Taking Ethics Seriously

Why Ethics Is an Essential Tool for the Modern Workplace

John Hooker

Carnegie Mellon University

The Central Role of Ethics

The departure area for my flight was noisy and crowded as passengers boarded by zones. My boarding pass was marked Zone 2, so I stepped back to allow the Zone 1 passengers to enter the gate. But they kept coming. A suspiciously large fraction of the crowd boarded before Zone 2 was even announced. I couldn’t help noticing that most had bulky suitcases in tow.

I thought about how the airlines created a demand for more cabin luggage space when they began charging fees to check bags. The result is a scramble for overhead space every time passengers board a plane, not to mention the headaches for the flight attendants who must make sure the overhead doors shut. The advantage of boarding early is clear.

I managed to spot a couple of the boarding passes carried by Zone 1 passengers. They were not marked Zone 1. Apparently, the gate agent was lax about enforcing the zones. When I finally entered the plane, I noticed that the early boarders were sitting throughout the cabin, not in the back or along the windows as one might expect from an efficient boarding system. Perhaps the airline rewarded frequent fliers with early boarding, regardless of their seat location. But this many? I also noticed that the overhead space was nearly filled with large carry-ons.

Imagine that we debrief some of these passengers in a focus group. Those who dutifully boarded with their zone would doubtless defend their compliance, although they might regret the hassle that resulted. Those who boarded early would be equally vigorous in their defense. I can hear the arguments now: It’s the airline’s responsibility to enforce its rules. The airline created this situation, not me, by its ridiculous practice of charging for checked luggage. The airline gives me the option of a carry-on bag, and if I must board early to find space, that’s the airline’s problem. Besides, why shouldn’t I have as much right to the space as anybody else? And on and on.

If this little matter doesn’t generate enough heat, we could ask passengers in a cramped economy cabin whether it’s okay to recline the seat all the way back, assaulting the knees and computer screen of the person behind it. Some would say that it is rude and selfish to make another person miserable for the slightly greater comfort of a reclined seat. Others will defiantly insist that their ticket gives them the right to use a certain seat, and that seat has a recline button. Everyone has the same right, and those who don’t like this arrangement can take the train. I’m not making this up, as these are arguments I lifted from an online forum on the subject—minus the insults and hate speech that are always found in such places.

REACHING AGREEMENT

Perhaps airlines have a way of bringing out the worst in us, but I see these little disagreements as evidence of a larger phenomenon. If we can’t agree on how we should board a plane, or even adjust a seat, can we agree on what to do about wealth inequality, immigration, or terrorism? More broadly, can we agree on how to manage the complex, interlocking systems that shape the world around us?

The complexity of modern life is no more evident than in the workplace. Whether we work in a business corporation, a healthcare facility, or a government agency, we find ourselves enmeshed in a vast web of social practices: commercial markets, legal regulatory frameworks, political discourse, media publicity, and the online world. We must not only somehow deal with these complex and conflicting forces, but we must rely on them to get anything done.

We all know that physical infrastructure is essential. Without energy supply, transportation, communication, and far-flung supply chains, we would quickly perish. It is no different with the social infrastructure that underlies everything we do. The physical systems themselves would collapse in an hour without the social cooperation on which they depend. We would not be able to turn on the light switch were it not for countless individuals who come together to finance, build, and maintain the power grid.

Making the parts of physical infrastructure interact properly requires a certain kind of know-how, which we call engineering. Maintaining social infrastructure likewise requires know-how, but there is a big difference: We are the parts that must work together. This means that we must all know what to do. Much of this knowledge is technical and domain specific. A banker must know how to assess a loan application, and a construction contractor must know how to write specifications for a supplier. But a broader type of knowledge is necessary. We must know how to agree on ground rules that make these social practices sustainable. We must agree on how much information should be shared in negotiation, what kind of competitive practices are allowed, what duties we owe our clients and customers, when employees can be fired, what we should post on the Internet, and what we can dump into the air and water. Fortunately, there is a field of study that provides guidance in this area. It is called ethics.

