Ethics Newsline®

by Rushworth M. Kidder

You’d think, by now, politicians would get the point. It’s not as though South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, who last week admitted to marital infidelity, was breaking new ground. The week before, it was Republican senator John Ensign of Nevada stepping before the microphones to make a similar announcement. Last year it was New York governor Elliot Spitzer, along with North Carolina senator and erstwhile presidential candidate John Edwards. Last decade, of course, it was president Bill Clinton.

What keeps these dominoes falling? It’s not enough to fall back on the usual pat answers — that it’s all about lust, ego, power, or thrill seeking. It misstates history to presume deep flaws of character, as though from their earliest years these men were given to venery or adultery. And it certainly won’t do to blame it on their wives, as though these husbands all had been nagged into someone else’s arms by a harridan at home. No, I think what unites them is both simpler and less understood: It’s a failure of mental self-defense.

The reference here is, of course, to physical self-defense. As any soldier knows, there are things you do routinely, almost unthinkingly, to protect yourself in a war zone even when you don’t see any enemies. You wear your helmet, put on body armor, carry your weapon, establish a perimeter, post sentries, keep scanning the horizon, and so forth.

In the war zone of public office, self-defense is of a different sort. The weaponry isn’t physical, nor is it merely political and social, although attackers from opposing parties and commentators from the blogosphere will always be waiting to pounce. The most important weaponry is mental and moral. And the enemy? It’s the drumbeat of excitement and discouragement, praise and blame, success and failure that keeps suggesting, “Give it up. You’re missing out on life. You’re trying too hard to hold high standards in a corrupt world. Climb down a rung or two on the ladder of integrity — you deserve it.”

To their credit, many seasoned politicians I’ve met understand, almost unconsciously, that they need to defend themselves actively from whatever would attack their integrity. They knew, going into public office, that they would have to fend off bribers, alarmists, cynics, and extortionists. They knew they would be tempted not to speak truth to power, muster the moral courage to turn down a campaign contribution, or take stands for integrity in the face of howling constituents. They knew they would have to fight daily to define compromise as an essential ingredient of political accomplishment rather than as a surrender of principle for the sake of expediency. They identified those mental demons, built solid defenses against them, and plunged ahead in spite of them. They possessed a kind of moral futurism that foresaw these ethical challenges before they arose. It was a mental stance that almost expected such an attack and dismissed it with the mental retort, “Oh, that again!”

But the Sanford saga reminds us that, for too many politicians, there’s a hole in the defensive network. It’s almost as though, just outside the politician’s firewall, something wants to plant a virus in the system. It’s called the anti-family virus. It seeks to wreck the one relationship that, for most people, is the key to continuity and success. Destroy that, says this enemy, and everything goes down with it.

How best to destroy it? Not by a direct attack on the family. For most public figures, that would only make them stronger. Best to do it by suggesting an alternative — a little infidelity, a capricious fling, an idle experiment. You can even do it, as in Sanford’s case, by proposing a real love interest — “alienation of affections,” as it was once defined in common law. You then need to insinuate that suggestion into the mind of the political figure. Let him think it’s his own idea, something he thought up and really wants to do. Along the way, blind him to the downside risks, perhaps by puffing up his sense of invincibility — a version of Wall Street’s “too big to fail” syndrome. But most importantly, don’t define it as anti-family. That way, like antiviral software lacking the latest definition of a particular worm, the politician’s mental network won’t pick up on this deadly threat — won’t even know he’s under attack until it’s too late.

What if politicians routinely recognized this potential attacker in their self-defense? What if public figures took it as read that the infidelity ploy would sooner or later appear? What if they saw it as just another trap along the way — as brazen as a scoundrel offering a suitcase of cash, and just as obvious? What if, when the illicit relationship proffered itself, they learned to say, “Oh, that again!” and to dismiss it out of hand?

This kind of self-defense won’t end public infidelity, but I suspect it will diminish it. Along the way, it will help us explain one of life’s anomalies: How it is that so many decent — I would say good — men fall victim to this kind of career-ending move just when the public needs them to continue.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

Questions or comments? Write to newsline@globalethics.org.

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Over breakfast last week with several senior Washington-based analysts, we got talking about America’s moral character. One of them, after sketching out the greed and corruption underlying the current recession, concluded with a personal assertion.

“I don’t think anybody is honest anymore,” he said flatly.

It was said less in anger than in sadness, reflecting the disappointment of a lover of humanity more than the triumphalism of a cynic. He wasn’t arguing, as cynics would, that the very idea of goodness is an illusion. He just felt that, at every turn, people seemed ready to ignore or abuse goodness for their own selfish ends.

There’s nothing new about this argument. It surfaces among the ancient Greeks. It finds expression in Thomas Hobbes’s view that men in a state of nature, unmediated by government, are condemned to lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” How to address it remains a key task of the world’s major religions. And how deeply it’s believed will determine how the citizens of any nation view one another along a scale stretching from suspicion to trust.

So I won’t try to refute it in a brief column. Instead, let me offer three recent global news items I wish I’d thought of that morning, all touching on the goodness of young people:

• In graduate business programs at Harvard, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Arizona, and a host of other schools, student activism is centered increasingly on ethics. Example: More than half of the 900 MBA students in this year’s class at Harvard have signed the “MBA Oath,” pledging to “serve the greater good,” act with “utmost integrity,” pursue their work “in an ethical manner,” and guard against “decisions and behavior that advance my own narrow ambitions but harm the enterprise and the societies” served by their employers.
• Across Indonesia, “honesty cafes” are springing up in local schools — places where students take drinks and snacks from the shelves and, in the absence of a cashier, pay by making their own change and leaving money in an untended box. Part of the government’s new campaign against corruption, these cafes — already numbering more than 7,000 — are largely successful. The move is part of a bid by a country long known for endemic corruption to breed habits of honesty in the young, who appear to be responding with enthusiasm.
• As the government in Tehran began expelling foreign journalists last week, Iranians took to the streets with video cameras and cell phones to record huge public protests against the apparently dishonest vote count in the June 12 election. In a country where 60 percent of the population is under 30, these videos appear to be coming largely from tech-savvy youths, who at one point last week were sending the BBC about five videos a minute.

You can of course quibble about these issues. At Harvard, are students signing up because, as the Economist notes, many graduates “see non-profit and government jobs as their best bet” in a drooping corporate economy and think that “embracing the ‘values agenda’ could prove useful”? In Indonesia, where’s the evidence that youthful peer pressure, making it cool to be honorable in the cafes, will translate into an adult willingness to resist bribes worth thousands of times more than a bag of chips? In Tehran, is this just the hacker mentality at work among students who salivate at the chance to prove they can outwit their enforcers?

These are valid reservations, no doubt holding true for some young people. But I sense the makings of a larger trend toward honesty. Perhaps it has to do with the widely documented ethical lapses that led us into the current global recession. Perhaps it’s a reaction to the excesses of me-first materialism, coupled with a dimming of the life of the mind, that characterized recent decades. Perhaps it’s a sense of communal guilt at what we’ve done to ourselves — “Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” as Shakespeare called it. Or perhaps it’s simply that, as survey data shows, the coming generation expects to have a lower living standard but a higher moral standard than its elders.

Whatever the reason, I’d be hard pressed to make the case that honesty has rotted out. Yes, there’s a bumper crop of moral outrage. But if the choice is between that and moral apathy, I’ll take the former any day. A citizenry that has lost its capacity for outrage has lost its moral compass. And yes, it’s easy to lose heart under the journalistic jackhammer of bad-ethics headlines. But look what happens when we dig a little deeper. When the next generation of leaders is signing on to ethics oaths, paying for snacks on the honor system, and demanding electoral honesty, I’m a long way from being dispirited. Which, of course, is what I should have said over breakfast.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

Questions or comments? Write to newsline@globalethics.org.

by Robert I. Cusick

Robert I. Cusick is director of the Office of Government Ethics in Washington, the Executive Branch agency charged with preventing and resolving conflicts of interest and fostering ethical standards for government employees. Appointed by President Bush in 2006, he serves a five-year statutory term. This column is drawn from a speech he delivered in Melbourne, Florida, on April 14, 2009.

Over the past few months we have been overwhelmed with news of foreclosures, financial recession, huge public debt, and widespread social problems resulting from job losses. For many months we have lived under a foreboding cloud of numbers, amid a prevailing sense that no one really knows what to do.

But before banks failed — before they admitted that billions of dollars of their putative wealth were toxic assets, before AIG’s reputation crumbled, before our national debt expanded so drastically — there was another failure, one that was not to be measured in numbers. It was an ethical failure of enormous proportions.

