Ethics Newsline®

by Rushworth M. Kidder

When presidential candidate Morgan Tsvangirai pulled out of last week’s election in Zimbabwe, was it an act of integrity or a failure of moral courage?

By all accounts, Zimbabwe is a mess. The African nation’s aging strongman, former terrorist leader Robert Mugabe, came in second to Tsvangirai in the initial round of voting on March 29. With the run-off election approaching, Mugabe was so determined to hold onto power that he bragged that “only God” could remove him. So he unleashed his thugs in a campaign of violence and intimidation against supporters of Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Five days before the June 27 election, with an estimated 80 or more MDC supporters murdered, some 10,000 injured, and more than 200,000 people displaced, Tsvangirai withdrew from the race. His reasons were twofold. He could no longer ask Zimbabweans to go to the polls when, he said, “that vote could cost them their lives.” He added that the election had degenerated into “a one-man competition” that bore little relationship to democracy.

Yet there were plenty of reasons to remain in the battle. Staying the course could have inspired his followers and possibly brought an end to the economic disaster that Zimbabwe has become. That’s how reform often happens. Somebody stands in front of a Chinese tank in Tiananmen Square. Nelson Mandela risks assassination by assuming a high-profile role in apartheid South Africa. Boris Yeltsin leaps onto a Russian tank to bring an end to a coup.

As the world inches its way toward democratic governance and human rights, we’re rightly fascinated by revolutions and reforms. We study them from various angles — political power, constitutional law, tribal tensions, religious divides, economic incentives, military might — hoping to glean useful lessons. But we tend to overlook the ethics angle until, as in Zimbabwe last week, the moral issues rise so powerfully to the surface that they can’t be ignored.

In this case, those issues fell into two categories. The first, journalistically compelling but conceptually uninteresting, concerns questions of right versus wrong. How the world responds to what the Economist calls “the ogre that has shamed an entire continent” makes headlines. In the past week, Queen Elizabeth II stripped Mugabe of his honorary knighthood, President Bush ordered tougher sanctions in light of what he described as “a sham election” conducted by “an illegitimate government,” and the United Nations called for the first-round elections to be respected — a position that could leave Tsvangirai the winner. But nobody has debated whether murder, rape, threats, bribes, pillaging, self-dealing, nepotism, fraud, theft, and arson are anything but wrong. On that question, there’s nothing left to say.

The second ethics category concerns right versus right. As Tsvangirai decided whether or not to withdraw, the world-class dilemma he faced pitted his loyalty and responsibility to the MDC — he is, after all, their candidate — against the truth that his followers were being attacked and murdered. It found him in an individual-versus-community struggle about saving himself versus bringing his people to power. It forced him to ask whether a short-term retreat would create a long-term loss, or whether the only way to achieve long-term success would be through intense short-term suffering that could cost him his life. And it pitted the need to defend justice and democracy for his nation against the need to show mercy and compassion for his followers.

Which of those arguments is right? All of them. So how to decide? If Tsvangirai stood by the ethical precepts of the ends-based, utilitarian construct — “do the greatest good for the greatest number” — he could argue for estimating the consequences of his actions and backing away. If, on the other hand, he followed the leanings of rule-based, Kantian logic — “follow the principle you want to see become a universal law” — he could argue that the principles of democracy were worth more than any single life, even his own. Finally, if he honored the care-based ethic of the Golden Rule — “do to others what you would want them to do to you” — he might say, “I want leaders who know how to keep fighting” — though he might say instead, “I want leaders who know how to stay alive.”

There is, in other words, a moral case for staying in the race and a moral case for withdrawing. Tsvangirai couldn’t do both. He had to choose what for him seemed to be the higher right. Will history show that he did the right thing? If things turn out well, the ends-based thinkers who judge by outcomes will applaud — just as, if things go badly, they’ll chastise him. By contrast, the rule-based thinkers will care only about the principle, not the consequences. In their eyes, he’ll be right whatever happens, as long as he stood by his highest principles.

And that’s the tough judgment. There is a high principle in standing up to tyranny and fighting to the finish. It is also highly principled to care about the lives and well-being of your followers. Either way, for Tsvangirai, last week took courage.

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

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

by Rushworth M. Kidder

It’s said that people buy more chocolate during economic downturns. Maybe it’s the only fun they can afford. Maybe it’s a cheap pick-me-up, or an escape mechanism, or a longing for simple childhood comforts. Whatever the reason, chocolate apparently is countercyclical: As the economy slows, chocolate sales rise.

I’m beginning to suspect that ethics also is countercyclical. Over the years, I’ve sensed a deepening of public concern over moral issues whenever the economy falters.

If that’s so, this past week not only should benefit Hershey’s and Cadbury; it also should drive ethics higher up the national agenda. With stocks sliding, oil prices rising, the housing market dragging, Midwest crops flooding, and global food shortages appearing, we well may see a greater interest in returning to ethics basics.

But why? Is there a link between moral insolvency and an economic slowdown? That suspicion was renewed last week with the arrests of two former executives at Bear Stearns (which was bailed out by the feds in March in a high-profile effort to stabilize the housing market) on charges of fraud related to the credit debacle. Last week, too, Canadian investigators brought criminal charges against three former top executives of Nortel, the Toronto-based telecommunications company long revered as a safe investment, in connection with an accounting scandal that severely rattled Canadian markets in 2004.

There also may be a link between political ethics and the economy. The Gallup Organization has just released data from its May 2008 survey showing that Republicans are particularly concerned about “the overall state of moral values.” This year and last, 51 percent of Republicans felt the nation’s moral condition was “poor” — up from a steady 36 percent between 2002 and 2006. Views of Democrats and independents, however, still sit at the 36-percent level.

The result puzzled Gallup’s analysts, who could find no apparent reason for this anomaly. But surely there are a few options:

1. Quagmire. Gallup asked participants about 16 issues, including abortion, homosexuality, cloning, gambling, polygamy, and divorce. Unlike their liberal colleagues, conservatives may feel stalemated on many of these fronts, leading to pent-up frustration that finally surfaced in this poll.
2. Skew. Gallup’s list didn’t include national security, education, immigration, or other current issues fraught with ethical overtones. Those issues might have given Republicans more reasons to applaud.
3. Definition. Listing only topics in the news, Gallup effectively defined morality in public-policy terms. Had Gallup used a virtues-based lens — asking about values such as honesty, respect, responsibility, fairness, or compassion — would Republicans have expressed less concern?
4. Exhaustion. President Bush’s approval ratings are in the cellar, even among some conservatives. With little time left to address ethics issues — and little visible appetite in the administration for doing so — once-loyal Republicans may be throwing in the towel.

But suppose Gallup got it right. Suppose a newly energized slice of the nation is, countercyclically, sounding the moral Klaxon. Have they recognized that unethical executives who deliberately wreck their companies may inadvertently be destroying whole economies as well? Are they sensing that while economic downturns can stem from broad, global forces, this one may have been abetted, at least in part, by local chicanery and turpitude? Are they realizing that a politics of divisiveness, animosity, and stalemate is not only inefficient and negligent but fundamentally immoral? Are they recognizing that when times are good, nobody wants to rock the boat with this “ethics stuff” — but that when times are tough, we face hard questions from the helmsman of our conscience? Are they feeling that perhaps we’ve overdosed on global resources — and that the globe finally may be pushing back?

If ethics is increasingly in demand, what the seekers will need most aren’t platitudes and surveys but ethical pathways and decision-making frameworks — structures to help embed integrity and resolve moral dilemmas all the way from the kindergarten couch to the CEO suite. But they’ll also need to be assured of something else: This didn’t need to happen. We didn’t have to wait for an economic shock to wake us up. We’re not so dumb that we can’t contemplate and correct our ethical future before it catches us unawares. And we’re not so hedonistic that we happily trash the moral long term as long as the short term feels great.

How do we know we’re not? Because, apparently, when times get tough we still care enough to be morally countercyclical.

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

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

by Rushworth M. Kidder

By the time we got there last Saturday, the annual town meeting in Lincolnville, Maine, was under way. Doris Weed shooed us in with a whispered greeting, handing us our bright teal “Registered Voter” cards without asking for identification. She’s worked in the town office for decades and knows just about all of our 2,000 citizens by name.