Some say that regulating conduct in the world of work is a task for lawyers and legislators, not ethicists. A legal framework is extremely useful, to be sure. But it is only part of the solution. To begin with, we must decide which laws are ethical and just, and this requires ethical judgments. Beyond this, after a moment’s reflection, we realize that real life is far too intricate to be governed by the ponderous mechanisms of the law, particularly in the complex and rapidly changing world we inhabit today. A lawsuit or legal prosecution is an expensive undertaking that requires months of tedious evidence gathering and sometimes years for resolution. Only the most egregious transgressions can be regulated in this way, and the legal system is already overwhelmed with them. The day-to-day operation of our social systems requires that the vast majority of us voluntarily comply with norms of conduct that we agree are reasonable. Reaching this kind of rational consensus is precisely the task of ethics.

WHY WE ARE SOMETIMES UNETHICAL

Even those who acknowledge the importance of ethics often see the main problem as getting people to be ethical, rather than deciding what is ethical. This comes out in professional ethics workshops I lead. Many participants are impatient to get past normative analysis and move on to the issue of what to do about unethical coworkers and bosses. To be sure, there are plenty of unscrupulous people out there. More often than not, however, unethical behavior in organizations stems from an inability to identify and defend what is right, rather than from a failure to do what we know is right.

To illustrate this fact, look no further than one of the most famous case studies in the annals of professional ethics. In the early 1970s, the Ford Motor Company began to receive reports that its budget car, the Ford Pinto, occasionally burst into flame after a rear-end collision. Serious injury or death frequently resulted. Investigation revealed that even a low-speed collision could cause studs protruding from the rear axle housing to puncture the fuel tank, resulting in an explosion. Ford could have fixed the problem at a cost of $11 per car. But it decided against the fix, on the ground that the cost outweighed the benefit. As the problem became more widely known, Ford finally redesigned the gas tank in the 1977 model, but it did not recall earlier models until the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration declared them defective in 1978. Meanwhile, a spectacular 1978 crash that killed three teenage girls attracted media attention, and an Indiana grand jury indicted Ford on a criminal charge of reckless homicide. Ford escaped a conviction, but its executives were widely condemned for what was seen as a callous decision.

We have rare insight into this case because one of the Ford managers who supported the company’s decision, Dennis Gioia, wrote an honest and self-critical article about the affair.^* After leaving Ford, Gioia became a business school professor and summoned the courage to use the Pinto case study in his MBA classes. While at Ford, Gioia was convinced that he made the right decision, and he practiced what he preached by driving a Pinto himself. He remained convinced for several years while using the case study in his classes, even though some of his students were outraged by his conduct. He eventually changed his mind, but what is relevant here is that his article gives no clear reasons for this change. This suggests to me that there was no solid rational basis for Gioia’s view either before or after he changed his mind.

Gioia neither was, nor is, a “bad person.” Quite the opposite. His article tells us that he went into the auto industry with a strong desire to make a positive contribution to society, and one can presume that he entered academia with a similar motivation. What is needed here is not better character, but a better intellectual framework for deciding such issues. We will find in Chapter 12 that the Pinto dilemma is actually fairly straightforward to resolve, after the necessary conceptual equipment is at hand. Gioia’s article goes to on analyze the organizational and psychological factors that influenced this thinking, which are important, of course. We ought to shape organizations and habits of mind that lead to ethical choices. However, we cannot do this until we know which choices are ethical. An essential part of shaping ethical institutions is building a capacity within them to identify and defend the right decision.

DOING ETHICS WITH OUR BRAINS

It’s not obvious how to resolve ethical issues like Ford’s, but it’s not obvious how to drive a car, either, and yet we learn to do it. With training and practice, we can all learn to think about ethical issues in a rational and objective fashion, and work toward consensus. Then why don’t we do it more often?