Much of that failure was connected to conflicts of interest. Corporate directors and officers and investment bankers, who stood to gain so much from ethical compromise, found it easy to mischaracterize the real risk of investment vehicles. By misrepresenting lending practices, they exposed the companies and the shareholders they putatively served to risks contrary to their fiduciary duties. Short-term gains — or at least the appearance of gains — were more important than long-term integrity. Numbers, points on the board, were everything. Hubris and arrogance found a fertile field in the absence of firm ethical standards. Such leaders as existed in the financial industry allowed themselves to be distracted by “innovative” new products, higher short-term profits, and pleasing numbers. They did not lead with integrity — the integrity to acknowledge the illusion of wealth they had built. As a result, trust in these institutions now has failed, and “distrust,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson said more than a century ago, “is a very expensive thing.”

Let me be clear: I am not an economist. I do not speak for the administration. I regulate no one in the private sector. But the work I do with the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) produces a certain way of thinking, and it is from that perspective that I speak. That thinking has led me to my own definition of government ethics as that system of laws and procedures that tends to ensure that official government decisions are informed by the public interest and not corrupted by private interests. The core of that system is the identification and disclosure of conflicts of interest, along with measures to remove or remedy them. Accountability and transparency are the cornerstones of our effort.

Why do we at OGE care about conflicts of interest? Because while some people can make principled decisions uncorrupted by a desire to feather their own nests, others cannot. But which ones are they? Our experience and instinct tells us that we cannot know. It would be much easier to appoint government officials without considering possible conflicts of interest. But because public trust is the lifeblood of democracy, it would not be easier to govern.

In the private sector, however, many businesses regularly hire people with little thought to possible personal conflicts of interests. Yet there, too, such conflicts tend to produce detrimental effects. They can neutralize or impair free-market forces. They can result in contracts to engage less competent individuals or to produce products of less than the best quality. They can distort budget planning and make economic analysis less predictive. They can bestow economic power based on relationships rather than objective analysis. They can require rationalizations of inappropriate risk taking. And they may be cloaked in levels of complexity — as in credit default swaps or securitized debt investment packages — that create disincentives for transparency.

Under our national financial recovery efforts, these effects are less clear than they once were. Suppose a prospective Treasury appointee has a perfectly legal bank deposit of $400,000. If that official might participate in discussions about whether to “bail out” a bank, then does such a large account — in excess of the $250,000 limit that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) guarantees — present a possible conflict of interest? Are federal officials who supervise lending to such a bank able to act with ethical clarity when the federal government, as a majority shareholder, is almost indistinguishable from a private investor? Should these supervisors think only as government officials, or should they incorporate private-investor thinking as well? Exactly where is the distinction between private-citizen thinking and government thinking?

We at OGE, along with 6,000 ethics officials across the Executive Branch, are working our way through these shifting analytical sands. From our point of view, there are three essential elements in an ethical organization: A code or set of principles that is enforceable, ethical leadership of the organization, and an ethical culture that arises from the first two. I believe that for the financial recovery effort to be firmly grounded, these three elements should be required of every organization that comes under government supervision.

But promoting these elements cannot be a solely federal effort, particularly since virtually every corporation in the country is incorporated under state rather than federal law. Board members need to be addressed more directly by state government about their duties to shareholders. At present, their level of communication with shareholders (other than large institutional shareholders) is almost nonexistent. That is especially true as concerns the compensation committees of boards of directors. In the financial sector, the lack of transparency and failure of accountability have been particularly evident. Many funds have sold themselves to clients in a way that emphasizes a lack of transparency. While the name of Bernard Madoff is most prominent, dozens of other investment funds pride themselves on obscuring what they do except for the result. Can this be tolerated any longer?

Even prominent financial executives are admitting the need for greater regulation and for a serious effort to establish higher standards of behavior. If this effort does not arise from the common sense of influential, experienced members of the industry, it surely will be imposed from outside. National anger and government response cannot be ignored. Ethical leaders must emerge. Enlightened cooperation among government and private sector agents, as well as nonprofit bodies that long have tried to improve corporate governance, must be undertaken to produce organizations more immune from the lobbying pressures that bedevil legislative efforts in this sector.

Recovery cannot depend on regulation alone. But neither can it depend on corporate structures shot through with conflicts, secrecy, and disregard for the public interest. Such destructive power must be tempered by a new sense of ethics. The financial industry has created its own conflicts for itself. Ethics rarely thrives in secrecy. Ethical analysis is rarely served while participants are seated around a table stacked with shareholder cash. Ethical culture rarely grows in a group that feels itself immune from oversight.

The rules and regulations established at OGE are not easily transferable to the private sector. But the ethos that underlies them, especially in regard to conflicts of interest, should be studied in restoring integrity to the financial system.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

Rushworth Kidder is on vacation. His column will return next week.

by Rushworth M. Kidder

These are tough times for nonprofit institutions. So on Saturday I go to the art museum, and what do I find? Every fourth painting on the wall has been replaced by a large poster advertising cosmetics.

Worried, I go to the symphony. After each movement, a giant screen rolls down above the orchestra, showing a two-minute video for a car dealership.

Then I hear that the soup kitchen makes clients listen to cigarette promos before dishing up their meals — and that hospital rooms are adorned with pictures of smiling staff from the nearby pharmacy.

But the kicker comes at church, where the sermon is interrupted by a beer distributor and a casino operator, both invited to the pulpit to push their products.

What’s up? Well, hey, these nonprofit institutions have audiences but no funds. Advertisers have funds but no audiences. Fair trade, right?

This little vignette, of course, is pure fiction, straight from the theater of the absurd. But the absurdity has a point: When institutions are vital to society, we support them through the generosity of donors. We could fund them through in-your-face commercial advertising, but we don’t.

Which brings us to newspapers. They appear to be evaporating before our very eyes. Why? Not for lack of excellent journalists, a need for news, or public interest in serious reporting. No, what plagues newspapers is simply their financial model. They’ve always been supported by advertising. Those dollars now have migrated to other media, much of it Web-based.

So we have a choice: We can abandon newspapers, or we can understand that — like art museums, symphonies, soup kitchens, hospitals, and churches — newspapers are so central to the public interest that they deserve to be recreated as nonprofits and operated for the public good.

In recent months, this idea has gained currency in the New York Times, the New Yorker, National Public Radio, and other places. Several nonprofit ventures already are in place, like ProPublica, an investigative reporting service, and MinnPost.com, a Web-based newspaper out of Minneapolis. The concept has been floated even in the Senate by Maryland Democrat Benjamin Cardin, whose Newspaper Revitalization Act would let newspapers operate as nonprofits for educational purposes.

Beneath this conversation lie three essentially moral questions:

• Are newspapers truly a public benefit? Thomas Jefferson thought so. “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government,” he wrote, “I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” His point: Democracy is inconceivable without an informed citizenry, and government needs the probing edge of in-depth reporting to keep it honest. But investigative journalism requires the capacity to run extended stories — not only to provide the detail of the case, but to ensure the balance of views. Nothing yet has replaced newspapers in that capacity.
• If Jefferson lived today, wouldn’t he praise broadcast, cable, and Web-based news? Don’t be too certain. There’s a spatial serendipity to a newspaper that catches your eye with stories you never intended to read, educating you into interests you didn’t know you had. That may seem a frivolous point, but much of modern entrepreneurial success is based on a creativity that looks at one thing and sees another, and that puts A together with B in wholly new ways. Web readers, it appears, don’t engage in much serendipity. Too often they say, “I’m interested in A,” and then link directly to it. TV and radio audiences may be interested in B — though, in those sequential media, they sometimes have to plow helplessly through more coverage of A than they need. That leaves newspapers, surprisingly, as perhaps the most interactive news media of all. Unlike radio and TV, they let readers, second by second, decide whether to turn the page and move on. And unlike the Web, they remind us that the simple act of turning a page can be an act of delicious randomness, with no idea what will turn up. Never mind that a Web browser, commanded to turn the page, typically grinds on for several attention-sapping seconds before giving you the sequel. The real problem is that it also eliminates surprise: If you don’t tell it exactly what to look for, no page gets turned.
• Could you run a news operation without depending on ads? Evidently you can: Both the BBC and National Public Radio are highly respected and essentially commercial free. And would newspapers be better as nonprofits? Perhaps. While the best papers maintain firewalls between the news and advertising functions, there always lurks the suspicion that editors might spike an exposé of a top advertiser while running a similar story about a competing company. Newspapers funded by broad-based contributions from a community of donors might face less suspicion.