The folding plastic chairs in the elementary school gym were pretty well filled, so we took seats down front. Up front were the selectmen — they’re still called that, even though two of them are women, including the chair. Joining them were the town officials At the rostrum was Lois Lyman, a librarian and editorial consultant who had agreed somewhat reluctantly to step in at the last minute. As we sat down, she was shepherding Article 10 (of 34) toward a vote. At issue: Does the town wish to appropriate $314,417 for the municipal administration budget, or reduce that number through an amendment by trimming Karen Secotte’s receptionist position back to part-time?

That, of course, was not the real question. The meeting, clearly, was still in throat-clearing mode, with the Big Issue still to come. Lois ran it with a deft hand, and under her self-deprecating grace the tenor was as thoughtful and intelligent as it was civil and polite. Which was a good thing because by Article 12 the sparks were going to start flying. That’s when we would decide whether to eliminate the entire police department budget of $110,564, effectively closing the department.

It’s been said that a New England town meeting is democracy in its purest form. Everyone can speak up, everyone can vote, and every detail of the budget is available for inspection — whether it was $300 for Memorial Day flags or $80,000 to fix that dangerous intersection where Thurlow Road meets Youngtown Road as you come over the blind rise past the winery. But the past five years have been tough. Tax collections have risen 65 percent, and the trend appears to be continuing. Now, with gas prices slamming rural communities where people drive trucks to work at jobs miles from home, every penny matters. The budget committee had labored for months, agonizing over what and how to cut. The selectmen had approved their numbers and handed them over to the voters. At issue was a dilemma fundamentally moral in its structure: Will we honor the needs of the community, represented in the collective budget, or respect the needs of the individual, represented by the struggling taxpayer?

This year it came down to the police. At times we’ve had a local constable, and at other times we’ve been serviced by the Waldo County sheriff’s officers. Now, with our own full-time police chief and four part-time officers, some people were happy to feel a greater sense of comfort. They worried that drug dealers already had targeted Maine’s 3,478 miles of coastline — longer than California’s, as it weaves around estuaries and peninsulas with more nooks and crannies than an English muffin — as a place to land boatloads of drugs unnoticed. They worried that U.S. Route 1, running through Lincolnville on its way from Canada to Florida, easily brought outsiders into the community. But others saw the police department as wasteful, outsized for a town this small, and providing a service we could have more cheaply even if it meant waiting longer for a sheriff’s officer to arrive when called. They warned of a false sense of security from thinking that one patrol car could effectively cover a township of 44 square miles in any case. And they worried in general that the town office was becoming too large and, well, too officious.

It had all come to head four days earlier at the June election. There, along with primary decisions about candidates for the U. S. Congress and the Senate in November, was Article 3, a referendum to “cease any operation” of the local police. It was followed by Article 4, which would amend the town charter to allow Article 3 to be implemented. While Article 3 was a classic no-means-yes question, requiring either a no vote to keep the police or a yes to disband them, Article 4 was a complex piece of legalese. Voters on Tuesday apparently had been baffled. By eight votes — 401 to 393 — they had eliminated the police, but by 17 votes they had refused to change the charter — meaning, in effect, that the police couldn’t be eliminated.

Unless, of course, the town meeting refused to appropriate money. So on Saturday the forces on both sides had mustered their best arguments, with the eliminators proposing an amendment removing $110,564 from the budget. It took her a good half hour, but when Lois finally had run through the speakers on both sides and we held up our teal cards for a vote, the amendment was roundly defeated.

So Lincolnville still has its police force. But watching the process, I could see that the town has something even more important: its sense of civility, of comity, of friendliness. At the national level, democracy is being fractured and abraded by the polarizing forces of animosity, cynicism, and rant. The national media may have a role in this polarization, sparking arguments that can then be sensationalized. But Lincolnville has no national media exposure. We all live here. When we’re not at a town meeting, we see each other at the post office or on the pier or down at Breezemere Park where the town band has its concerts. We can argue, but we can’t hide.

Maybe that’s the overlooked secret of effective democracy — that while ballots can be secret, the debate must be public. In the end, democracy and anonymity don’t mix. On a national scale, and especially on blogs and talk radio, you can hide. You can rail and recriminate without giving your name. You can’t do that in a New England town meeting. Yes, feelings can be strong, but the forces tending to keep discourse civil are even stronger.

That’s why Lois needed to set an inclusive tone. That’s why speaker after speaker acknowledged sympathy and understanding for the other side. What they were debating was not right versus wrong: Both sides had their share of right. Of such tough ethical issues are democracies made.

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

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

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Late last week, as the price of a barrel of oil surged $11 in a single day, I recalled a conversation I had in the fall of 1986 with one of America’s leading scientific thinkers, Freeman Dyson. The 1979 oil crisis was still a sobering memory, but Dyson, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton who described himself as “obsessed with the future,” wasn’t worried about energy.

“I don’t regard that as a real problem,” he told me during an interview for the Christian Science Monitor. “If you have advanced biotechnology, I don’t see any difficulty in getting all the energy you want from the sun. It’s only a question of redesigning trees so that they produce something other than wood — gasoline, for example.”

This was before the age of email, laptops, cell phones, or the cloning of Dolly, the Scottish ewe. So does that mean, I asked somewhat incredulously, that we’d get fuel the way we get sap from a sugar maple in New England — by tapping the tree?

“I wouldn’t do it so crudely,” he explained. “I would have a sort of living, underground pipeline system, so that the gasoline would be delivered where you want it.”

For a man who designed a nuclear-powered starship and long had been a proponent of space colonization, energy sufficiency was simply a matter of inventiveness. But how far into the future would it be? “At the most,” he said, “50 years.”

We’re now about halfway there, and Dyson’s prophecies — about which he continues to write — no longer seem so strange. Last month on PBS, “NewsHour” reported briefly on Solazyme, a California high-tech startup that has reengineered the genetic structure of algae. Processed in laboratories for a few days, it produces oil very similar to the light sweet crude that nature requires tens of millions of years to create. Solazyme already is running several cars on its product.

Why can’t I buy some for my car? Because, obviously, the innovation is still under way. But that’s no excuse for other alternative-energy resources. Here on the Maine coast, the wind is typically steady and strong, and we have more sunny days than Michigan or the Pacific Northwest. But I have no windmill in the yard, no solar panels on the roof.

Now you can blame me for not being a tech-savvy early adopter like a few of our neighbors happily living off the grid in south-facing houses with basements full of batteries. But that’s not the point. Why aren’t alternative-energy technologies as common as cell phones and broadband — not restricted to the clever and the forward leaning, but spread across millions who only want their benefit and couldn’t care less how they work?

Because (the theory goes) the answers don’t lie in the technology but in the economy. As long as oil is relatively inexpensive, there’s not much demand for these new technologies. Let gas prices hit $10 a gallon (or so it is thought), and all of that will change.

But will it? If prices rise slowly, the boiled-frog syndrome may set in, with nobody thinking to leap out of the pot until it’s too late. If, on the other hand, the increase is sudden and sharp, the clamor for change could cause massive disruptions in family budgets, prompt panic at the gas pumps, and raise the specter of profiteering in alternative-energy products.

In fact, we have a better choice. Rather than waiting for markets to force painful adjustments, we can create policies to speed up change. Suppose, 10 years ago, Congress had legislated changes that vigorously promoted entrepreneurial solar and wind-power equipment. Suppose, as a result, my local Yellow Pages listed as many local firms selling and servicing this equipment as there are car dealers — and as many banks willing to finance it as to provide auto loans. Suppose I could realize substantial tax savings by equipping my home with equipment powered by wind or sun. Is there any doubt that, even though Dyson’s genetic wonder world still may be two decades off, our little Maine community already would be well on its way to energy sufficiency?

What’s holding us back? The answer has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with political will. In the end, our political progress depends on the moral choices we make and the ethical decision making we pursue. Effective national policymaking requires three things: agreement on shared values, methodologies for creating compromise when values conflict, and the moral courage to put those methodologies into practice. Around the politics of energy policy, we’re seeing a few proclamations about values. But as last week’s partisan muddle in the Senate over a global warming bill suggests, we’re seeing far fewer efforts to hammer out the compromises that create sound post-petroleum economic policy — and hardly any moral courage in leading the march toward that goal. Will we simply wait until the economic hardship falls so harshly and unfairly on the nation’s households that some of them are destroyed? Or are we ready to demand more responsible forethought from our policymakers — so that, as Dyson observed, energy continues not to be “a real problem”?

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

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

by Rushworth M. Kidder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

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

by Rushworth M. Kidder

What is the most threatening global issue facing humanity today?

