How good people make tough choices: Resolving the dilemmas of ethical living
Kidder’s book entitled as above makes interesting reading on what people encounter in their day to day lives as ethical dilemmas with tough choices of choosing or deciding between right vs. right. Kidder went to the extent of establishing an Ethics Institute inviting people to join a think tank for resolving the tough choices. It was while the author was interviewing in 1986 Barbara Tuchman, twice Pulitzer Prize historian, he was warned of imminent breakdown of public morality unable to make choices between two right ethical decisions an issue as serious as The Nuclear Threat, Environmental Degradation, The population explosion, The North-South economic gap between the developed and developing worlds and The need for education reform.
In this context, the author recalls the case of a librarian who faced the tough choice between maintaining confidentiality of the library’s client that enquired over phone the state laws on rape and disclosing his identity and phone number to a police officer that demanded the caller’s identity and contact information upon overhearing the conversation between the librarian and the caller. The officer explained the necessity of nabbing a serial rapist which this caller may happen to be. The librarian was nonplussed because she owed a duty to the community on the one hand and the duty to maintain the confidentiality of the caller on the other as part of her professional ethics. If she refused to divulge the identity, there could be every possibility another rape happening in the following night. If she did divulge the identity, the caller might as well turn out of a student researching on rape laws. The choice she encountered was right-versus-right kind. The right to support the community and the right keep the confidentiality were both right for the librarian whose values were so well defined. Has she been less concerned about the confidentiality and felt more concerned about the larger community interests, she would have turned over the caller’s identity or had she been dedicated to maintain her profession as a gate keeper of society’s information, she might have disregarded her obligations to the larger community. And she would not have felt any conflict with the importance of a social need.
There is another case of a California-based executive of a large corporate manufacturing concern. Immediately after assuming the responsibility of the manager of the company’s California’s manufacturing plant, he came into conflict with right vs. right. The Hollywood- based film institute that used the parking space of the manufacturing plant as it did every year free of cost of on holiday offered the new manager $ 500 as was the custom with the previous manager. But without knowing the custom, the new manager asked the institute to make out a check in favor of the corporation he worked for. When the film institute informed him that the practice was to pay the previous manager as a personal compliment, the new manager faced the dilemma as to whether to let the prevailing practice to continue or turn over the check to the corporation that was apt to make investigations of the how previous years payments were accounted causing trouble for the ex-manager. Or was it right to accept the payment as a personal favor for after the manager just as the old manager sacrificed his holiday for the sake of the shooting.
Thus, tough choices are setting one right value against another that people face in their day to day life be it corporate, professional, personal, civic, international, educational, or religious. The author provides several examples: the right to protect the endangered species and the right to provide jobs for loggers. The right of a woman to decide on conditions affecting her body and the right to protect the unborn children. The right to provide education to children in the finest public schools and the right to prevent ever increasing tax burden on the society. The right to provide equal opportunities regardless of race or ethnicity or the right to give special status to those deprived of opportunities in the past. The right to desist from getting entangled with the internal affairs of the sovereign nations and the right to help the helpless nations in war regions. The right to stop a less performing sports person under the pretext of his having been found drunk the night before to participate in the championship next morning and the right to field a better team instead the next day. The right to discourage import goods from nations not meeting environmental standards and to provide jobs at low wages for people from those countries. Whether it is right to admonish a cleric for having an affair with a parishioner or to pardon him for the only mistake, he has ever committed. Whether it is right to obtain competitor’s costs by clandestine means or through proper channel. Whether it is right to spend for a family vacation or save the money for children’s education. Whether it is right to support a minority opinion or allow a majority to prevail at the same time in one’s club. Whether it is right to support a creative photographer to exhibit his creations at a local museum or to lend support to the community in its effort to avoid display of pornographic or racially offensive materials. Whether it is right to punish employees for making decisions detrimental to the firm or give them another chance giving them a lesser punishment. The author questions whether there are no right versus wrong choices at all or what is wrong for someone, is right for some other. The author is quick to answer there are indeed right versus wrong choices, but they are quite different from the right vs. right ones. He names cheating on taxes, lying under oath, running red lights, inflating expense account, buying under 12 movie tickets for fourteen year old, overstating damage done to the vehicle for insurance purposes are clearly wrong and are very different from right versus right ones. There is no question of dilemma over the former. The latter strike at one’s most profound and central values and it is difficult to resolve between right vs. right unless by pretending that one of them is wrong. The author names the former category as moral temptations and the latter as ethical dilemmas. Unlike moral temptations, ethical dilemmas involve tough choices and are painful because they truth vs. loyalty, individual vs. community, short-term vs. long-term, and justice vs. mercy. Most of them are literally justice vs. mercy although people call them differently as law vs. Love, equity vs. compassion, or fairness vs. affection. These the author calls as dilemma paradigms and explains them in detail in later chapters. However, the examples of these paradigms are as follows.
Truth vs. loyalty: A professional working for a defense electronics manufacturing firm was noticing frequent layoffs as their order book started narrowing. The firm did reemploy the laid off workers when the order book began fast filling up. However, the professional’s boss confided with him about the possible retrenching of a senior employee in the near future and took assurance from the professional not to divulge it to the senior employee at any cost. However, soon after the senior employee approached the professional and enquired about the prospects of his continuing in the job which request “landed the professional squarely in the truth versus loyalty dilemma”. Truth compels him to divulge the prospects, and the loyalty prevents him. Whichever way he chooses should be right for him though he cannot choose both.