Now, I admit there are caveats: Web-based news is in enormous and creative flux, nobody’s figured out how to charge for it, and new formats may resolve issues of spatial serendipity. But the advent of nonprofit newspapers neatly addresses these three ethical concerns. They would encourage a citizenry to accept its moral responsibility to stay informed and demand integrity — and to pay a modest price for that privilege. Such papers would mitigate the unwitting bigotry that occurs when readers seek only the news they want rather than the news they need — while promoting entrepreneurial creativity along the way. And such papers would enhance objectivity and lessen conflicts of interest in newsrooms.

What’s so absurd about that?

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

Questions or comments? Write to newsline@globalethics.org.

by Rushworth M. Kidder

The Senate Judiciary Committee shortly will begin its confirmation hearings on Sonia Sotomayor, president Barack Obama’s first nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court. But will it ask the central question?

That question isn’t about her experience on the bench. It’s not about her allegiance to her Catholic roots or her tilt toward the underrepresented. It’s not about her penchant for crafting prose that is exacting and deliberate rather than sweeping and quotable. It’s not even about identity politics — the way her race and gender might influence her decision making.

Important as these are, the key question is about her ethical mindset. Not “her ethics”: There’s nothing to suggest anything here but the highest personal integrity. This question is deeper: What conditions must prevail for Judge Sotomayor to say, “Yes, ethics has been done”?

The question goes to the heart of what Supreme Court justices need these days. New technologies spin off ethical questions at warp speed, in everything from cyberwarfare to neuroenchancers. As these issues come to judgment, the court will find itself addressing entirely new regions of moral concern.

Even more important, the court finds itself at the crossroads of a public discourse that is increasingly polarized, strident, and dismissive. It will find itself rendering opinions in the face of a popular culture that tends to reduce every issue to an absolute, I’m-right-you’re-wrong, good-versus-bad dichotomy (as, for instance, in the increasingly harsh debate over the Sotomayor nomination). In response, the court will need to remind a perhaps surprised public that it hardly ever sits in judgment on matters of right versus wrong. Instead, its task is almost always to resolve right-versus-right dilemmas, where each side has noble and potent moral arguments on its side.

Which is where the question of Judge Sotomayor’s ethical mindset comes in. Facing some of the most intractable issues of our day, she’ll be asked to choose between two right sides on:

• Immigration. How should we treat illegal aliens? Since so many have been allowed to stay for so long, building lives and forming communities, it’s right to include them — and especially their children — in the social services network. But since by definition they are “illegal,” it’s right to invoke the law and send them home.
• Economic justice. What ought we to do about those who lost livelihoods or mortgages in this recession due to the recklessness of others? It’s right to help victims back toward stability. But it’s also right to make the reckless take responsibility for their own financial decisions.
• Gay marriage. How do we respond to this movement? There are powerful arguments for recognizing the rights of same-sex couples to enter into a relationship that affords the legal protections necessary to ensure the welfare of their families. But there also are powerful arguments for allowing churches not to recognize such unions if they contradict their belief systems.

What ethical principles will Judge Sotomayor bring to bear on these questions? Will she speak from an ends-based, utilitarian perspective, always paying attention to consequences and seeking the greatest good for the greatest number? If so, we might expect her to side with the first set of arguments in the above bullets — being sensitive to policy outcomes that can impose real hardship on aliens, the unemployed, and gay Americans.

Or will she speak from a rule-based, Kantian perspective, always advocating the precept she thinks should become a universal standard? If so, she’ll probably side with the second set of arguments, paying more attention to the need for overarching, universal principles concerning legality, economic responsibility, and maintaining the traditional definition of marriage than to the immediate impact of her rulings on affected individuals.

Either way, Judge Sotomayor will find herself in a tough ethical position. By nature, judiciaries are rule-based, seeking to create the precedents — the universal principles — that endure over time and set standards for everyone. Legislatures, however, are ends-based, looking for ways to accomplish the most benefit for the largest number of stakeholders. Her background, and her self-assessment of the role that race and gender play in her decision making, align her with the latter. As such, she readily can play the role of the good utilitarian, for whom ethics gets done by focusing on specific consequences in each case. But her role as a judge, especially in the highest court of the land, will set her up to be the good Kantian, for whom ethics gets done by putting aside short-term, case-specific outcomes in favor of long-term universals.

Moving toward the former, she’ll be accused of behaving more like a policymaker than a judge and “legislating from the bench.” Moving toward the latter, she’ll be accused by the very constituencies she so long has defended. How she strikes this balance will depend on what, case by case, she sees as the ethical imperative.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

Questions or comments? Write to newsline@globalethics.org.

by Rushworth M. Kidder

According to chaos theory, the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can influence a tornado’s track in Texas. But can a $600 bill for horse manure convulse the Mother of Parliaments, threaten a government, and help extend a global recession? Apparently so, given the moral outrage now seething through the United Kingdom.

The manure tab — along with invoices for mouse poison and sunflower seeds, worth another $6.30 at today’s exchange rates — was submitted as a parliamentary expense by David Heathcoat-Amory, a backbench Conservative in the House of Commons, to maintain the gardens at his second home near Glastonbury.

By itself, the Glastonbury grift would be inconsequential. But as part of a pastiche of revelations published in recent weeks by one of London’s most respected newspapers, the Daily Telegraph, it has become part of a scandal that has gripped the British conscience with unrelenting force. The newspaper’s stories have detailed the expenses claimed by members of Parliament (MPs) under rules that allow them to recover costs for maintaining second homes in London. According to the newspaper, scores of MPs have claimed reimbursement for items ranging from cleaning a country-house moat and purchasing a trouser press to completing major renovations and covering excessive mortgage payments. Some members, by switching their second-home designation between various properties, effectively have used taxpayer funds to upgrade and sell homes — and, in at least one case, to avoid paying capital gains on the sale.

Outrageous? Evidently. The picture of high-living public servants fiddling their expense reports couldn’t have come at a worse moment, as their constituents struggle through a severe economic downturn.

Historic? Profoundly. Last week’s resignation of Michael Martin over this issue marks the first forcible removal of a sitting speaker of the House of Commons in more than 300 years.

Economically troubling? Apparently. Standard & Poor’s, the credit rating agency, lowered its outlook on Britain to negative for the first time last week, noting not only a growing national debt but swelling public uncertainty in the run-up to the next election, due by mid-2010.

Politically transformative? Quite possibly. Polls suggest that the scandal, which is tainting the Labour, Conservative, and Liberal parties alike, is ginning up new interest in the country’s far-right British National Party and the more moderate U.K. Independence Party.

But illegal? Here things get tougher. Under Westminster’s rules, many of these expenses were completely legal. Others were apparently so commonplace that they easily slipped by under the everyone-else-is-doing-it test. In any case, the fiscal impact is minute: Rolled together, these payments are merely a rounding error in the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s accounts.

But that’s not the point. The dazzling significance of this development is precisely its butterfly-wing smallness. Students of chaos theory, noting that tiny changes in initial conditions can have enormous long-term impacts, like to explain that a boulder balanced on a mountain peak could roll into any one of several different valleys depending on a half-inch adjustment to its starting position. At Westminster, similarly, even a small deviation of Parliament’s attentiveness — given the international leverage of London’s financial markets — could theoretically spell the difference between a short and a long recession.

If Parliament had been able to focus its energy for the last two weeks on global economic progress rather than local constituency outrage, would London still have its triple-A outlook from Standard & Poor’s? Absent this scandal, would a majority of voters have remained loyal to one of the nation’s two major parties, rather than invoking Shakespeare’s towering curse — “a plague o’ both your houses!” — and perhaps edged the nation closer to the multiparty chaos plaguing so many parliamentary democracies? Would British subjects have retained a greater modicum of trust in the ethical standards of their public officials?

By its very nature, public trust is ultimately reflected in public sentiment. And in the end, it is public sentiment that will determine the course of this recession. How and when consumers decide to spend — how they execute billions of choices as they perch like boulders on the peaks of millions of family budgets around the world — will shape the course of our collective future. But consumers only spend when they believe the economy is healthy enough to let them replenish their personal coffers. And that belief grows directly out of their trust that politicians will do the right thing — a trust that, over the last two weeks in Great Britain, has been shattered.

Maybe flaps over corruption, even about things as slight as Glastonbury manure, really can change the global economy. Maybe a small moral deviation in the initial conditions of a dynamic economic and political system really can make a long-term difference. Maybe, in other words, these British butterflies are proving something we’ve long suspected: that in ethics, as in chaos theory, it really is the little things that matter most.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

Questions or comments? Write to newsline@globalethics.org.

by Rushworth M. Kidder

As a small boy, I grew up with a 1920s Louis Armstrong recording of W. C. Handy’s “Loveless Love.” In his trademark gravelly voice, the cornet player they called Satchmo delivered a pithy social commentary that has stuck with me through the years:

Love, oh love, oh loveless love,
Has set our heart on goalless goals:
From milkless milk and silkless silk,
We are growing used to soulless souls.