Is it terrorism, where advancing nuclear and biological technologies give single individuals new opportunities to create mass destruction? Or is it violence against women, which today creates more casualties than warfare? Maybe it’s CO₂ emissions, which could warm the world and melt enough polar ice to raise sea levels for 634 million coastal residents. Or is it governmental corruption, which accounts for more than $1 trillion a year in political bribes? Or perhaps it’s mass migration, which by 2025 could put as many as 1.8 billion people on the move in water-scarce areas? Or is it slavery, with more slaves now than at the highest point of the African slave trade?

To chart public priorities among these and other global issues, we recently did a small pilot survey of members of the Institute for Global Ethics. Given our mission, we wanted to know which issues raised the greatest ethical challenges to our global future.

Since the questions in our survey were based on the 15 major issues catalogued in the 2007 “State of the Future” report from the United Nations-affiliated Millennium Project, we asked one of the report’s co-authors, Theodore J. Gordon, to join us for a follow-up conference call with our survey participants. Gordon, who was a founding board member of our Institute, conceived of the Millennium Project in the 1980s and remains one of the world’s most highly respected futurists. He’s been studying future issues and trends since well before 1971, when he founded his own consulting firm, The Futures Group. So we were eager to share with him our results.

Of the nine topics in our survey, our respondents clustered three of them near the top: terrorism, CO₂ emissions, and mass migration. They followed with a group of five more: corruption; violence against women; global slavery; disease, AIDS, and pandemics; and imbalanced wealth distribution. The ninth issue, shortage of medical professionals, came in well below the rest. As Gordon talked us through these results and as the respondents shared their views, I sensed they were searching for some bigger, overarching theme — some common thread that made these issues significant. I also sensed an unspoken question on everyone’s mind: “Ted, what do you think is the Big One?”

His answer surprised us all. In effect, he said, it’s none of the above. Then, in three key words, he nailed the concern we’d all been circling around. “If you look at all of these issues,” he said “and ask what’s common to them all, it’s lousy decision making.”

“There used to be a time,” Gordon continued, “when I thought futures research, my field, would make its contribution by improving decision making. But I’ve abandoned that thought. We could have the best insight into what the future might be — through magic techniques not yet invented — and decisions would still be terrible!” Translation: It’s not the specific issues that challenge us, but the way we fail to deal with issues of every sort.

That strikes me as a remarkable admission for a man whose life has been devoted to advancing and promoting futures research. Gordon wouldn’t want me to hold him up to unfair comparisons, but if Einstein after decades of work had told us that something mattered more than physics, or if Cezanne had concluded that painting wasn’t what it was all about, or if Darwin had intimated that he was outgrowing his commitment to evolution, wouldn’t we pay attention?

Our leaders, Gordon emphasized, aren’t bad people. But “they don’t have a good grounding in decision making, because decision making is ad hoc.” As a result, today’s decisions often rely too much on the decision maker’s reputation or on undetermined psychological factors. Worse still, decisions even can rely on what he called “creating opportunities for the family” or on “what you had for breakfast.”

“Somewhere in the future,” Gordon observed, “a science of decision making has to emerge.” This science, he feels, must comprise such elements as futures research, econometrics, and ethics — what he describes as “a curriculum that covers the field.”

Gordon’s not telling us that the big, high-leverage issues on the global agenda aren’t important. They matter enormously and require every bit of energy that global organizations pour into them. They need public support, private initiative, and collective will. But mostly they need the new, sharp instrumentality of twenty-first-century decision making. That instrumentality includes ethics — an ability to discern right from wrong, coupled with a way to frame our toughest problems as moral dilemmas that pit two right courses of action against each other. With that in place, nothing we face — terrorism, global warming, slavery, corruption, or the rest — will be beyond our ability to correct.

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

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

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Want evidence that the global moral barometer is in steep decline? Look at Myanmar, where the ruling generals have only recently permitted outside aid to reach cyclone victims. In the end, when history does its tally, the deaths caused by a tyrannical government working in secret may far outnumber those caused by the forces of weather.

Want evidence that the barometer is rising? Look at China, where last week the government responded to an earthquake by sending in thousands of soldiers and taking unusual steps to share the story with the outside world. History may eventually note that this disaster, coming so close upon the opening of the 2008 Olympics, forced a new openness in this once-secretive nation.

So which is it? Is the barometer rising or falling?

Questions like these were on the table when I joined a group of Nova Scotia public-school educators to consider questions of ethics last week in Halifax. Dividing the group down the middle, I asked one half of the room to list as many arguments as possible — quickly, in bullet-point form — to indicate that ethics is in free-fall and that the world is plunging deeper and deeper into turpitude. The other side had the charge of arguing the opposite — that the barometric uptick is taking us incrementally but steadily toward a more ethical future.

As you might imagine, the conversation was rich and varied. Each time the negativists tossed out a point, the upsiders came right back with a rejoinder — and vice versa. Within moments the room was thick with problems, from AIDS and cheating and global warming to Enron and pornography and Eliot Spitzer. But the countercurrent was just as strong, with talk of diversity, recycling, charitable giving, energy conservation, gender equity, and Nelson Mandela.

“So which is it?” I finally asked. “Is the barometer rising or falling?”

“Yes!” someone replied. His quip was met with a general chuckle around the room as people recognized the impossibility of any such oversimplification as I had proposed. It was a nice answer.

But I think the best answer is, “That’s a really dumb question!” Over the years, I’ve had scores of similar conversations with groups in various parts of the world. People often come into these discussions with a bias toward cynicism or optimism. But when forced to confront the range of evidence — even briefly, under broad headings without detailed analysis — they quickly sense the complexity of the issues and the difficulty of making a categorical judgment. Optimists are sobered, cynics are undermined, and a quiet sense of moral nuance sets in.

These days that moral nuance is hugely valuable. At every turn, it seems, our public discourse demands that we commit ourselves to categorical judgments. Going out in public without an opinion somehow feels like arriving at the supermarket without your pants: You can function fine for a while, though sooner or later someone’s sure to notice and ask you to explain yourself.

That’s especially true when ethical issues are at stake. We may feel uncomfortable taking positions on topics requiring specialist knowledge — immigration, the economy, healthcare policy, future sources of energy, or the like. But on the broader topic of ethics we feel an impulse, even an obligation, to speak up. We feel prepared to chart the ebb and flow of responsibility, respect, fairness, compassion, and honesty. And well we should. Ethics is first and foremost a personal topic, open to every voice and inviting each individual’s response. While it sometimes can appear academic and arcane, it’s actually an immediate set of ideas, grasped through intuition and reasoned out in commonplace language. Everyone deserves a place in the ethics conversation — except, perhaps, those who insist that if you haven’t read the right texts and don’t know the proper scholastic language, you aren’t qualified to talk about this most commonplace of topics.

Yet that very commonality poses a threat to ethical discourse. It can turn too easily into unwarranted certainty, smug self-confidence, and prickly assertiveness. The startling superficialities that pass for opinions on cable television and in today’s blogosphere remind us what happens when a culture of glib obduracy replaces a culture of reasoned questioning.

As we head into the election season, we may encounter a surfeit of mulish, unbending self-will on questions of values and ethics. The reaction may be to write off all moral discourse as perverse and pointless, and retreat into a disdain for any sort of ethical conversation. Needed, instead, is a capacity for moral nuance. If we remember that every assertion of a declining moral barometer is apt to be followed by the demand, “Therefore, vote for me!” — while each claim of moral improvement invariably precedes the request to “Reelect me!” — we’ll be better equipped to resist demagoguery. The more we respect moral complexity, the less we’ll be in danger of falling for either the dogmatic or the dismissive. Of such quiet nuance is civil society made.

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

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

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Last week, conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh sought to skew the Democratic presidential primary in Indiana in favor of Hillary Clinton. What he did was perfectly legal. Why then did it strike so many people as unethical?

Here’s the background. As the nation headed into the latest primaries, it was well understood that Clinton could not lose both North Carolina and Indiana and still keep her campaign alive. Barack Obama was favored to win North Carolina, which he did. Clinton was favored in Indiana. She won, but only by 14,000 votes.

Well understood, too, was the need for Democrats to end the primary season quickly and focus on John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee. Every argument that Clinton and Obama lobbed at each other potentially could weaken one or the other of them later in the general election, so the Republicans were keen to see the Democratic primary continue as long as possible.

