suspect, with immense care, they can be properly done. But I have one request of any award committee. First, go see the movie The Informant! (the punctuation is part of the title), based on the true story of Mark Whitacre, a top corporate executive at agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland. Was he a whistle-blower and a reformer — or a mole and a con man? When lying becomes so subtle, what does it mean to say, “There stands a noble life”? If you’d given him an award, at what point would you wish you hadn’t?
In questions of awards, the old Russian adage still rings true: “Trust, but verify.”
©2009 Institute for Global Ethics
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I do not think that a global ethics award is a good idea.
Each and every day there would be millions of people who are making totally ethical choices, often at great personal cost. They will, as always go unsung.
Why should we give an award to a public figure who has done ‘the right thing?’ Isn’t that what’s expected of a public servant? If I’m voting, a political figure doing the job they were elected to do simply isn’t eligible.
This rings the same bell that we hear when some edifice is named after a politician who may have done nothing more than appropriate public funds for a highway, a bridge, or a community center. Name it after a figure or organization that has truly stepped forward and gone beyond what was expected. If we feel compelled to recognize ethics and community involvement, cite a deed that is truly worthy, not an individual.
For example, the ABC show Home Makeover recently rebuilt a home in my area for a truly worthy individual. No good deed goes unpunished, and a huge property tax increase resulted. A local businessman (who, by the way, hasn’t previously been noted for generosity) agreed to pay both back taxes and the current bill. Is this purely ethics? Certainly not, but it’s the action that should be recognized, not necessarily the individual.
Thomas Marton
Erie, PA
We have recognized courage on the battlefield with awards for years. Mr. Kidder recognizes numerous people and acts in his book “Moral Courage.” It seems that a form of recognition has real merit whether it is the person or the act. Legends are created from stories and shape organizational culture. I think there are several questions that should be answered before deciding whether or not it should be done.
Thank you for your article. Your argument against compartmentalizing ethics is spot on. Those advocating for awards to reward desired behavior – ethical or other – through extrinsic rewards often fail to appreciate the complexity of incentives. Designing incentives in such a way that they accomplish the desired effect is far from trivial. Amongst those who study human motivation it is generally accepted that just dangling a reward in front of someone’s nose is not necessarily going to increase this person’s likelihood to behave in the desired way. Studies (some examples cited below) have shown that a monetary incentive that is perceived as too low can decrease motivation. And according to the well studied “overjutification effect”, incentivizing people with money when they are already intrinsically motivated to behave in the desired way can diminish this intrinsic motivation. Bottom line: Dread carefully when implementing incentives programs.
One could easily point to examples illustrating how an overreliance on extrinsic incentives has contributed to undesirable outcomes. The recent financial meltdown is a case in point. Some companies now attempt to counter the negative impact of incentives for financial performance with “counter-incentives” for ethical performance. Good luck with the fine-tuning. An alternative approach might be to reconsider the excessive use of extrinsic rewards altogether. A daring proposition, I know. Be as it may, it would be great to see the findings of motivational research be applied to the field of corporate ethics.
Eberts, Randall W., Hollenbeck, Kevin and Stone, Joe A., Teacher Performance Incentives and Student Outcomes (August 2000). W.E. Upjohn Institute Working Paper No. 00-65.
Frey, Bruno S & Oberholzer-Gee, Felix, 1997. “The Cost of Price Incentives: An Empirical Analysis of Motivation Crowding-Out,” American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 87(4), pages 746-55, September.
Gneezy Uri and Rustichini, Aldo. “Pay Enough, or Don’t Pay at All.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 2000, 115(3), pp. 791–810.
Lepper, M. R., Greene, D., & Nisbett, R. E. (1973). Undermining children’s intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward: A test of the “overjustification” hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28, 129-137.
I agree with Thomas Morton’s point. If we give awards recognizing ethical behavior it sends a signal that ethical behavior is out of the ordinary and not an expectation of everyone all the time. Ethical behavior should not be so unusual that it requires special recognition when one encounter it.
Bruce Balfe
Valparaiso, IN
I couldn’t agree more. Superb writing.
Islam is full of ethics compared to the rest!
Rush,
This one hit me. It triggered questions others may not ask.It probably has to do with my age, or more likely the age in which I grew up.
I ask, Why does your organization need to exist? In my view it should be superfluous. It should be just a reminder of who we are, what we do, how we act and think.
Instead, your whole purpose is to run behind the rolling ball of behavior, trying to catch up, but seemingly falling farther behind.
When I (we) were young, when I lied, my mouth was washed out with soap. If I did it again I was also sentenced to my room for a period of time. Of course in those days spanking was not out of the question. My parents went to great lengths, which I did not then understand, to see to it that I had a character that exhibits an ethical and moral behavior that at least at my start, had barriers to the indiscretions of so many of today’s young people.
I have not parented a young child for over 30 years. But I have seen the residue of a lot of parenting and much of it seems to me to be inadequate. Permissiveness is rampant in the interests of letting the youngsters “learn to express themselves”. On the other end is simply apathy on the part of parents who seem to say: “I don’t have the time or inclination to deal with this!”
Of all the errors and insufficiencies of today’s society I think bad parenting is the worse. It stems from the last generation’s permissiveness and if today’s parents cannot or will not adopt the concept that their child’s character depends mostly on them, we are sunk, Global Ethics will be an after thought. The bulldozer you stand in front of will be getting larger and closer.
The current crop of violators, the ones we can see in the news, can probably not be stopped except by Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs: When all the wealth they crave is accumulated, they will go on to higher things.
Your stuff needs to go down, down down. Get them at eight or ten when they have come to the age of reason.’ Perhaps you need to redefine “reason”. But you are really needed.
Peter