Such grafting times we never saw –
That’s why we have a pure food law.
In everything we find a flaw,
Even love, oh love, oh loveless love.

If Satchmo were around today, imagine how he could have improvised on that theme of “grafting times!” Here’s a snapshot from last week alone:

• Chipmaker Intel was fined $1.45 billion by the European Commission for antitrust violations. The EU’s competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, said that Intel “went to great lengths to cover up its anticompetitive actions” and “harmed millions of European consumers.”
• The trustee overseeing the Bernard Madoff bankruptcy filed $6.1 billion in lawsuits against investors whose profits (in one case reaching 950 percent in a single year) raised strong suspicions that they were party to, rather than victims of, Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
• Laura Pendergest-Holt, the chief investment officer for Stanford Financial Group, was indicted on charges related to a suspected $8 billion fraud by Texas billionaire R. Allen Stanford’s Houston-based company.
• German authorities announced they were investigating truck-maker MAN, one of the country’s largest industrial firms, on charges of paying bribes topping $1 million in Germany and possibly much more elsewhere.

And that’s just the big-dollar financial stuff. Also bubbling away:

• The New York Times is reporting that a former Army surgeon who published a favorable scientific study of a drug sold by Medtronic — for whom he was a paid consultant — fabricated data about soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, forged the signatures of his co-authors, and overstated the effectiveness of the drug.
• Investigators into the February 12 crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407 fingered pilot inattention as cause of the crash. The idle chatter that left them unprepared to respond to stall warnings was, according to the airline’s director of operations, Dean Bandavanis, a lack of “integrity,” which he defined as “doing the right thing when nobody’s watching.”
• A stinging report by the New York inspector general identified the state’s ethics commission as the source of leaks to former governor Eliot Spitzer during the commission’s 2007 investigation of his activities. Governor David Paterson has demanded the resignations of all 12 commission members.

What to do about it all? One approach, of course, is more rule-making. In a widely reported speech last week, U.S. assistant attorney general Christine Varney called for tough new antitrust regulations, effectively reversing the more laissez faire approach of the Bush administration. While noting that there is “no adequate substitute for a competitive market, particularly during times of economic distress,” she concluded that “passive monitoring of market participants is not an option” and identified antitrust regulation and enforcement as a “frontline issue” in the government’s response to the economic downturn.

Which takes us back to Satchmo. If he were updating Handy’s lyrics for 2009, he might have noted that investors buy trustless trusts, pilots take careless care, and citizens get ethics-less ethics commissions. But his riff goes deeper. When integrity ebbs, the response is inevitable: We get the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, or the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, or the upcoming flood of financial-industry regulations. In other words, we get more rules.

But Satchmo’s real chiller is his last line. Under the steady water-drip of corruption, we’re numbed into accepting “loveless love.” When ethics collapses, our deepest emotional and intuitional feelings are betrayed, squelched, and deadened by counterfeits that look like love but aren’t. We catch a glimpse of what it would be like to live in a moral void that can’t tell the real from the fake.

For that condition, law-making offers no real remedy. These days, the old saying that “You can’t legislate morality” is truer than ever. There’s no rule that can impose integrity on a populace that doesn’t care about it. Integrity grows up from within, among people who see that they can’t survive without it. Just as there’s no quick fix for loveless love, there’s no legislative pill for valueless values. Yes, we’re in for whole new round of “pure food law.” But unless today’s rule-makers also hammer home an expectation of integrity — calling strongly on individuals and organizations to do the right thing even though nobody’s looking — we’ll find ourselves still duped by counterfeits.

I suspect Satchmo knew all that. But he also sang with an optimistic twinkle in his eye. His music, rooted in the gospel singers’ against-all-odds faith, grew out of the tailgate Dixieland that celebrated funerals with buoyant hope. He knew his audience wouldn’t settle for milkless milk, silkless silk, or loveless love. So he warned them about flimflams, feints, and frauds. Sometimes that warning is all it takes to spark the vigilance that bites the coin, holds the twenty up to the light, casts aside the phony, and demands the sort of moral reform that goes deeper than any rule can reach.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

Questions or comments? Write to newsline@globalethics.org.

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Last Friday, in the safely historical confines of a Broadway theater, my wife and I heard a potent dialogue about the deliberate killing of Polish Jews in World War II. Two days earlier, that topic had become brutally real with the murder of a Jewish student at Wesleyan University. Can history throw light on that grim reality?

The play we were attending, “Irena’s Vow,” includes a conversation in which a Nazi SS officer explains to a German Army major the reason for killing Jews. The major can’t see it. He needs workers to run the small-town factory he oversees in occupied Poland, and Jews provide useful labor. But the Nazi, pushing the grisly logic of racial purity and genocidal revenge, pushes the reluctant major to accept his “scientific” logic.

By turns melodramatic and comic, the plot is riddled with coincidences that would be incredible but for one thing: It’s the real-life story of Irena Gut Opdyke, a Polish Catholic who managed to save 12 Jews from the Nazi death machine. In the play, as in real life, the major later lets her spirit the Jews away to safety. But when he first discovers that she’s been hiding them in his own basement, he flies into a rage punctuated by the SS officer’s logic.

“They’re Jews!” he storms, holding a gun to her head. “They’re the enemy!”

Fast-forward some 70 years. Last Tuesday night, shortly after the curtain rang down on Tovah Feldshuh and her fellow actors, 29-year-old Stephen P. Morgan left his family home in Massachusetts and drove to Middletown, Connecticut. Sometime on Wednesday morning, after reaching the Wesleyan campus, he jotted a new entry in the journal that police later found in his laptop bag.

“I think it okay to kill Jews,” he wrote. “Kill Johanna. She must die.”

Several hours later, he sought out and gunned down 21-year-old Johanna Justin-Jinich at the campus bookstore café where she worked.

To be sure, there’s a backstory here. Morgan, a troubled loner from a well-to-do family, had graduated from an elite Catholic prep school and gone into the Navy rather than to college. In 2007 he met Justin-Jinich in a class at New York University. When he failed to build a relationship with her, he bombarded her with so many unwanted and harassing emails that she notified university officials, who alerted the police. But Morgan left the city, and Justin-Jinich never pressed charges. Like so many murders, then, this was no random incident among strangers. Unlike the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech, this was a deliberate, targeted act in which victim and perpetrator were known to one another.

Beneath it, however, lies an anti-Semitic strain. Police reports indicate that Morgan’s father had heard his son make anti-Semitic comments. Was the fact that his victim was Jewish just a convenient justification, allowing him to see his vengeance as “okay”? Or was it a driving force in Morgan’s consciousness, finding its outlet in a murderous repayment for some prior slight, perceived or real?

We may never know — nor need to know. The point is a larger one: that vulnerable mentalities, unsure of their own convictions, can be persuaded to adopt the darkest of ideologies through a culture of hatred and self-justification.

How does it happen? On Broadway and in history, that persuasion can come through personal contact. While the major never sought out that discussion with the SS officer, he went along with its conclusions enough to allow his latent anti-Semitism to be fanned into a full conflagration. But in reality and in 2009, such persuasion doesn’t require face-to-face contact. Morgan didn’t need to attend skinhead conclaves, read undercover books, or consort with neo-Nazis to find support for his nascent views. He could find plenty of support through his laptop.

That, at least, is the point of a recent piece in the Jerusalem Post. Published several days before Justin-Jinich’s death, it noted that Facebook now has “more than 150 groups whose names are variations of ‘I hate Israel’ and ‘We hate Israel’” — with the largest having more than 68,000 members. A similar article last year in the Jewish Weekly, a widely respected New York community newspaper, added YouTube and Wikipedia to the list. “This is the new face of anti-Semitism: Anti-Semitism 2.0,” wrote Jewish Weekly staffer Tamar Snyder. “And it’s potentially more hazardous than the relatively straightforward smear campaigns and petitions of yesteryear.”

Whatever snapped in Morgan’s mind, then, found a culture capable of nursing these “more hazardous” seedlings of hate. It found a news and entertainment media reveling in the harsh expression of violently opposing views. It discovered a blogosphere that cultivates and approves of anonymous animosity, allowing hatred to go public in unpunished ways. It encountered an abdication of moral responsibility by the public, the regulators, and the media that never held such hatred in check. And it was abetted by the failure of our education system to teach students any ethical frameworks for navigating the most pervasive personal communication systems ever invented.