Into that mix stepped Mr. Limbaugh. He recognized that once John McCain had dispatched his competition, Republicans had no reason to vote in their own primaries. So he began urging them to do two things they probably found repugnant: vote in Democratic primaries and vote for Clinton. Prior to the March 4 Democratic primaries in Texas and Ohio, Republicans who crossed over to vote had strongly favored Obama. Had that trend continued, the Democratic primary might have ended much earlier with an Obama victory. Limbaugh’s strategy — he called it Operation Chaos — had the avowed purpose of messing up the Democratic primary by keeping Clinton’s campaign alive as long as possible.

Did it work? Nobody’s quite sure. Limbaugh congratulated himself roundly for bumping up Clinton’s numbers in Indiana and extending the Democrats’ travails. Obama’s campaign appeared to credit Limbaugh’s legions with delivering Clinton’s narrow margin of victory. Those who pore over exit polls, however, see too much complexity to be sure of the Limbaugh effect. But on one point all agree: The Indiana primary was a high-stakes venture that future historians may credit with partly determining the next president.

Who wins, however, doesn’t affect the legality of Limbaugh’s efforts. Nor does it change the ethics of the situation. Legally, he’s in the right: Like any of us, he can seek to influence citizens to vote his way. But ethics depends on motives. The motive behind a primary is to allow a party’s own voters to decide their nominee. In most primaries, voters participate in good faith, assuming that other voters are acting with equal integrity. They trust that voters who cast primary ballots probably are going to vote the same way in November if their candidate becomes the nominee. Since March, however, a significant block of Republicans apparently set out to game the system by infiltrating the Democratic decision-making process. Their motive, far from wanting to help the Democrats, was to tilt the results to their detriment. The tip-off in Indiana came from exit polls, which found strangely large numbers of voters who said, “I’m a Republican,” “I voted for Clinton just now,” but “in November I plan to vote for McCain.”

That a talk-show personality would seek to raise himself in popular approval by tinkering with the fundamentals of democracy in this way is, perhaps, not surprising. That so many Republicans would follow his lead, however, is saddening. Many of them are people who take pride in their integrity, their respect for the individuality of their fellows, and their strong sense of responsibility, transparency, and community. Many are real patriots with a deep love for the nation’s democratic processes. They are, in other words, ethical folks.

What led them astray? They simply fell for two unstated clichés that seemed to drive Limbaugh’s thinking. One is the old canard that if it ain’t illegal, it must be ethical — as though the world’s highest moral standard were “break no rule” rather than “live consistently with your ethical compass.” The other cliché is, Do whatever it takes — as though the end justifies the means, motives don’t matter, and manipulation and duplicity are fine as long as you win. Armed with that philosophy, even a wholesale abandonment of principled influencing can be made to sound plausible.

Which is why Operation Chaos struck so many people as unethical. Most voters, and most Limbaugh listeners, would never raise their own children under these two clichés. As rules for living, “if it ain’t illegal…” and “whatever it takes” fall at the first hurdle. But in the heat of an election, and under the influence of a talk-radio tradition that trades largely in clichés, it’s easy for voters to let down their guard. Failing to examine motives and duped by an excitable discourse that doesn’t always make its moral standards explicit, they allowed themselves to be subjected to manipulative clichés.

Good ethics cases don’t usually flow from high-decibel talk-radio shows, so at least credit Limbaugh for giving classrooms around the nation a lucid illustration that what’s legal isn’t always what’s ethical.

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

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

by Rushworth M. Kidder

PALO ALTO, California
At a conference here in Silicon Valley last weekend, I heard two predictions that fell together for me like tumblers in a lock. The first came from Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd, who pointed out that “only about 2 percent of the world’s data is digitized.” In other words, only a tiny fraction of our knowledge is currently available for use on computers, DVDs, or iPods. He expects that number to double in the next four years — a period during which, he says, there will be “more data created than in the history of the planet.”

Much of that information will be in video formats, which require immense amounts of data compared to print or audio. Hence the second prediction. It came from Google vice president Marissa Mayer, a self-professed geek who years ago was hired on as the infant company’s first female engineer. For her, the future lies in developing smaller, higher-capacity discs to store all of this data. She predicts that by 2015 you’ll be able to “carry on an iPod more video than you can watch in a lifetime.”

Taken together, those comments paint a heady future for the students at this conference, which was convened to honor the hundredth anniversary of the Castilleja School. By 2015, many of them will have graduated from this prestigious independent girls’ school and finished college. At that point, iPods in hand, they will come thundering into a workforce awash with moving images. How will this newly dense video culture impact their lives?

Some of the impact will be positive. They’ll have access to troves of video information unavailable to today’s graduates. At their fingertips they’ll find everything from sophisticated training manuals to classic Shakespeare performances. And when every cell-phone call is a video conference, they’ll be more in touch with family and friends, locally and globally, than any generation in history.

But what of the downside challenges? First, of course, are the ethical issues. One is pornography, which is already so pervasive that many corporations have developed tough and toothy sanctions to counter its corrosive effects on gender relations at work and at home. Put it all on iPods, and the evil expands exponentially. Another danger arises from abuse by those who use video to instruct viewers on everything from building nuclear weapons to cheating on tests. These ethical threats aren’t new; they existed in print as well. But the speed with which they can be communicated so vividly in the YouTube era is unprecedented.

The second downside is the sheer glut of information. Even if every iPod user had an hour a day for viewing, how would they know what to watch? The answer may lie in some yet-to-be-invented datavisory services. By providing customers with their own personal video broker or byte guide, they’ll help us sift through what’s available and extract the worthwhile.

More likely, however, tomorrow’s students will simply listen to their friends, either in person or through such sites as FriendFeed or Iminta that help them see what their acquaintances are watching. The result: The much-vaunted openness of the new video world will quickly become elitist. In television’s early days, everyone watched the same thing, making it hard for cliques to develop among those who had special access to the coolest stuff. That’s all changing: The new social stratification will depend on whose friends recommend the coolest stuff — and on who spends the most time watching what those friends are watching, for fear of missing something vital. What if that cuts into family or homework time, plunging students into lonely, screen-staring vigils in place of face-to-face conversations with real people? Is that too high a cost to pay for being on the edge?

And that raises a third video-culture challenge. Call it the silent scream, where the medium itself prevents those who use it from being heard. Like Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting “The Scream” — an iconic depiction of a desperate-looking, open-mouthed woman whose cry, by the very nature of oil on canvas, will never make a sound — the new video culture may actually be the medium that reduces human interaction. Those most yearning to be heard in the video marketplace will find themselves jostling for attention among a million other expressions. Their voices effectively will vanish, lost under a torrent of competing presentations.

And that raises one of the most subtly ethical challenges of our day: the marketing of new communication technologies as though they could actually democratize access to information. The central point of democracy isn’t that everyone gets to speak. It’s that others listen, that everyone’s voice matters, that every vote is counted. The grandly democratic promise of YouTube and its ilk — that they allow everyone’s work to be posted and shared — may ironically have the opposite effect. It may end up burying each individual work under so many gigabytes of other data that it stifles, not amplifies, the identity yearning for recognition and response.

This is not a plea to turn back the clocks or shoot all the programmers. It’s a plea for exercising our moral futurism, our capacity for over-the-horizon, predictive ethics. As we dash to develop ways to pack lifetimes of video onto credit-card-sized devices, we need to ask why we ought to do so — and what kind of moral world we are creating. If we’re smart enough to compress a whole Blockbuster store into a few digital-processing centimeters, surely we’re smart enough to foresee and mitigate the moral consequences of doing so.

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

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

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Is it ever right to tell only half a truth?

Ordinarily, Lara would be the first to say no. As a manager of global information technologies for a Fortune 500 multinational, Lara (not her real name) has seen too many occasions where half-truths and spin have muddied the waters and damaged careers.

But then her son Troy turned 11.

When he was seven, Lara told me, he was diagnosed with a mild case of attention deficit disorder (ADD). After she and her husband consulted a doctor, they decided to put him on the drug Ritalin. It “took the edge off,” she recalls, “and helped him to concentrate.”

Over the next four years, his schooling progressed well. His energy and zest never seemed anything more than the typical rambunctious creativity of young boys. As a result, Lara and her husband saw no reason to change the original dosage, even as his body grew. So after four years, and with a doctor’s guidance, they took him off the drug entirely for one summer. He was fine.

As fall approached, Lara faced a tough choice. It wasn’t about whether to go back to the drug; she felt sure that was behind them. It was about what to say about Troy’s prior use of it. He was heading into a new school where nobody knew his past. Should she let the staff know about his medical history?