Individual vs. Community: In the mid-1980s when there was little known about the HIV, the administrator of residential care facility received a letter from a nearby hospital where the care facility’s five inmates had undergone surgery and the blood used in the surgery was possibly HIV-infected and therefore asked the administrator to send them back for HIV testing and treatment. Now the administrator faced a real dilemma whether to divulge the fact to the inmates. He was sure that if the fact were divulged, the staff at the care facility would not enter the inmates’ room and give them care. If it was not divulged, there was every possibility of one of the staff contracting AIDS and he would be guilty. Although the inmates eventually tested negative, the administrator was concerned with both individual rights as well as the community rights. Individual rights concerned the five inmates’ privacy and safeguarding of their medical records. Hence, it was in a way right to keep mum about their status. At the same time, the administrator has a duty to safeguard the interests of the community by protecting it from the disease. The staff had not signed on for hazardous duty but were merely working as unskilled workers and not as members of a life-endangering profession. The moment the news was broke, there was every possibility of not reporting for work from next day onwards. If it is easy to say that one of the choices is wrong, it is certainly not an ethical dilemma. Merely analyzing a set of ethical dilemmas is not to resolve it. The author suggests ways to resolve the dilemma by choosing the one that is the nearest right in the given circumstances by applying certain principles of decision making drawn from the theories of moral philosophy. There are three theories that can be help resolve right versus right issues. The authors label the principles as ends-based, rule-based, care based. Ends-based has the roots in the utilitarianism theory that dictates to choose “whatever produces the greatest good for the greatest number”. This involves cost-benefit analysis, and modern legislation are drafted on the basis of utilitarian principles. Rule-based thinking has the roots in the theory of categorical imperative propounded by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. This principle requires one to follow what everyone follows to create the greatest good or the greatest worth of character. Known as the Golden rule, care-based thinking teaches one to do to others what one expects them to do to oneself. These rules guide people to exercise their moral rationality by looking at the dilemma through different perspectives.
Chapter 2
According to Kidder, ethics can be regarded as one’s conscience or morality. It helps acting as a responsible authority, acting with integrity, showing respect for the community and the environment. The author says that moral perversion has led to the killing of millions of people because of people in authority could not differentiate between the right and the wrong. People violate law and fail to comply with rules by ignorance or intention. Moral rectitude is violated when the shop-lifting goes un-reported, the dog is left unfed, and plagiarism is not taken seriously. The inner core helps people to differentiate the right from the wrong. In its absence, people fail to recognize their wrongful actions. It is ironical that ethics is a much talked about subject when lying, cheating among students, professionals have been on the increase.
Chapter 3
Just as physical fitness, people should have ethical fitness by being able to tell right from the wrong and live by it. It could be achieved by practicing it daily through unconscious, natural or even accidental efforts. And it should be maintained just like physical fitness for it can be evasive. Ethical conduct is a highly noble human attitude of caring for others, involving in dialogue, balancing, compromise, rationality and negotiating solutions. There is no use trying to distinguish between morals and ethics which the philosophers use interchangeably in their dialogues. The author refers to Moulton's proposition that when ethics fails, law fills the vacuum. Moulton's worry lies in the fact that there are innumerable state and federal laws encroaching the place of ethics that is a warning that ethical decay will lead to hyper-regulation.
Chapter 4
Moulton has defined ethics as "obedience to the unenforceable". A value is an end itself and defined as a value worthy of esteem. Core values involve moral, political, economic and culinary values. Lettuce values are moral, and they are strongly held values. Code of ethics is comparable to Ten Commandments with the first four defining God's relation to man and the remaining six commanding not to steal, envy or covet, etc as prohibitions without saying what must be done. The Boy Scot Law shows that the Scouts are loyal and friendly with different laws for girls and boys requiring that the boys should be kind to all, but the girls should be kind only to animals. West Point Code that is a concise ethical code directs one's own actions and requires attention to the others' actions. The code of ethics must be brief and centered on moral values. In Tylenol tampering case, Johnson and Johnson did the right thing. Coe values such as injunctions against killing, lying, stealing, immorality, etc. are universal. The authors say that the codes of ethics are shared reference points.
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
In dealing with the resolution principles, the author talks about journalism that is capable of bridging differences. Journalism helps share knowledge and brings in new revelations.
- One should do what is best for the majority but, that does not mean minority interests should be ignored. This ends-based thinking known as utilitarianism simply means that it should result in the rightness of actions giving greatest happiness for the greatest number as posited by Bentham (1748-1832). Mill (1806-1873) propounded consequentialism to determine right and wrong by weighing the consequences or outcomes. The modern policy making flows from the utilitarian principle
- One should be guided by the highest sense principle which arises out of rule-based thinking. One should act according to inner conscience. The rule-based thinking seeks to act according to the maxim that could be made universal. This is in line with the categorical imperative principle that dictates that the law must be obeyed by one and all.
- The care-thinking posits that one should do what one expects others to do to oneself. That is one should act in a way that he would like others to act for him in similar circumstances. However, Kant does not approve of the principle in this sense saying that it is too simplistic to be supreme moral principle.
Chapter 8
Some check-points suggested by the Author who says there is only "Ethics" are; there should be a recognition of a moral issue in conflict. One should convince oneself whether one is morally obligated. One should gather relevant points. There should be a test for right vs. wrong issues, the legal test, stench test, ends-based test and the Mom test. Examine which of the right vs. right paradigms such as truth vs. loyalty, self vs. community, short-term vs. long-term and justice vs. mercy is in issue. The resolution process by applying ends-based principle, rule-based principle or the care-based principle. Enquire into a possibility of a "trilemma", i.e., whether there is a third way to settle the conflict as an unforeseen and highly creative way of resolution.
Work Cited
Kidder, Rushworth M. How Good People Make Tough Choices: How good people make tough choices: Resolving the dilemmas of ethical living. Harper Collins, 2009.Print