No doubt about it: Anti-Semitism, like any racial or ethnic bias, must be vigilantly resisted. But so must a media culture that oxygenates these sparks. The real question is not whether anti-Semitism killed this young woman. It is whether, in the presence of a more ethical media culture that refused to tolerate such debased forms of persuasion, she would still be alive.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

Questions or comments? Write to newsline@globalethics.org.

by Rushworth M. Kidder

In 1979, as a foreign correspondent assigned to London, I covered the first 20 months of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s government. It was a tempestuous time, as her free-market principles slammed up against Britain’s entrenched labor movement. My colleagues in the British press, using phrases like “the best man in her cabinet” and “somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun,” quickly tagged the prime minister as a take-no-prisoners arch-conservative. Relishing a good fight, they dug in for a right-versus-left argy-bargy.

As the months went by, however, I began noticing an anomaly: By U.S. standards, Prime Minister Thatcher was merely akin to a moderate Republican. True, she hit it off brilliantly with Ronald Reagan. But where he would have dismantled Britain’s social welfare state, she simply cranked it back a few notches to allow free enterprise to flourish. Ideologically, he deeply distrusted big government; she simply despised a left-wing takeover of big government.

The difference is instructive. European parliaments have nothing resembling the conservative sentiment of America’s religious right. The U.S. Congress, in turn, has not one member even remotely like a far-left European communist. Our center of gravity lies significantly to the right of theirs.

I was reminded of this distinction last week as news organizations covered two events that showcased public outrage over the economic crisis. On our side of the pond, the anger was directed at corporations: Bank of America shareholders rose in umbrage and stripped CEO Kenneth Lewis of his board chairmanship. In Europe, by contrast, the anger was directed at governments: On May Day, union protesters turned out in force in France, demanding that president Nicolas Sarkozy’s government provide more relief. True, European workers have recently “boss-knapped” corporate executives. And some Americans, updating Patrick Henry’s words to read “Give me liberty, not debt,” lambasted government during tax-day protests last month. As a default position, however, Europeans tend to seek redress from the state, while Americans demand private-sector reforms.

That difference helps explain why the idea of socialism is uttered with such fearsome effect these days. Case in point: U.S. senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), writing last week in the Wall Street Journal, warned his fellow Republicans that “if the American people want a European-style social democracy, the Democratic Party will give it to them.” His point: A lunge toward big government could sap the individualism, enterprise, and entrepreneurial spirit that powers the U.S. economy. While history may not bear him out — Mrs. Thatcher’s social democracy proved enormously supportive of business — his fear that government is, as he said, “too big, takes too much of our money, and makes too many of our decisions” is understandable.

But here, too, there’s an anomaly. Look more closely at U.S. public outrage. It’s not directed at either corporations or governments per se. Instead, it has a pervasive moral tone. Its target is not the institutions themselves, but the dishonesty, irresponsibility, corruption, and greed that infect them. Yes, the outrage is channeled toward the unethical behaviors that have coalesced to create the current recession. But the intent is not to destroy capitalism; it’s to allow it to survive.

How so? Because the greatest threat to capitalism arises when it becomes divorced from its moral roots. With nothing left but raw economic incentive, capitalism turns into a destructive force. Aiming at nothing higher than short-term selfish gain, it chews up the very resources of investment and labor that feed it. Unfettered by any higher motivation than material acquisitiveness, it ultimately leaves an economy in shambles — “consumed,” in Shakespeare’s words, “with that which it was nourished by.” Result? Capitalism plays right into the hands of its enemies. In the very act of casting itself loose from its moral moorings, it hands to its opponents — socialists, communists, Muslim extremists, or whomever — the most powerful argument imaginable for its abolition.

“But where,” the cynics will splutter, “do you get this crazy idea that the invisible hand of capitalism ever had a moral basis? Who said capitalism had any ethical impulse?” Surprisingly enough, there’s a simple two-word answer: Adam Smith.

Much is made in today’s conservative circles of this Scottish social philosopher’s 1776 masterwork, The Wealth of Nations, especially of its pragmatic elucidation of the famous “invisible hand” that operates best in unfettered markets without interference from the state. But few remember that, 17 years earlier, Smith wrote a book titled The Theory of Moral Sentiments, probing the origin of mankind’s ability to form moral judgments despite an overwhelming impulse for self-preservation. And fewer still remember that in this earlier work he first wrote about self-seeking individuals who are nevertheless “led by an invisible hand … without knowing it, without intending it, [to] advance the interest of the society.”

The point? Smith couldn’t have conceived of free enterprise divorced from “moral sentiments.” He knew that capitalism, like any -ism, could be described without reference to moral standards. But he also knew that those who practiced it had to be possessed of an ability to reason and a capacity for sympathy if they were to succeed.

Have Americans, by separating these two books, also confused history with philosophy? Maybe, in our minds, we’ve merged the twin events of 1776, seeing The Wealth of Nations as synonymous with the American Revolutionary War. Maybe it was a misreading of that book that led us, at the end of the twentieth century, to launch a bizarre and tragic experiment: to see whether we could deliberately create a form of capitalism absent any moral content.

That experiment has run its course. We now know that it indeed can be done, but only at grave risk to the economy and to free enterprise itself. The real danger of the ethics recession is not the current economic collapse. It is that unless we restore the moral underpinnings of capitalism, the very freedom that makes capitalism possible may be swept away on waves of public moral outrage. Reinserting ethics into business, then, is no mere luxury. It’s essential to our survival as a wealth-creating nation. But then, Adam Smith could have told us that.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

Questions or comments? Write to newsline@globalethics.org.

by Rushworth M. Kidder

By all accounts, the world’s financial institutions are surging toward reregulation. But unless the new rules are set in a context of corporate integrity, they could make things worse. Here’s why.

The smartest guys in the room — the moniker for corporate hotshots like those who wrecked Enron and shattered their own careers — used to be the smartest kids on the playground. Back in third grade, ordinary kids followed the rules. These other kids found the loopholes. When the rules said, “Don’t run in the halls” and “Don’t chew gum,” these kids found ways to walk really fast and use tongues (rather than teeth) to avoid the definition of chew. Where ordinary kids saw rules as necessary annoyances, these kids took them as delicious challenges.

Back then, adults could have helped these kids understand the relationship between ethics and regulation. They could have explained ethics as “obedience to the unenforceable,” a term coined in 1924 by a British jurist, Lord Moulton, to distinguish the idea of morality from the principle of law. Adults also could have shared analogies about the usefulness of rules: As a former London banker put it to me recently, “Cars have brakes so they can go fast.” In addition, they could have developed in kids a sense of community beyond self, a moral commitment to doing right even when nobody’s looking. Finally, they could have explained that while any dolt can bend the rules, only the wise can maintain integrity and prosperity at the same time.

Would those lessons have crushed out the entrepreneurial wizardry of youth? On the contrary, it would have nested it safely within a moral conscience. In many cases, of course, adults did say these things. As a result, today’s financial community has a strong cadre of creative talent moderated by a sound moral compass.

But it also has its devil-may-care cohort. Dressed up as adults, but carting around a third-grade moral neutrality, that cohort is exceptionally bright. Their lust for challenges is almost Pavlovian: When a new rule comes along, they salivate at the idea of taking it apart, seeing what makes it tick, finding its flaws, and inventing a workaround. As in third grade, well-crafted rules serve only to inspire a more aggressive loopholism. Like computer hackers, for whom every new firewall is a chance to prove their mettle, they relish the gotcha game of one-upping the regulators. And like hackers, they find technology showering them with new products that regulation hasn’t caught up with yet.

What’s to be done? Start by recognizing that twentieth-century rule-making procedures won’t stand up to twenty-first-century pressures. As we learned from Sarbanes-Oxley, layering on rules without addressing ethics simply causes corporations to build extensive compliance operations. It does nothing to change thought. It doesn’t shift the balance away from those playing Masters of the Universe and toward those living by their values. Instead, it stimulates more rule bending.

So should we stop regulating? No. Deregulation has proved calamitous. Instead, we need to parallel every regulatory advance with concerted efforts to promote ethics in the marketplace. Research on this point, beginning with a string of surveys from the Ethics Resource Center in Washington, overwhelmingly points to the need to shift the emphasis from enforcing compliance to building cultures of integrity.

How can regulators foster such cultures? For starters, don’t make them mandatory. If Lord Moulton is right, that would reduce the unenforceable to the punishable — more rules and more loopholism. Instead, regulators should use their enormous moral suasion. From their bully pulpits, regulatory agencies can encourage financial institutions to recognize (among other things) four characteristics of such cultures. They are:

• Identifiable. They have attributes that any reasonable observer can spot. These include a commitment to the core values of honesty, responsibility, respect, fairness, and compassion, along with a decision-making methodology for applying them and the moral courage to put them into practice.
• Measurable. These attributes allow a culture to be compared to others in its field. These measures should not be imposed by external demand but arrived at through internal self-regulation.
• Replicable. These measures can be imported into other corporations and bring noticeable improvement. Business schools can play a role here in encouraging such replication as an effective management tool.
• Sustainable. Successful cultures of integrity make ethics a core part of the corporate mindset rather than a passing fancy.