On the one hand, she felt she had an obligation to tell. She and her husband strongly believed that “when you are dealing with people who are educating your children, they need to understand your child” so that they can “create environments where kids learn really well.” For her, schooling is “a two-way street.” As parents, she says, “we have to work with our kids to make sure they’re getting their homework done so that the teachers can be successful.”

On the other hand, she had fought hard to help Troy avoid being labeled. She was keen to protect his identity as a healthy, vigorous individual rather than a child with ADD. “You read about people whose kids get labeled,” she says, “and you say, ‘I can’t believe that happened so fast!’ But children do get labeled pretty fast.” She felt Troy had made significant progress and that he needed to be able to prove himself without any preconceptions.

For Lara, it was a right-versus-right decision. She knew it was right to honor the community of educators, but it also was right to defend the individuality of her son. She saw the arguments for truth telling so clearly that, she admits, she felt deeply guilty about misleading the school. Yet her loyalty and responsibility to Troy made her want to protect him from the unwitting condemnation that had produced such harmful effects on other ADD children. With truth pitted against loyalty and with the rights of the individual conflicting with the needs of the community, there were powerful moral arguments stacked up on each side — and she couldn’t choose both at once.

Finally, after weighing both sides of this dilemma, she and her husband made a “conscious decision” to withhold the full story about their son. They said nothing about the ADD.

Shortly after the school year started, Lara went to her first parent-teacher conference — and was delighted by the “glowing results” she heard from the teacher. Troy was doing well in class, said the teacher, “his grades are good, and we love having him here.” Lara was so pleased, she said, that she admitted to the teacher that they had taken Troy off Ritalin that summer.

And with that, everything changed. The teacher “shook her head and said, ‘Oh, now I understand why I’m having so many problems with your son!’” From that point forward, Lara says, he was “immediately labeled. I kept receiving notices as to his performance issues, and everything went downhill.”

To this day, Lara says, “I’m convinced that she just decided to label him. It didn’t matter whether he was just being a typical kid. In her mind he wasn’t being typical, he was ‘that kid with ADD who needs to get on his medication again.’”

Troy is now 14, and he’s changed schools once again. Since that time, Lara admits, “I

have not told the school system a thing.” Troy is aware of his challenge and occasionally tells his mom that he’s had a tough time concentrating, and they talk about it. But she says he’s learning to handle it without drugs. “It was a tough fight going forward,” she concludes.

But was it an ethical fight? Was this a wise defense of his dignity — or a willful disobedience of regulations? That depends on how you see the moral arguments on both sides. Some would say that Lara did what every parent should do: take a firm stand against the all-too-human tendency, even among well-meaning educators, to see stereotypes instead of individuals. Others would say that every parent must share all such details with teachers — and that ethics depends less on how you see things turn out (fine, in this case) than on the principle (in this case, full disclosure) you’d like to see everyone follow.

Did Lara do the right thing? I’m eager to hear in your views. Email me your thoughts and your reasoning, which I’ll share in a future column.

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

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

by Rushworth M. Kidder

You may think this column is about the environment. In fact, it’s about the moral responsibility of the news media. First, some facts:

• In the first four months of 2007, clothesline sales rose 150 percent and sales of clothespins by more than 1,000 percent, according to one British retailer.
• Also last year, a leading maker of clothes-drying racks in Australia saw revenues rise by 15 percent.
• “Right to dry” activists in Colorado, Connecticut, Vermont, and Ontario, Canada, presently are seeking to overturn laws that ban backyard clotheslines in some communities.

Why? Because energy-hungry tumble driers are fast becoming the major-appliance equivalent of gas-guzzling SUVs. If, as some experts suggest, environmental action depends on behavioral change, a shift from clothes driers to clotheslines could be a leading indicator of a change in public attitudes toward global warming.

Now I’m pretty sure you never said to yourself, “I need to know more about clothespin trends.” Yet I bet that, like me, you find the “right to dry” movement intriguing. But I also suspect you’d never heard of it until now. Nor had I, until I saw the story in last week’s New York Times.

And that’s the point: I never planned to read that story, yet I did. Why?

It’s not because I have a laser-like focus on environmental issues. I don’t approach each day’s paper like a heat-seeking missile, ignoring every target but the one I’m programmed for. I want to know about lots of things. What’s more, I know I haven’t got time to read everything. So, like most of us, I tend to read about what I already know I want to know.

But there it was, on an inside page, illustrated by a large photo of a woman hanging out clothes in a snowy backyard in Aurora, Ontario. It was well constructed, broadly sourced, and engagingly written. It got me thinking about the ways in which some of our laws actually prevent us from conserving energy.

Would I have read that story on a Web page? I doubt it. I find I go to the Web to learn about what happened yesterday to Hillary, Zimbabwe, the markets, gas prices, or other things I’ve already defined as “the news.” This wasn’t news. It was something we in the trade call a feature story, which, unlike a news stories, can be read tomorrow as well as today and still remain relevant. But even as a feature, I wouldn’t have defined this topic as relevant to me. It wasn’t by-lined to a well-known correspondent or columnist. I didn’t see it as a must-read piece that everyone would be talking about. Neither, apparently, did most readers of the Times’s website. It didn’t even show up on that day’s list of the most downloaded stories.

Yet there I was reading it — all because my eye happened to catch it on the page.

As the economics of print drive newspapers toward a Web environment, one of the casualties may be what New York Times editor Bill Keller has called “serendipitous encounters” of this sort. The Web, after all, lives and breathes a sense of quickness, purpose, and drive. We go there to get what we need. Unlike the broad visual expanse of a well-designed newspaper, the Web doesn’t naturally draw us into corners of thought we never meant to visit. That’s partly because, on most news-related websites, the blurb for each story looks pretty much like every other blurb, making no story seem more important than any other except by virtue of the sequence.

Now, I admit to some bias. I spent several years as feature editor for a major international daily newspaper, so I love good feature stories. I like encountering examples, comparisons, and insights I wasn’t looking for. I relish the way a good newspaper, without warning, ambushes my single-mindedness and leads me to acquire a multitude of engaging but unrelated ideas. I look forward to the way it invites me to rise from fact to metaphor — so that, looking at one thing (a mere clothespin), I’m encouraged see another (an environmental trend).

Yet each week, I find I’m spending a little more time getting news on the Web and a little less time reading newspapers. I’m at risk, then, of the inevitable narrowing that comes with deep immersion in the Web.

I know, I know — I can already hear the outrage of Web addicts who insist that surfing the Web is hugely expansive. Agreed. But this isn’t about addicts. It’s about ordinary people with serious schedules who can’t spend time surfing, have no appetite for traipsing through chat-room threads hoping for the odd tidbit, and yet need to be informed about things they didn’t know mattered.

In a world of exponential increases in information, we have a moral responsibility to remain broadly informed. So, too, our editors and Web designers have a moral obligation to keep us from funneling down into the narrowness of our own repetitive preconceptions. They need to invent ways to recreate the spatial expanse of a newspaper, where the eye falls on the unexpected and the mind turns distraction into education. They need to do whatever they can to compel these “serendipitous encounters.”

Sure, I can get by without reading about the right to dry. But can the world survive without our collective capacity to contemplate big-picture trends by looking at things as small as clothespins? The poet William Blake referred to it as seeing “a world in a grain of sand.” If all I learn is what I tell myself I need to know, am I seeing Blake’s world? Or am I just staring into the mirror of my own certainties? Without a broad, unintentional, serendipitous engagement with the world, where does creativity come from?

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

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

by Rushworth M. Kidder

If Barack Obama becomes president, he stands to bring young people into U.S. political life in ways unseen since the Kennedy years. On this point there is little dispute.

But what if he loses? What will happen to that surge of youthful political energy? On this profoundly moral question, the discussion has hardly begun.

This energy is not illusory, but it is new. In his 2000 report titled “Civic Engagement,” Thomas Ehrlich of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching found deep “political disaffection” and “mounting political apathy” among young adults. How quickly things change! Now, a scant eight years later, young people are flocking to Obama’s campaign. His rallies regularly galvanize huge turnouts among youth. Exit polls in the Democratic primaries so far (not counting Florida and Michigan) show about 60 percent of the under-30 crowd supporting him. Many of these young people are dragging their parents along with them: One get-out-the-vote bumper sticker reads, “Tell Your Mama/Vote for Obama!”

If he loses, does that energy simply dissipate? Will apathy and disaffection sweep in again? Or, conversely, will young people transmute their pent-up disappointment into cynicism, anger, even violence? Will there be a 1960s-like uprising over an unpopular war, an economic downturn, and distrust of politics?