I think it’s because we don’t know it’s possible. Popular culture tells us that ethics is a matter of gut feeling, simplistic platitudes, or personal values, with no objective way to resolve issues. Few of us have ever been exposed to rigorous ethical argumentation, and so we naturally have no idea what it is like. This is despite our centuries-old heritage of ethical reasoning, developed by some of the smartest human beings who ever walked the earth. We have forgotten this tradition. As the world becomes increasingly crowded and complicated, with an increasingly urgent need for rational consensus on how we are going to live together, we have cast aside the very tools our forebearers developed for this purpose. We have forgotten how to do ethics with our brains.

That’s why I wrote this book. I attempt to lay a conceptual foundation for ethical analysis that I believe has the best chance of building rational consensus. It draws on insights from the past but goes beyond the classical theories by refining them and integrating them into a unified framework. This doesn’t mean the framework allows us to turn a crank and get the right answer. Rather, it sets out requirements that any valid ethical argument must satisfy. To get results, we must take these as a starting point and work toward an ethical consensus.

One might think this is a job for professional philosophers and ethicists. The professionals preserve and develop our intellectual heritage, but unfortunately, they have largely failed to knit together ethical theory and practice. The theories provide insight but are typically too general to apply to messy, real-world cases. Even in the field of normative ethics, which focuses on the resolution of practical dilemmas, the dominant mode of reasoning is to seek a reflective equilibrium of moral intuitions and principles, an approach that cannot resolve fundamentally differing intuitions. This leaves us no alternative but to take on the ethical task ourselves. It has to be this way in any case, because ethics, unlike physics, biology, or mathematics, can’t be left solely to the professionals. We must all be ethicists, because we are the parts of the system that must work together.

The heart of ethical reasoning lies in constructing arguments for why one choice is right rather than another. This requires more discipline than one might think. It is not enough for me to conjure up an argument that I think is convincing, because it probably won’t sound convincing to someone with a different perspective. We humans are very talented at rationalizing our behavior, which means it is vital to distinguish mere rationalization from correct analysis. The only way to make progress is to agree on a few bedrock principles of ethical reasoning that everyone can accept before any specific issues are considered. Then we must stick with these principles when we analyze a dilemma, even when we don’t like the outcome. We do this in other fields and we can do it in ethics.

2

Myths and Misconceptions

Popular culture has clogged our brains with layer upon layer of myths and misconceptions about ethics. These preconceived notions too often obscure the vital role of ethics in everyday life. They lead us to believe that there can be no rational analysis in ethics. It is imperative to clear out this sludge before we can make progress toward building a practical framework for resolving ethical issues.

WHY WE HAVE ETHICS

The first misconception is that ethics exists to judge our moral worth. It does not. Its task is not to decide whether we are good people or bad people. There may be a higher power that judges us, but the mistaken notion that ethics makes this judgment raises an unnecessary barrier to rational discourse. We go into an ethical discussion with an emotional investment in an outcome that vindicates our past actions or beliefs. We find ourselves fabricating arguments to support a preconceived position, which makes it practically impossible to come to consensus.

It’s no surprise that we think this way, because people so often use ethics as a basis for judging us. When mom says to big sister, “It’s wrong to hit your little brother. Bad girl!” she makes two very different statements, only the first of which is an ethical statement. Religions have made valuable contributions to ethical discourse, but they also may pass judgment on people who go astray, perhaps consigning them to eternal damnation or samsara (endless death and rebirth). This kind of judgment may or may not be a useful practice, but it doesn’t come from ethics.

The purpose of ethics is not to judge us, but to help us agree on how we are going to live and work together. It is a negotiation tool. It provides a thought framework within which we can reach rational consensus on the ground rules.