What will the result be? No more Bernard Madoffs? Probably not. But Madoff and his ilk have given regulators a powerful ally: public moral outrage. If regulators work equally hard on each side of this two-pronged approach — creating rules while promoting ethics — they’ll tap into an enormous public yearning for integrity. Corporations that don’t get it will find themselves increasingly isolated, at the pointy end of piercing public opprobrium. Meanwhile, corporations who do get it will relearn an ancient truth: Rules alone won’t create an ethical culture, but an ethical culture makes it easy and natural to obey the rules.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

Questions or comments? Write to newsline@globalethics.org.

by Rushworth M. Kidder

You’d think we would have foreseen it. Give a kid a cell-phone camera, and we know they’ll take pictures. Give them messaging capability, and we know they’ll start texting messages and sending photos of themselves to each other — alone or with friends, goofy or serious.

Then why didn’t it occur to us that some of those shots would be in the nude?

Once again we’ve been caught flat-footed by the latest teen fad: sexting. According to a survey last fall by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 20 percent of teens say they have sent or posted nude or seminude pictures or videos of themselves.

This isn’t the first time our lack of moral futurism has tripped us up. Several years ago it was DWT — driving while texting. Only when DWT created headlines with the death of five teenage girls in upstate New York in June 2007 — and then, spectacularly, in the Los Angeles commuter train wreck that killed 25 people last September — did we begin to understand that it could be fatal.

Shame on texting drivers and teenage sexters? Sure. But shame on us as well. We regularly let our technologies leverage our ethics, so that single unethical acts can create enormous, unforeseen ethical problems. Then we act surprised when fads or calamities strike. “Wow!” we say. “Technology has created a whole new ethical problem! Who knew?”

We knew — or at least we should have. Here we’ve got these cell-phone cameras. Here we live in a video culture drenched with explicit eroticism. Here we access an Internet system where pornography is the single most common target of Web searches. How hard would it have been to imagine what would happen if you put these three threads into the hands of teenagers with little instruction and no warnings?

What’s wrong with sexting? For starters, here are seven arguments:

• It constitutes the kind of “lewd and lascivious behavior” that society seeks to avoid and the law generally prohibits.
• When you transmit such images, you may be guilty of circulating pornography — a tough charge, especially when it involves minors and could lead to permanent labeling as a criminal sex offender.
• Sexting surrenders a key aspect of your individuality — the way you invite others to see you — to a medium beyond your control. What keeps recipients from forwarding your picture to dozens of others — or posting it for everyone everywhere to see?
• Sexting may encourage aggressive sexual activity that, absent responsibility or affection, is especially harmful to young minds and bodies.
• Sexting promotes a desensitized peer culture where sexual activity becomes more difficult to resist — even among teens who avoid instant gratification and value abstinence.
• If such a culture leads to teen pregnancy and abortion — or early marriages at high risk of divorce, generating more single-parent families — the psychic and financial burdens to society can be severe.
• If such a culture leads to rape, domestic abuse, and sexual predation, the consequences are enormous.

What should we do? The Vermont Senate recently passed and its House is now considering legislation that, oddly enough, reduces the penalties for sexting. Supporters on both sides of the aisle explain that they aren’t legalizing sexting so much as partially decriminalizing it. Why? Because after 12-year-old Brooke Bennett was sexually assaulted and murdered in Vermont last summer, the legislature crafted one of the nation’s toughest sexual predator laws. The proposed sexting law, its supporters argue, would merely ensure that juveniles caught sending these pictures won’t be subject to punishment under that toughened law. They could still be prosecuted under pornography or lewd-behavior statutes, but they wouldn’t be placed on sex-offender registries for the rest of their lives.

Fair enough. Young people making stupid mistakes deserve reformation, not retribution. But how?

Here’s an idea: What if cell phones came equipped with a feature that, whenever any picture was sent or received, would automatically send a copy to a designated third party? Some parents wouldn’t use it, trusting their teens. Others would have the pictures sent to an archive to access later if they suspected something. Still others would have the pictures sent directly to their own cell phone in real time. Whatever they did, parents would have to make a choice about whether to have that feature permanently turned on or not. And that choice would compel a conversation about sexting with their teens. “Tell me why you want the feature turned off,” parents could say. “If you’re only sending or getting innocent pictures, having it on won’t bother you. But if you plan on sexting — sorry, I’m not paying for your phone.”

Not every parent would opt in, and some teens might buy their own phones. But every would-be sexter would have to suspect that some parents would have access. Would he or she (and most sexters are female) be so quick to send pictures?

Whatever the result, the very availability of such a feature would raise a tough moral dilemma, pitting the rights of teenage privacy against the responsibilities of adult supervision. We don’t want censorship, but we also don’t want pornography. If every parent’s purchase of a phone for a teen would provide the occasion for a serious ethical conversation on that point, we’d be well on our way to addressing sexting. Then, instead of technology leveraging our ethics, we might find that our ethical foresight was beginning to drive our use of technology.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Apr. 6.

Questions or comments? Write to newsline@globalethics.org.

by Rushworth M. Kidder

The world’s battle with pirates off the coast of Somalia came to a head last weekend with reports of two rescue efforts. One was a complete success. In the other, a hostage died. Were both — or either — ethically right?

The success came on Sunday, when a team of U.S. Navy Seals rescued Richard Phillips, the captain of the U.S.-flagged Maersk Alabama, from a lifeboat where he was being held by three Somali pirates. The shootout, which left his captors dead, came after U.S. negotiators refused the pirates’ offer to free Capt. Phillips in return for their own freedom.

The less successful venture came on Thursday, when French soldiers stormed the Tanit, a 41-foot yacht seized by pirates five days earlier. The commandos freed four French hostages and killed or captured the five pirates on board. But the yacht’s owner, Florent Lemacon, was killed during the attack. French government officials repeatedly had warned the two families aboard the yacht, which was headed for Zanzibar, not to sail through the Gulf of Aden, where the attack took place.

Behind these events lie several ethical premises. On the first set, we probably can all agree:

• Premise: Piracy is criminal, with no moral justification.
• Premise: Maintaining sea lanes free from piracy is essential to international trade.
• Conclusion: Nations should take vigorous steps to eliminate piracy, by force if necessary.

The second set is more complex:

• Premise: Ransom should never be paid, and pirates should always be punished.
• Premise: Protecting the lives of innocent hostages is of overriding importance.
• Conclusion: Nations should …?

Here’s where the moral sledding gets tough. These premises are at odds with each other. Should nations put the needs of the whole community above the safety of their own citizens? Or should they refuse to put at risk the lives of noncombatants — innocent people who have not signed up for military service? Must they be willing to sacrifice hostages in order to convince thugs that no effort will be spared to eradicate piracy? Or must they value the tangible life of each citizen above the abstract principles of international trade?

The challenge of this individual-versus-community dilemma, of course, is that both sides are right. The case on the individual side was made last week by James Christodoulou, who was held hostage for 56 days last November when his ship was taken by Somali pirates. The CEO of Industrial Shipping Enterprises Corp., Christodoulou described to National Public Radio the patient steps that he took — and the ransom his company paid — to negotiate the safe release of his crew. Christodoulou says that as CEO he feels the lives and safety of a crew are “my primary concern — and, believe me, I would do anything that I had to to make sure that they were returned home.”

From this individualist perspective — and presumably from that of Capt. Phillips’s family in Vermont — the only ethical position is to “do anything” to protect innocent lives first, and to worry about dealing with global piracy later. It’s a perspective that a rule-based Kantian thinker could applaud. If the principle is that you always avoid killing or causing death, then you would want everyone in the world to hold to that principle regardless of the immediate consequences for piracy, shipping, or international affairs. You would, in other words, always negotiate instead of risk an attack.

From the point of view of the community, however, it is enormously important to stamp out piracy. The BBC, reporting that piracy may have cost the world $60 million to $70 million in higher prices for goods shipped internationally, cites Kenyan government estimates that pirates received $150 million in ransom over the past year. Result: Pirates buy faster boats, more powerful weapons, and sophisticated navigational systems. That kind of cash also makes piracy ever more alluring — and tougher to stamp out.

From this perspective, then, the only ethical position is to defend the entire community, even at the cost of the occasional sacrifice of an innocent noncombatant. Here the ends-based utilitarian thinkers would be comfortable. Wanting to do the greatest good for the greatest number, they would argue that sometimes a small amount of bad (like a hostage death) may be necessary. So you would always attack if negotiations stalled — and never let pirates go unpunished.