In fact, there may be a third option — one that I sensed earlier this month during a four-day tour of post-Katrina New Orleans. There, community organizers like Broderick Bagert — himself a highly educated thirty-something drawn back home to his flood-ravaged city by the immense potential for change — noticed other young people gravitating toward New Orleans long before they began moving toward Obama.

Bagert is a senior organizer for Jeremiah Group, which comprises several dozen community-based religious congregations, schools, and unions. Trained by the Industrial Areas Foundation under a principle that says, “Never do anything for people that they can do for themselves,” he now trains others to develop local leaders, build relationships and networks, and create better futures for their communities. Not surprisingly, groups like his are magnets for young volunteers.

“There are a lot of young people who’ve moved here,” he says, “and even more who have come in for spring-break cleanup and service trips.” While he admires their pep, he’s concerned that many are awash with “romanticism” — a “salvation mentality” that he sometimes sees in his peers and once saw in himself.

“I started this work arrogant and naïve and overly rigid,” he admits. He then had to learn the value of listening to older people and creating relationships — “developing some reverence,” he calls it, “which is not our generation’s strongest suit.” Without such training and seasoning, he finds that youthful zeal can produce “short-term wonders,” but that it eventually “renders people ineffective.”

“‘I’m going to go save the world,’” he sees his generation saying, “‘and when that doesn’t work out, I’m going to be a corporate lawyer.’”

What needs developing, he feels, is “a deep commitment to institutions.” He wants his generation to understand the difference between movements and organizations. The former, he says, are built around charismatic leaders, with a following of disconnected individuals drawn together by enthusiasm. Organizations, by contrast, “are built on institutions, with lots of leaders and networks and relationships built around interests.”

And that, at bottom, is the challenge facing Obama — who, like Bagert, has a background as a trained community organizer. His campaign didn’t create the youth movement: It was at work in New Orleans, Chicago, and other cities long before he stepped out in front of it. But where will it go from here?

If he wins, his ethical obligation will be to channel all that energy away from a focus on his own charisma and into the tough, persistent task of building local leaders and institutions. If he loses, that obligation will fall to the volunteer sector. A wave of newly energized youth — disappointed, deflated, and in danger of falling eight years backwards into apathy and disaffection — could hit them like Katrina’s storm surge. If the sector is unprepared, it will probably just hunker down and wait it out, lest the surge overwhelm their mental and moral levees. If they’re prepared, they’ll absorb, train, and deploy these young people in ways that give them practical successes while preserving their idealism.

And if that happens, this surge could be the force for change that the nation long has been awaiting.

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

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

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Last week I spent four days in New Orleans, a city in comeback mode two-and-a-half years after the ravages of hurricane Katrina. Traveling as trustees of a charitable foundation, our group met dozens of community leaders, government appointees, business executives, bankers, demographers, environmentalists, and local residents. We saw the gray-brown watermark on the sides of buildings several yards above ground level — evidence of a flood that immersed an area seven times the size of Manhattan, in some places for as long as 56 days. We heard chilling stories of personal loss and social disorganization. Yet we also found evidence that in small but significant ways, a new political and moral order is struggling to be born — one that could shape not only New Orleans but the nation.

If that sounds overblown, consider that New Orleans is the site of one of the two great American stories of this still-young century. If 9/11 represented a major test of the nation’s ability to respond to international attacks, Katrina tested our ability to respond to domestic crises. Both are ongoing stories. Both leave us wondering whether we’re passing or failing. Both mark points of definitive, irreversible change.

You can’t hang around New Orleans for very long without hearing people talk about change — and about the “silver lining” arising from the calamity. Environmentalists see a silver lining in the new concern for the nearby wetlands, which could have significantly reduced the storm surge if they hadn’t already been degraded by decades of commercial development. Community organizers see the silver lining in the sound of once-silent citizens speaking up to save neighborhoods devastated by the floods. Economists see it in the resilience of local entrepreneurs who, working with nonprofit microcredit banks, are reopening day-care centers, driving schools, debris-removal companies, and hosts of other mom-and-pop businesses. Churches see it in once-separate black and white congregations coming together in new forms of collective action.

That doesn’t mean the challenges aren’t severe. New Orleans may never again reach its pre-Katrina population. Nearly 40 percent of the population, according to figures from the Brookings Institution, live below the poverty level. The destruction of 100,000 homes from wind and flood damage has wiped out family investments and pushed rents up by nearly 50 percent. The final bill for repairing present damage and investing in a new future will exceed $100 billion.

Still, the optimism is palpable. Why? Because what’s also being destroyed are some old ways of thinking. The city’s entrenched and infamous public corruption is at last being resolutely challenged. So is the idea that you can build houses safely without stilts — slab on grade, as they say here — on dangerously low land behind a flawed levee system. So is the idea that you can simply reconstruct school buildings in an education system ranked among the nation’s worst before Katrina hit.

But there’s deeper change afoot. To understand it, imagine a horizontal scale with two end points labeled, respectively, Big government will save us and Big government will destroy us. Conventional wisdom puts each of us somewhere along that scale, roughly related to our location along the conservative-liberal spectrum. So you might predict that impoverished, jobless, welfare-dependent communities in New Orleans would cluster toward the liberal end of the scale, while the city’s oil-rich, high-living, internationally sophisticated communities would have little use for government.

Instead, voice after voice last week echoed that of Marylee Orr, executive director of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network. In the weeks and months following the storm, she told us, “I thought that government agencies would come forth and help us. It didn’t happen.” Yet there is equal skepticism, even from business leaders, about New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin’s declaration that “market forces” should be allowed to determine the city’s redevelopment.

In an odd way, it’s as though New Orleans finds itself at right angles to that whole scale, its residents distrusting both ends points and shifting instead to live along a different, perpendicular axis. They’re rolling up their sleeves and getting things done themselves, depending less on governments or markets and more on their own self-reliance. Of course they need money and regulations — two things that governments provide. And of course they need financial incentives and economic opportunities, which markets create. But in the new realism of survival, the old horizontal idolatries of either one are collapsing like shotgun houses in a storm surge.

In an election year, that collapse has ramifications for politics just as, in a period of economic uncertainty, it has financial implications. But primarily, in an age groping to understand 9/11 and Katrina, that shift has ethical consequences. In a city called the Big Easy, the easy language of bigness — in praise of big government or in adulation of vast market forces — is losing sway. Instead, in conversation after conversation, you hear the language of individual values. People here talk about responsibility for self and others. They talk about a race-blind respect for everyone’s dignity. They’re demanding public truth telling, a compassion for all who suffer when disaster strikes, and a justice that is incorruptible, swift, and fair.

Will that shift from horizontal to perpendicular thinking reach beyond New Orleans? Will it create a fledgling social order at right angles to the past, equally wary of governments and markets? That may depend on the nation’s youngest voters — the newly energized activists who continue to pour into New Orleans, gravitate toward presidential campaigns, and distrust the politics of polarity. But that’s a subject for another column.

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

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

by Rushworth M. Kidder

If memory serves, my earliest acquaintance with a grandfather clock was in a bank lobby. As my mother did business with a teller behind a high marble counter, I stared around down at knee-level, listening to the stately tick-tocking of the clock’s massive pendulum. It was the sound of confidence. We’re here to safeguard your money, it said, and nothing will break our rhythm. Grave and perpetual, it bespoke the essence of financial order.

But suppose you stood that clock in the back of a pickup and drove it pell-mell down a potholed logging road. Imagine the pendulum, slamming randomly from side to side in the pitching truck. Not only would it be useless at keeping time, it would be lucky to survive without smashing through the polished cabinet. Violent and haphazard, it would be the epitome of disarray.

Watching the markets this year, there’s little doubt which pendulum symbolizes our age. As the first quarter of 2008 closes, the swings have been extreme. Writing in the New York Times last week, Floyd Norris noted that U.S. markets posted twelve sessions this quarter in which stocks either rose or fell by more than 2 percent — “something that didn’t happen even once in 2004 or 2005.” But the biggest change — a 4.2 percent rise in the Standard & Poor’s index of 500 stocks on March 18, as the Federal Reserve cut interest rates — was modest compared to volatility in France and Germany, which bounced around in ranges above 6 percent. In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng index rose 10.7 percent on one day and dropped 8.7 percent on another, with India and China showing extreme volatility as well.

Is there an ethical issue underlying these excessive swings?