We often fail to appreciate how important this is. We may think, for example, that we can just vote on the rules. But what if some people disagree with the outcome of the vote? We say that they should abide by the vote anyway. But this means we need prior agreement that we are going to honor the results of the vote. We can’t arrive at this agreement by taking another vote, because people will ask why they should respect that vote, and so forth in an infinite regress. We have to agree, before any votes are taken, that we should respect the outcome of voting. Read that again: We should respect the outcome of voting. This is an ethical claim, and we have to agree on it. In fact, we must agree on a wide array of ethical principles if we are to live and work together.

It is tempting to believe that in the real world, law enforcement does the heavy lifting, not ethics. We behave decently because we get in trouble if we don’t, not because of ethical scruples. Ethics helps now and then, but it’s not central to the process. The truth is precisely the opposite. If you doubt this, imagine that tomorrow morning, every motorist in the city starts driving through red lights. What can the police do about it? There are thousands of intersections and not nearly enough police to watch them. The city might install video cameras at every intersection, but who is going to analyze the images, send out citations, and collect half a million fines every day? What if motorists simply refuse to pay the fines? Or suppose that tonight, people start burglarizing houses and apartments all over the city. There is no way the police can stop it. They can’t be everywhere at once.

It is the same in the world of work. Law courts and regulatory agencies cannot enforce compliance. The legal system is clogged with a multi-year backlog of cases, even though only a fraction of disputes result in legal action, and most of these are settled out of court. Regulatory agencies have nowhere near the funding and staff necessary to police behavior. Even if they did, organizations can take advantage of legal loopholes or stay a step ahead of the rules.

Legal and ethical conduct will prevail only if most of us voluntarily comply with the rules (in both letter and spirit), leaving the regulators and police to take care of a few people on the fringes who don’t cooperate. And most of us won’t voluntarily comply unless we agree on how we should behave. We don’t run red lights or break into houses because we agree that we shouldn’t. On the other hand, we regularly violate the speed limit when we think it is too low. In fact, I am told that in some areas, traffic engineers first determine how fast people are driving and then set the speed limit so that most of them will be within it.

Agreement, not enforcement, is at the core of the process, and ethics is the way we reach agreement. In the Western tradition, ethics accomplishes this primarily through rational consensus. We adopt rules that seem reasonable. Law courts, for example, resolve disputes according to common law principles that were hammered out over the centuries so as to be acceptable to all parties. The loser, as well as the winner, must view the rules as fair. William Blackstone’s eighteenth-century treatise, Commentaries on the Laws of England, was a major legal milestone because it provided a rationale for Anglo-Saxon common law. The book, which was written for ordinary people, made English law seem reasonable and even inevitable to them. The field of ethics must provide a similar service, but in a much larger context.

THE ROLE OF RELIGION

Why do we resist the idea that ethics can be a rational endeavor? One factor seems to be its historical association with religion. Popular culture today often views religion as a haven for stubborn belief in irrational doctrines, not to mention extremism and intolerance. I have two responses. First, we can carry out ethical reasoning perfectly well without reference to religious belief, and I do so in this book. Second, this is a one-sided view of religion that ignores its long and rich history of ethical analysis. I will focus on the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), which have had the largest role in developing our ethical sensibilities.

Despite the popular image of God handing down the Ten Commandments on stone tablets, these religions have viewed ethics as a matter of rational debate, not divine fiat, for at least twenty-eight centuries. It was in the eighth century BCE when the prophet Isaiah became concerned about corruption and moral decay. He saw God (Jahweh) as disapproving of this behavior but didn’t portray God as laying down the law. The first chapter of the book of Isaiah quotes Jahweh as saying, “Come, let us reason together.” Scholars tell us that the Hebrew words refer to the kind of argumentation that occurs in a court of law. Even in this ancient time, God is inviting the Jewish people to a debate about ethics, so they can resolve their differences in a rational manner. The juridical approach to ethics continued to develop in Jewish culture and eventually produced the great rabbi and pacifist Hillel, who helped to found the Talmudic tradition of scholarship. He is known for his enunciation of the Golden Rule and emphasis on civility and compassion for all human beings, both of which appear in the teachings of Jesus a few years later.