Was it right, then, for the French soldiers to attack last week, even though it resulted in a death? Does the fact that Monsieur Lemacon ignored the warnings make his life less valuable than if he had turned back? Or is all human life equally valuable? In the end, was his death an unfortunate but necessary sacrifice to deter piracy and save future French lives?

And was it right for the Navy Seals to attack despite the fact that it turned out well? If Capt. Phillips had died, would the attack have been wrong? Is the nation right to insist on signaling a tough line on piracy? Or should the Navy have accepted the pirates’ offer of Phillips’s freedom for their own — a bargain Mr. Christodoulou probably would have snapped up?

The point: Like so much in our world today, these are not right-versus-wrong issues but right-versus-right dilemmas. Case by case and nation by nation, policymakers, military officers, and law enforcement personnel will continue to sit around tables and discuss how best to respond to piracy. At times they’ll vote to attack and at times to negotiate. And at no time will either group have the moral standing to say flatly to the other side, “You’re wrong!” Nor, as citizens, will we.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

Questions or comments? Write to newsline@globalethics.org.

by Rushworth M. Kidder

I write this column with some trepidation. After all, the markets have been rising, spring is coming, and I’m an implacable optimist — dangerous conditions for writing about the current economic crisis. But here’s a thought: Is it possible that this recession could end rather quickly?

I know, I know: There’s plenty of economic theory to refute this thesis. These days the dismal science even finds support from politics, sociology, and demographics — not to mention the three laws of thermodynamics, which have been translated colloquially as You can’t win, You can’t even break even, and Things will get worse before they get better.

But “spring is the mischief in me,” as Robert Frost once wrote in his poem about mending stone walls. The neighbor with whom the poet’s been working isn’t interested in anything new, so he tries to “put a notion” in his head. Here’s my notion: We’ve never had a recession where our information technologies have been as fast paced or broad based as they are today. That same speed may get us out of this mess quicker than we imagine.

I was musing on this the other day while driving to the airport in Portland, Maine. Not long after I began making these trips regularly some 25 years ago, an enterprising financial firm took up lodging in a hollow along the road known as Stroudwater, bought a massive stock ticker, and mounted it so cars coming down the hill could see it at some distance. In those days, it was a useful bit of technology: With cell phones and PCs still in their infancy, how else could I have known what the market was doing at, say, 10:37 on a Tuesday morning?

Perhaps a decade ago the ticker disappeared. I never knew whether prosperity or calamity drove its owners out of Stroudwater. Either way, it was no longer needed. Even in those early days, anyone wanting to follow the markets had far more sophisticated ways to do so. Since then, computer technology has roared ahead according to something called Moore’s Law (and its similar brethren), which predicts that the speed of microprocessors, the size of memory, the ease of access to networks, and nearly every other relevant measure concerning computers will double every two years. Result? Our technologies are exponentially ahead of where they were during prior recessions. And since economists extrapolate future trends based on previous experience, consider for a moment what they have as benchmarks for today’s crisis:

• The recession of 1960-61. In those days, people typically kept stock certificates in safe-deposit boxes. Buying and selling stocks took seven days, allowing time for mailing or hand-delivering certificates to brokers. In 1960, the first stock market quotation system, later known by its trade-name Quotron, was installed in investment offices.
• The recession of 1973-74. During that period of market collapse and stagflation, investment managers had much better information as Quotrons and their competitors expanded. But a typical office in that period may have had one or two terminals per floor, which portfolio managers checked perhaps once a day.
• The recession of 1980-82. Following the revolution in Iran and the spike in oil prices, markets shuddered. By then Quotrons were on individual desktops — by 1984 there were 72,000 of them in use. The effect, says a friend of mine who was a portfolio manager during those days, was “mesmerizing,” leading to an upsurge in rapid-fire, short-term trading as the old buy-and-hold mentality tailed off.
• The recession of 1990-91. By then, financial information had become so cheap and accessible that individuals were finding ways to be their own investors. Why? In part because IBM had introduced the first PC in 1981. Almost overnight, the once-dominant Quotron became a money-losing relic.
• The recession of 2001. The last benchmark today’s economists can study found the public still playing catch-up with the new technologies. To check the markets in 2001, I recall I had to be at a computer plugged into a modem. By 2005, though my laptop was wireless, I still needed a location with Wi-Fi service.
• The recession of 2008-? Now, on my Blackberry, I can know within seconds what’s happening to the Dow — or the DAX, the Hang Seng, or the Nikkei — wherever I am, whatever the time.

The question is, What will that knowledge do to me? Will it make me (and millions like me) more startled by volatility, less willing to trust, more fearful about spending? If so, it will lengthen the recession. Or will it make me more confident in the long-term future, less flappable over extremes, more willing to buy and hold? If so, it could shorten the cycle.

Intellectually, I’m persuaded that knowledge tends to create confidence rather than fear. Economically, it seems clear that nations prosper in proportion as money circulates, with faster and more fearless circulation usually creating more prosperity. Morally, it’s evident that public outrage over Wall Street’s ethical lapses is demanding speedy responses from regulators and legislators. And historically, one trend is sure: Over the last 200 years, as knowledge has expanded, recessions have shortened. Okay, the Great Depression in the twentieth century went on for 10 years. But of the seven recessions in the nineteenth century, only two were as short as three years. The others ranged from five to seven years, and one dragged on for 23 years.

Somehow, I don’t think that’s us. I suspect speed may be an ally this time. But maybe that’s just a poetic notion.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

Questions or comments? Write to newsline@globalethics.org.

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Last week, in a blizzard of public outrage over corporate greed, vandals smashed windows at the Edinburgh home of Sir Fred Goodwin, former CEO of the state-controlled Royal Bank of Scotland.

Then on Saturday night, in a blizzard of public enthusiasm over energy conservation, the Scottish Parliament building and Edinburgh Castle happily went dark during Earth Hour, a global demonstration calling for action on climate change.

Last week, angry workers facing layoffs at a 3M plant in Pithiviers, France, held plant manager Luc Rousselet hostage for several days, demanding better severance packages in an incident of what’s becoming known as “bossknapping.”

Then on Saturday night, as the lights shut down at the Eiffel Tower, householders across France gladly joined in, turning off inessential lights for an hour in an event designed to bring together a billion people in 80 countries and 25 time zones.

Last week Iowa senator Charles Grassley had to backpedal on his comment that AIG executives responsible for the ailing insurance firm’s financial mess should either “resign or commit suicide” — a retraction coming only days after AIG executives reported receiving death threats connected to large bonus payments.

Then on Saturday night, Americans dowsed TVs, dined by candlelight, and delighted as monuments from the Empire State Building to the Golden Gate Bridge temporarily vanished from nighttime skylines.

What’s going on? Who are we?

Are we a people fixed on revenge? When we find arrogance and greed in our midst, do we resort to vigilante violence to set things right — spurred on, at times, by ill-considered words from our top political leaders and media personalities?

Or are we a people wedded to reform? When a cause — like saving energy — unites us, do we readily band together in global networks to urge those same leaders to develop policies for a better world?

Looking at the cultural context of the twenty-first century, you can understand why there’s such a crisis of identity. On one hand, we’re marinated in a polarizing political discourse. For the sake of sound bites and tweets, we reduce complexity to black-and-white starkness. Result: Frustration is heightened, anger is encouraged, and we’re drawn into speaking and acting on these oversimplifications with all the belligerence of a schoolyard bully.

On the other hand, we’re surrounded by thoughtful, many-layered arguments about oil reserves, alternative energy sources, global warming, and rising energy costs. Result: We roll up our sleeves, do the hard intellectual work of comprehending such issues, knit together common frameworks for action, and join hands to promote them peaceably and respectfully around the world.

Some would say, of course, that these are two sides of the same coin. They argue that wrath is an essential precursor to reform, that local revenge and global hand-holding are simply different paths to the same goal, and that to save the world for good you must first save it from bad. For them the perception of humanity as morally bipolar — by turns brutish and generous, craven and thoughtful, hateful and loving, noxiously misanthropic and radiantly communitarian — is less a cause for alarm than a statement of fact.

In earlier centuries, that was an interesting theory. But changing the world demands that we change our theories of the world. And one of the theories most in need of change is that such dualism is okay. Given the moral stakes of our collective future, we can no longer tolerate this kind of two-sided approach to public affairs. Why? Because the technology of today’s media — from global satellite radio to instant messaging, from Google to Facebook, from BBC online to blogs and chat rooms — has brought us into a whole new moral universe. We can now gin up populist outrage immediately, globally, and deeply. We can use it for enormous good — to change energy policy, for example. Or we use it for enormous bad — to foment personal violence and the like.