I think there is, and I think it traces back to a financial short-termism that seriously imperils the free enterprise system. This trend — the quest for immediate profit at the expense of long-term financial security — is not new. In 1936, British economist John Maynard Keynes contemplated measures to “make the purchase of an investment permanent” as a way to “force the investor to direct his mind to the long-term prospects and to those only.”

Recent critiques of short-termism have erupted on all sides of the political spectrum, with observers as different as Warren Buffett and Al Gore calling for change. And several weeks ago the Economist, contemplating Wall Street’s woes, pegged short-termism as a root cause. “Spurred by pay that was geared to short-term gains,” its editors wrote in the March 19 issue, “bankers and fund managers stand accused of pocketing bonuses with no thought for the longer-term consequences of what they were doing.”

What’s wrong with short-termism? That question underlay two studies by reputable organizations in 2006, well before the current crisis. In a report titled “Breaking the Short-Term Cycle,” the CFA Institute Centre for Financial Market Integrity and the Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics called for reform of “practices involving earnings guidance, compensation, and communications to investors.” It declared that companies need to “make adjustments to their involvement in the ‘earnings guidance game’” — the practice of providing quarterly assessments of earnings prospects to Wall Street analysts, thereby encouraging investors to look only at immediate, bottom-line results rather than Keynes’s “long-term prospects.” It also called for executive compensation to be based on “long-term strategic and value-creation goals” rather than on these quarterly targets.

That same year a Conference Board report, “Revisiting Stock Market Short-Termism,” spoke presciently about today’s situation. “The pressure to meet short-term quarterly earnings numbers,” it asserted, “can cause undue market volatility.” Such whipsawing, in turn, can “cause management to lose sight of its strategic business model,” compromise global competitiveness, and fail to invest in “such critical long-term focused areas as research and development and environmental controls.”

These reports set forth the financial case against short-termism. But what about the ethical case? In themselves, neither short-term nor long-term thinking is “wrong.” In fact, situations that pit our present needs against our future obligations are so common that the phrase short-term versus long-term is used as a paradigm to describe some of humanity’s toughest right-versus-right dilemmas. And for good reason. All of us must honor the short term by spending for today’s necessities. To say, “I won’t eat today — I can do that next month,” is not an option. But neither can we say, “It’s boring to bring in the harvest — let’s just live for the moment.” There’s a moral case for both the long-term and the short-term — and frequently a need to choose between them.

But as with the other decision paradigms — individual versus community, justice versus mercy, truth versus loyalty — an excessive focus on one side over the other invites unethical behavior. In successful decision making, the two are kept roughly in balance. When one side continually drowns out the other, volatility rules and moral chaos ensues.

That’s nowhere truer than in short-term-versus-long-term dilemmas. More than the other paradigms, this one helps explain why market volatility is an ethical issue. Think of short-termism as consumption and long-term thinking as investment. Then remember that the issue driving the recent downturn — the housing market — represents something that, for most Americans, is the largest and most long-term investment they will ever make. Yet consumption — cashing in on rising markets to make immediate profits — represents one of the fastest ways to make money that most Americans have ever seen.

Does it now make sense that whatever would seek to destroy investment for the sake of consumption could be considered unethical? True, there are lots of financial causes for today’s downturn. But unless we recognize that behind them all lies the twenty-first century’s addiction to excessive short-termism, we’ll never address the ethical cause. Instead, we’ll just keep driving down that potholed road to nowhere — and wondering what all the clanging is about.

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

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

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Presidential contender Barack Obama’s March 18 speech on race was widely applauded as one of the most compelling speeches of our time. But why? What made it so?

True, he spoke with authority on a much-avoided topic. He dignified his audience’s intelligence, addressing their thinking rather than manipulating their emotions. He confronted a serious challenge without ducking or spinning. And he lifted the discourse from the merely defensive to the genuinely philosophical. But lots of politicians do that, at least from time to time. Obama’s speech seemed a cut above the rest. Why?

The answer, I think, lies in a kind of coherence that was musical in its impact. In an almost symphonic way, he interwove three strands of oratorical skill — a rhetorical structure, a moral theme, and a narrative conviction — into an integrated whole.

Rhetorical structure. This speech moved through three broad topics: an exposition of his own story and his relationship to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, an analysis of that relationship as an illustration of a racial divisiveness that “this nation cannot afford to ignore,” and a proposal for addressing that divisiveness by finding the “common stake we all have in one another.” Throughout this architecture ran a motif of balanced, two-part statements and counterstatements that included:

• A condemnation of Rev. Wright’s “distorted view of this country,” followed by an explanation of why he cannot utterly disown him
• A discussion of the buried anger in the black community, matched by a discussion of white anger
• His call for blacks to “squarely [face] our own complicity in our condition,” balanced by a call for some whites to stop “dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice … as mere political correctness”
• A choice between an old “politics that breeds division” and a new politics of hope

This duality also showed up in numerous well-balanced sentences, as when he spoke of the gap between “the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time,” the fact that we have “different stories, but we hold common hopes,” and the need to “embrace the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past.” These doublets may be nearly invisible, but they build verbal intensity just as surely as symphonic structure intensifies musical notes until, without quite knowing why, we feel moved.

Moral theme. Within this architecture, two related themes laced themselves together. The first centered on the word perfect, a note he struck eleven times from his very first sentence (”a more perfect union”) to his penultimate word (”that is where perfection begins”). But perfection is a daring theme in an age of ethical relativism. It opens him to the sneers of cynics, who contemptuously dismiss perfection as a silly impossibility. Yet for Obama to have called for anything less would have undercut the idealism of his campaign. His solution? Invoke the powerful but grammatically suspect constitutional phrase “more perfect.” Setting aside the problem of how anything perfect can become even more so, Obama used that phrase to focus on progress toward perfection rather than on demands for its absolute state. His variations on this theme touched on Rev. Wright (”as imperfect as he may be”) and included a seemingly casual but artfully self-deprecating comment on himself (”a candidacy as imperfect as my own.”)

The second theme, expressed as hope, began early and built to a crescendo. As with perfection, this word also risked the cynics’ wrath. Yet a focus on a hopeful future was crucial to his message. In a moment of real insight, he noted that Rev. Wright’s “profound mistake” was that “he spoke as if our society was static,” without any progress upon which to found a sense of hope. Without hope — Obama’s signature word — nothing can be made “more perfect.” Yet while “this union may never be perfect,” he declared, “generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.” Again, the thematic interplay of perfection and hope was all the more powerful for being only semi-recognized by his listeners.

Narrative conviction. In a rich and many-layered moment, Obama didn’t just tell the story of his formative experience in Rev. Wright’s church. Instead, he quoted a paragraph from his earlier book about how the church used Biblical stories to explain the moral story of the black experience. If that story-within-story-within-story seems complex, the result was a powerfully simple statement of how “our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal” as “the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, [and] Ezekiel’s field of dry bones.” In the end, this was a story about the importance of stories in helping us make meaning out of moral complexity. Not accidentally, then, his speech ended with a story. It was about Ashley, a young white campaign organizer, and an elderly black man in Florence, South Carolina, whose simple comment — “I’m here because of Ashley” — was layered with multiple meanings.

For most politicians, such stories are for adornment, amplifying the logic of the speech. For Obama, by contrast, logic is the setting for gem-like narratives. Like the Biblical stories in black churches, his stories don’t simply illustrate his point. They are his point. And that, I think, helps explain Obama’s appeal. Most politicians, relying on the principles of sociology and political science, start with facts or polling data and, if needed, round out their talks with what they sometimes see as “mere” anecdotes. Obama, relying on the traditions of literature and the humanities, understands that symbolic narrative can often convey a moral message better than data-driven discourse.

Which explains why the Democratic primary features two such different candidates. On one side of the party’s individual-versus-community divide are those who, seeing sociologically, build science-like constructs in which the community trumps the individual. On the other side are those who, seeing narratively, use the literary imagination to focus more on the lives of real people — flawed, imperfect, but authentic — than the group. If Obama’s speech had an unfamiliar but welcome resonance, it was because he spoke to an almost-forgotten hunger in us all for the symphonic, elevating, and deeply moral stories of real, recognizable people. Will that win nominations? Who knows. But it certainly makes good speeches.

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

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

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Last week’s pyrotechnic transformation of Eliot Spitzer — from governor of the state of New York to Client 9 in an international prostitution ring — left his supporters speechless, his Wall Street enemies elated, and the nation grasping for meaning. As his career pinwheeled into millions of glittering bits, it provoked a shower of responses to the one-word question on everybody’s lips: Why?