The Jewish respect for law and justice permeates Western civilization to the core and continues to shape our ethical outlook. To take just one example, the idea of public interest law (think about Ralph Nader) was introduced to the United States by legal activist Louis Brandeis, who later became a Supreme Court justice. Brandeis was deeply influenced by the Jewish perspective of his uncle Lewis Dembitz and even changed his middle name to Dembitz in his honor. His brilliant legal arguments were also largely responsible for establishing a legal right to privacy in the United States, a paramount concern in our age of electronic surveillance.^*

The Christian faith has accumulated an equally impressive record of ethical thought. Perhaps best known is the natural law tradition associated with the Roman Catholic thinker Thomas Aquinas and ultimately grounded in Aristotelian philosophy. Natural law theory holds that ethical principles can be derived from a rational analysis of human nature. Its reliance on reason rather than divine edict was a strong attraction to such enlightenment figures as John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Francis Hutcheson. Hutcheson may not be a household name, but he was intellectual mentor to Adam Smith, whose statement about the “invisible hand” that governs a market economy is routinely quoted today.

Catholic thought is popularly viewed as fixated on abortion and contraception, but this overlooks centuries of social justice teachings that are as relevant today as ever. For example, Pope Francis released in 2013 an Apostolic Exhortation that addresses the pressing issue of economic inequality.^† It contains analysis that might very well appear in a secular tract. Many readers will find the Pope’s arguments unconvincing, but they are arguments nonetheless, not merely appeals to divine edict.

Islam has a long tradition of sophisticated ethical reasoning developed by the ulema, or community of Muslim scholars. A good example of Islamic teaching in today’s world is Islamic finance. It is primarily known for its rejection of interest on loans (riba al nasi’ah), which is prohibited by the Qur’an and was for centuries regarded as usurious and exploitive. Modern finance dismisses this perspective as outmoded, but we are also beginning to recognize the tendency of modern finance to exacerbate income inequality, encourage excessive risk taking, and trigger capital flight. Excessive risk lay behind the global financial crisis of 2008, and capital flight magnified the Asian financial crisis of 1997 as short-term investors pulled their money out of the region. Recent Islamic thinking uses the old misgivings about riba as a springboard for a critique of modern finance.

Interest-bearing loans are seen as problematic because lending banks assume too little risk relative to the borrower, which over time results in excessive power for banks and their owners. It’s an all-too-familiar issue in our era of banks that are “too big to fail.” Socially responsible investment in stocks, by contrast, is encouraged because the investor assumes risk proportionate to gains. Derivatives, short selling, and speculative trading are frowned upon because they are too much like gambling. They incur unnecessary risk (gharar) and lead to instability and capital flight. At a deeper level, gambling is immoral because it exacerbates injustice. The world is unjust enough already, and gambling only makes it worse by transferring wealth on the basis of chance rather than who deserves or needs it.

One can debate the soundness or economic efficiency of Islamic finance, but there can be little doubt that the financial crisis of 2008 would have been unthinkable in an Islamic financial system. The highly leveraged trading, subprime loans, mortgage-backed securities, and credit default swaps that precipitated the crisis are all haram (forbidden). We are also seeing an intermingling of ideas from Islamic finance with secular thinking about sustainable development, particularly in the sustainable banking movement.^*

Religion, then, has played a major role in the development of ethics, but not simply by laying down commandments. For centuries, religions have been working out a rational basis for moral precepts, much as Blackstone’s Commentaries did for the laws of England. I don’t claim that the ethical arguments in religious writings are adequate in today’s world. But they remind us that Western civilization has long relied on rational discourse to build consensus around ethical norms, even in a religious context. We abandon this practice at our peril.

ETHICS AND SELF-INTEREST

Another barrier to ethical reasoning is the popular view that people and organizations are motivated solely by self-interest, not by ethical scruples. Philosophers call this view psychological egoism. Perhaps the most interesting thing about psychological egoism is how much people want to believe it. It is imperative to deal with this theory, because anyone who accepts it is likely to dismiss ethical reasoning as pointless. Why worry about ethics when you are going end up acting in your self-interest anyway?