Does that mean outrage is bad? Not at all: There are plenty of things that require us to rise in rebellion, look selfishness and tyranny squarely in the eye, and muster the moral courage to deliver a ringing condemnation. But that doesn’t give us permission to fight arrogance with disrespect or greed with violence. The fact that some corporate bonuses are unjust doesn’t give us license to vandalize. The fact that some executives made bad decisions doesn’t mean they should die.

Last week left us with a danger, a promise, and a way forward. We now know how easy it is to stir up populist outrage — and the danger of doing so. But we also know something promising about our better angels and our capacity for respectful, united action. Going forward, we need leaders committed to doing the former only in the service of the latter. Moral outrage? Yes. Violence? No. Respect? Always.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

Questions or comments? Write to newsline@globalethics.org.

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

Questions or comments? Write to newsline@globalethics.org.

by Rushworth M. Kidder

I still don’t know Michelle’s last name. Somewhere in Green Bay that late Wisconsin afternoon, as she was listening to the car radio, she pulled over to the roadside and called the station. Then, in a voice edging into tears and freighted with meaning, she provided one of those glistening, rare, and reassuring moments in the nation’s ethical life.

That afternoon, Ben Merens and I had been talking about the ethical issues behind the current financial crisis. Ben hosts a highly regarded daily talk show, “At Issue,” on Wisconsin Public Radio, and he had invited me on to talk about my new book, The Ethics Recession. Our callers already had raised questions ranging from the morality of derivatives and credit default swaps to the outlawing of religious teaching in schools. They’d wanted to know what could be done about the corrupting nature of financial short-termism. They had wondered how to make it easier for people to recognize unethical behavior — and harder for them to lack shame and guilt.

Then Ben took Michelle’s call.

“Y’know, I had this whole conversation I was going to have,” she said, starting out bravely enough on what sounded like a slightly crackly cell phone. “But I have been so touched by the things that you’re saying, I’m — I’m sitting here in my car in tears. Because I have felt like I’m the only one who feels like this, and everybody else in the entire world is so morally bankrupt!”

In the instant’s pause before her next sentence, it dawned on me that what was breaking up was not her cell-phone signal. It was the deep emotion in her voice. But she struggled onward.

“And, y’know,” she continued until she could go no further, “it’s like I have hope now — and I just want to thank you…!”

I assured her she was not alone, that there were plenty of others in the world who also longed for this kind of integrity. Ben waited patiently for me to finish, and then he gave her the answer she really needed.

“Michelle,” he said, in a voice as sincere as hers had been troubled, “I am touched by callers all the time. But it’s been a while since someone touched me as deeply as you just did. And if we are giving you hope, please know that your call gave that right back — to me, to Rush, and to a lot of people listening to this program!”

He was right. But why? Why does it matter so much that a woman calls up in tears? Yes, this was talk radio in America, a phenomenon that sometimes attracts anonymous emotional venting. But Ben isn’t the kind of high-decibel ranter who whips his audience into an emotional froth every afternoon. He manages a thoughtful, intelligent conversation about current events and hard news. Nor are his public-radio listeners given to outbursts of illogic, rage, or despair. I could think of nothing in the preceding minutes that had cranked our discourse to a fevered pitch. We hadn’t been rooting around among dark scandals or ain’t-it-awful outrages. We’d simply been talking about ethics, character, and responsibility.

What moved Michelle, then, was not so much what we were saying as the fact that something was being said at all. I suspect that, if Ben could track her down and quiz her, she wouldn’t be able to point to this or that exact sentence as the place where the dam of her composure came unstuck. I also suspect that if Ben’s talk show had been like so many others — where callers secretly hope that if they seethe with enough indignation, someone will throw a chair at someone else — she would have turned away in dry-eyed disgust. Nor were her tears prompted by sentimentality, tragedy, patriotism, or the rest of the kit bag of tricks well known to speechwriters and actors. They were tears of relief. She found she wasn’t a lonely thinker plagued by weird thoughts no one else shared. She was part of a widening conversation among rational people caring deeply about values and integrity. That gave her hope. And as Ben so elegantly noted, she gave it right back to us and to the other listeners.

So thanks again, Michelle. I think you’re out there by the hundreds of thousands, yearning to know that the ethical life is more than a myth. You’re reminding us that we have an obligation to care for one another, especially during the moral midnight of an ethics recession. And you’re telling us that we build hope and nurture engagement simply by keeping the ethics discourse alive and timely — and that our very willingness to get into the conversation can sometimes be more meaningful than the things we say.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

Questions or comments? Write to newsline@globalethics.org.

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Here’s this week’s quiz question: In hard economic times, do Americans tend to become (a) selfish, competitive, and fragmented, or (b) caring, cooperative, and unified?

You can make the case either way. On one hand, higher unemployment could lead to desperation, family tensions, fraud, and street crime. Economic pressures could promote a bootstrap individualism, bent on surviving through hyper-competitiveness even at the cost of others’ failure.

On the other hand, a tough economy could beget compassion, solidarity, and a new appreciation for nonmaterial pleasures. A barn-raising frontier spirit could reemerge, where progress depends on helping each other and where sharing becomes the means to survival.

The answer probably lies somewhere in between. But the folks at the Washington-based Campaign for Community Values are beginning to pick up an encouraging trend: Rather than wedging people apart, “the economic crisis has brought people together,” says Seth Borgos, director for Research & Programs for the Campaign’s parent organization, the 40-year-old Center for Community Change in Washington.

For two years the Campaign, a national coalition of more than 300 grassroots organizations examining core values, has been charting what Borgos calls “a change in the moral temper of the country.” Speaking to a group of funders in Michigan last week, he put it succinctly: “There’s a change in the way that Americans are thinking about the relations between the individual and the community.”

Borgos says he first detected the shift in 2005. Even now what he’s sensing are faint signals, not yet widely reflected in the polling data. The Gallup Organization, for instance, has tracked a steep decline since 2005 in those who feel “satisfied … with the way things are going in the United States at this time.” It also finds that many believe “the state of moral values in the country is … getting worse.”

But Borgos, working largely with low-income people of color, sees something more hopeful. In prior years, he says, the “dominant theme” within his conversations about values tended to reflect a “go-it-alone, extreme individualism” that “crowded out interdependence and shared values.” Recently, he’s finding a greater interest in the values that lean toward the community — not so much in spite of the financial crisis as because of it.

“For us,” he says, “the financial crisis is a metaphor about interdependence.” As the financial crisis spread outwards from a low-income lending debacle that had roots in these very neighborhoods, he explains, it became increasingly clear that “the story of the crisis is that we’re all connected — our fates are shared.”

That perception of a shared fate could have bred disillusionment and anger, targeting those atop the economic pyramid. Such anger can explode into street demonstrations, like those that recently have fragmented Iceland, Greece, and Central and Eastern Europe. “If you don’t do the patient work of finding commonality around values,” Borgos says, “people do tend to fragment.”

Instead, he feels, the current crisis has caused communities to coalesce in new ways, returning to “a core-values base” that fosters unity and combats political polarization.

Could this change be a bellwether for broader change? If so, it would come squarely up against America’s long love affair with individualism. During the nineteenth century, that theme drove Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous essay on self-reliance and permeated Walt Whitman’s sprawling poem, “Song of Myself.” By the latter part of the twentieth century, excessive individualism undergirded such self-help screeds as Robert J. Ringer’s 1977 best-seller, Looking Out For Number One, as well as scholarly studies like Robert D. Putnam’s 2000 study of separateness, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. In between, in the 1950s, individualism produced not only “The Lone Ranger” radio series but the craggy cowboy image of the Marlboro Man, widely viewed as one of the most effective ad campaigns ever launched in the United States.

But even a cowboy can fall into disfavor. These days, that word is less often used to praise a rugged individualist than to denigrate a renegade executive riding roughshod over employees, shareholders, and communities. If the shift Borgos sees toward community values is as real and significant as the change in our views of cowboys, we may be at one of the nation’s key turning points. And the turn could come suddenly. It was not so many years ago, after all, that anyone expressing a communitarian impulse risked being branded as a Communist. Now, with two decades separating us from the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and with Communism posing a lesser existential threat to individualism, the bias against community may fade more rapidly than ever.

Or at least recede. At some fundamental level, the individual and the community will forever be in tension. Our toughest policy choices probably will always straddle the divide between the needs of the group and the needs of the self. That’s as it should be — although, in proportion as the moral case on each side is compelling, the challenge of finding a solution can be agonizing. That challenge has been made more difficult by an imbalance favoring individualism, which too often pits personalities against one another in ways that damage rather than sust