Some charge it up to the pride and ego engendered by power. Others see it as the bitter fruits of a neglected marriage. For some, it’s nothing but garden-variety lust. For others, it evinces a deep psychological dysfunction. But on one point the public, the pundits, and the press are in wide agreement: What Spitzer did was wrong.

That, of course, is a moral judgment. It depends on a values-based perspective. But is such a perspective valid? Is ethics (as the relativists want us to think) merely subjective, existing only in the eye of the beholder? Or is there a platform of widely shared values from which to judge right and wrong?

Our research at the Institute for Global Ethics convinces us not only that such a global platform exists but that it can be articulated readily as a kind of five-fingered hand. When Spitzer’s actions are assessed against these five core values, it’s clear why the public is so quick to say he was wrong.

• Honesty. Spitzer’s liaisons with prostitutes betray a calculated dishonesty even with those closest to him — his family, staff, and probably even his security team — in order to cloak his secret life.

• Responsibility. Using his governorship for personal indulgence, he irresponsibly risked extortion, kidnapping, even assassination. Knowing what a prostitute will do for a thousand dollars from a client, what might she do for a million from his enemy?

• Respect. The disrespect for his close associates, as well as for his elected office, is evident. Even more appalling is his apparent contempt for the public, whose trust he betrayed in such an egregious ways by twisting public service into private exploitation.

• Fairness. As a public prosecutor, he demanded exacting penalties for those found guilty. As governor, he placed himself above the law, in blatant disregard of the principle that the law must be fair, even handed, uniform, and equitable.

• Compassion. The most haunting photographs of this saga will include those of his wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, whose face captured the enormity of a betrayal of compassion — for her and for their daughters — by the one who should have been the most caring.

Not surprisingly, then, the public confidently reads Spitzer’s story as a tale of moral failure. But what makes it particularly offensive is the searing hypocrisy of his stand. Not only did he set himself up as the reformer. Not only did he go after financial deviousness and constitutional lawbreaking — two charges he himself now may have to face. Not only did he earlier attack prostitution rings in New York. But he clothed his crusade in the garments of high moral outrage and ethical probity.

Of the three salient lessons from his case, that’s the first. Hypocrisy, cynicism, and apathy are the greatest challenges to ethics. But cynicism and apathy are less formidable — the former because cynics are often self-critical and are smart enough to change, and the latter because the apathetic often can be shaken awake when the issues become engaging and relevant. Hypocrisy, however, grows more entrenched with every successful deception. Spitzer’s history as a prosecutor suggests that behind the moral righteousness lay an ego and a will that used the language of the five values without always embodying their spirit.

The second lesson concerns the devastations of unbridled sexuality. As Spitzer’s revelations were unfolding last week, two parallel stories hit the papers. One, based on a survey by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reported that a quarter of the country’s teenage girls have been infected with some form of sexually transmitted disease. Another, from Mexico City, reported that groping and verbal harassment of women on public busses has grown to such proportions that a new women-only bus service is being offered and is scheduled for expansion. At their core, these two stories are about disrespect for the dignity of women and the tendency of men to treat women as objects rather than as individuals. Seen in this light, the Spitzer story is not about a victimless crime. Nor is it about an unwarranted invasion by the public into a man’s private life. It’s about a high-profile example in an epidemic of unpunished sensuality that is global in its scope and devastating in its consequences.

The third lesson is the hopeful one. It concerns David Paterson,the legally blind lieutenant general of New York, who suddenly has become the state’s governor. Apparently as jovial and decent as his predecessor was prideful and harsh, he reminds us that even the worst organizational cataclysms can have positive outcomes. That’s a needed reminder just now, as trust in individuals, institutions, and markets is being tested. Spitzer, falling so suddenly from such a height, made us ask, Can anyone be trusted? Paterson at least gives us hope that the answer is yes.

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

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

by Rushworth M. Kidder

This is a tale of two cell phones. It is, to paraphrase Charles Dickens, a story of the best of technologies and the worst of technologies. It is about one cell phone that saved a life and another that took life away. And in true Dickensian fashion, it raises profound social and ethical questions about what it means to be modern — and whether technology really is morally neutral.

The tale starts in the leafy summer of New York’s Finger Lakes region, with five teenage girls celebrating their graduation last June from Fairport High School, an Erie Canal town near Rochester. Driving to a lakeside cottage owned by the parents of one girl, Bailey Goodman, they were killed when the SUV she was driving veered into an oncoming tractor-trailer. According to police records, her cell phone had been used at 10:05 P.M. to send a text message to a friend in another town, who replied at 10:06. The first report of the accident — a call to 911 from one of her friends in the car behind — came in at 10:07.

Autopsies have ruled out alcohol or drugs as a factor in the crash, though sheer inexperience may have contributed: Goodman was driving on a junior license that prohibited her from driving after 9:00 P.M. But was she also driving while texting — a phenomenon now known as DWT? Her phone was never found. “We will never be able to clearly state that she was the one that was doing any text messages,” said a police spokesman.

But text messaging is enormously popular — so much so that state legislatures are considering following Washington State and New Jersey in outlawing DWT. Assessing current research on the topic in its January 2008 issue, State Legislatures Magazine reports that an estimated 73 percent of cell-phone subscribers use them while driving, and that a recent Zogby poll “found that 66 percent of drivers between the ages of 18 and 24 confess that they drive-while-texting.” The magazine also reports that an estimated 80 percent of motor vehicle crashes “involve some form of driver inattention” such as that caused by DWT.

Not surprisingly, proponents of tougher DWT restrictions are citing the Fairport case as casting more than a reasonable doubt on the notion that texting is a silly but inevitable driving behavior among the young. This case also strengthens those who think that cell-phone technology is not morally neutral but a clear moral hazard, bringing with it severe damage to individuals and society.

But listen to the second tale. It unfolded last month in Fargo, North Dakota, following a cold snap that registered minus 38 degrees Fahrenheit without counting the wind chill. On that bitterly cold Sunday afternoon, Terry Higdem began drinking heavily. Then he began threatening his former girlfriend with death. “I’m taking you [expletive deleted] hostage,” he told her as she drove him to a local Holiday Inn, according to a report in the Fargo Forum. “Do you wanna die tonight, ‘cuz I want to die.”

Newspaper reporters can’t usually quote exactly what was said in the privacy of a vehicle. This time was different. At 9:34 that night, police dispatchers got a curious cell-phone call. Asking questions, they got no response. But they could hear an alarming conversation going on. Not only had Higdem’s 21-year-old hostage surreptitiously dialed 911 on a phone she kept out of sight, but she continued to ask him where he wanted her to go. She also began commenting on local landmarks she was passing. Police officers quickly caught on, followed her clues, spotted the car within 15 minutes of her call, and arrested Higdem without incident — with the phone that very possibly saved her life still transmitting the entire proceeding.

These are grisly and Dickensian tales, to be sure. But they illustrate the downside and the upside of cell-phone technology. Who can deny the power of this technology to foment disaster at Fairport and deliverance at Fargo? Does that mean that, on average, cell-phone technology is morally neutral? Whatever your answer, one thing seems clear: The technology is widespread, irreversible, and transformative. Where, these days, is a teen that doesn’t text — or a driver unaware that cell phones are wise security measures?

How, then, should we respond to this high-contrast picture? Maybe an answer lies in another technology at the heart of both these tales: the automobile. It too is wildly popular, amazingly liberating, and evidently deadly. We don’t condemn its use, but we are unflinching in our demand that nobody gets to use it without first undergoing serious training.

But where, these days, is the education about how to use the cell phone? We may not need to issue cell-phone licenses, but can we afford not to spend time — in schools, at home, at work, and in the media — talking with teens about how Bailey Goodman deserved to live and Terry Higdem deserved to get caught? Can we afford not to train a generation to deal better with the best and worst of cell phones?

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

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

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Is ethics worth $40 billion? Not officially. Last week’s stunning announcement from the U.S. Air Force — that Boeing had lost a massive contract for a new fleet of refueling tankers — has been couched in strictly economic terms. In announcing that the company’s 50-year franchise to build those famous gas stations in the sky had been handed to a partnership between Europe-based EADS (the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company, makers of the Airbus) and Northrop Grumman, Air Force acquisitions chief Sue Payton insisted that the choice was based only on the “requirements of the war fighter” balanced with “the best interests of the taxpayer.” It was never debated, she insisted, as a choice between jobs for U.S. or European workers. Nor was it framed in terms o