Common sense tells us that psychological egoism can’t be right. We all know of people who sacrifice self-interest to fight for their country or to care for children and elderly parents. We can’t forget the 441 fire fighters and other emergency workers who gave their lives while responding to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. There are countless not-for-profit (as well as for-profit) organizations that dedicate themselves to making the world better. None of this sounds like self-interest. Science also provides refuting evidence. Altruism appears to be in our genes, for example. There is a large literature on how biological evolution can favor altruistic behavior because it has survival value.* We are a stronger species when we support each other. Neurological research may have discovered a neurological basis for some of this behavior, in the form of mirror neurons in our brains that react to the experiences of others. These are neurons associated with pleasure or pain that fire when we observe pleasure or pain in others. They may help give us the capacity for empathy, enabling us care about other people as well as ourselves (although their role now appears more complicated than originally thought).^*

A remarkable volume by Matthieu Ricard, entitled Altruism, fills several hundred pages with research-based evidence for human altruism and empathy.^† Yet such research has little effect on the determined psychological egoist, who always has a retort. What appears to be altruism is really perceived self-interest. People provide personal care to elderly parents to avoid the guilt feelings of putting them in an institution. People join the military for employment or to feel good about being patriotic, and they go into battle to avoid shame or court-martial. Organizations work for a better world because this helps people to feel satisfied with themselves, or at any rate provides them a paycheck. I’m not sure what egoists would say about the 9/11 responders, but I’m sure they can imagine some kind of self-interested motivation.

It is not hard to see what is going on here. No conceivable behavior is allowed to count as evidence against psychological egoism. No matter how utter the sacrifice, there must be some self-interested reason for it, or else one wouldn’t do it. This strategy comes to the surface in an almost amusing way in the highly popular book Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, which uses economic concepts to explain everyday phenomena.^‡ Much of mainstream neoclassical economics rests on the assumption that incentives (i.e., perceived self-interest) motivate human behavior, at least in economic matters, and so it is no surprise that economists are partial to this view. In making a case for it, the book concedes that people sometimes appear to choose an action simply because it is right. But the authors say: Aha! In this case, people are motivated by moral incentives! Naturally, if any motivation (even a moral one) counts as an incentive, then it means nothing to say that behavior is motivated by incentives. As philosopher of science Karl Popper famously pointed out, a theory that has no conceivable refutation has no content.

Returning to common sense, beliefs about right and wrong motivate our behavior all the time, along with self-interest and other factors. We wait at the red light, even when there is no police officer in sight, because we believe it is wrong to drive through it. We make a right turn on red, under the same conditions, because we believe it is permissible to do so. We take care of our parents partly because we believe it is our obligation. We don’t take care of the neighbor’s parents partly because we don’t believe it is our obligation. And similarly with a thousand other behaviors.

Why do so many of us want to deny this common-sense psychology? Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” which I mentioned earlier, gives us a clue. Smith is the patron saint of our economic culture, because we credit him with showing us how self-interest lies at the foundation of the economy. We tirelessly quote his remark, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.”^* By pursuing self-interest, one is “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention,” namely the “public interest.”^† We are presumably to infer from this that (a) people are motivated by self-interest, and (b) this is good, because at least in a market-based economy, it leads to the betterment of all.

This portrait of human beings as self-interested might be seen as justifying our economic system, and perhaps this is why we seize upon it. Yet it is a gross misrepresentation of Adam Smith’s views. He entered the University of Glasgow at the tender age of 14, where he fell under the spell of Francis Hutcheson, a founding father of the Scottish Enlightenment. Hutcheson was an inspiring lecturer in moral philosophy who explicitly rejected psychological egoism, then and now associated with Thomas Hobbes. Hutcheson taught that many of our actions are motived by sympathy for others, a view that deeply influenced Smith. It is reflected in his book Theory of Moral Sentiments, which he wrote years later after returning to Glasgow as a professor.^‡ The very first sentence of the book states that human beings are often motivated by empathy, as well as self-interest, and the rest of the book elaborates on this proposition. I’m sure Smith would have felt vindicated by modern research on empathy.

The famous quotes about self-interest are lifted from Smith’s second book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which receives far more attention today. Some think that Smith changed his mind and corrected his earlier, naïve views on the goodness of human nature. But there is no evidence for this. Smith always viewed Theory of Moral Sentiments as his best work. He revised both books several times, last revising the book on moral sentiments shortly before his death in 1790. There is no reason to doubt that it reflects his final views on the subject. In any case, he clearly recognized that markets cannot rely solely on self-interest. He called for government regulation and progressive taxation to tame the excesses of selfish interest and ensure equal opportunity for everyone. In fact, after writing The Wealth of Nations, he resigned his post at the University of Glasgow and became a government regulator.

Perhaps we cherry-pick certain Smithian quotes because they support the concept of Homo economicus (economic man), which many see as underlying the key regulatory mechanism in the West since feudalism gave way to a market-oriented society. Economic man is motivated by a desire to maximize personal utility, at least when making economic decisions and perhaps in life in general. Economists tend to be particularly enthusiastic about Homo economicus, and many fondly cite the invisible hand passage in support of general equilibrium theories that arose in the nineteenth century and still dominate mainstream neoclassical economics today. These theories, at least in their purest form, see a free market economy as consisting of atomistic, self-interested individuals that maximize personal utility subject to scarce resources, resulting in a supply/demand equilibrium that is optimal in some sense. Ironically, the idea of Homo economicus is almost invariably associated with Smith, even though his actual views of human nature are more balanced and consistent with common sense, as we have seen.

Smith and Hutcheson were scarcely the first moral philosophers to remark the human tendency to altruism. A notable example is Mencius, whom Chinese refer to as Mèng Zĭ (Master Mèng). He is probably the most important Confucian philosopher aside from the sage himself, and he may have studied with a grandson of Confucius. Mencius taught that human nature is innately good, and that bad character is the result of society’s failure to cultivate this innate tendency through education and moral training. He was doubtless influenced by his mother, whom Chinese honor with the saying, Mèng mŭ sān qiān (“Mencius’s mother, three moves”). It refers to the fact that his mother moved the family three times to find quality education for her son.

Mencius defended his perspective with a parable. Suppose you hear a scream and spot a young child who is clinging to the side of a deep well, about to fall in. How would you react? You would rush over and save the child. Anyone but a monster would do the same. But why would do you do it? Mencius says it is not because you would enjoy the gratitude of the child’s family, or want to be recognized as a hero. You would rush to the rescue if the child were an orphan, or if no one ever learned about your heroism (and the child too young to remember). You would respond because it is part of your humanity. It is a manifestation of the altruistic impulse that lies in every human being, waiting to be cultivated.

I grant that we have selfish impulses as well as altruistic ones. The great truth in Mencian philosophy is the extent to which the resulting conduct depends on our training. We can learn almost any kind of behavior, from beastly to beatific. I will illustrate this with two stories of my own. One day while I was teaching in Zimbabwe, a student was scheduled to make a presentation in class. Malaria is endemic in parts of Africa, and it can become chronic in an individual, with the fever recurring after several weeks of dormancy. When I noticed that this student was not feeling well, I suggested that he take the day off. However, like all of my African students, he was very serious about education and insistent on attending every class. During his presentation, the fever became more intense, and he began to faint. Before I could move a muscle in response, fellow students rushed to his aid and helped him to a chair. While some hovered over him to offer comfort, others arranged to have him transported to the college clinic. I later learned that his classmates continued to be solicitous after class, checking on him regularly to make sure he was recovering. They told me that his relapse was brought on by news that his mother, who had been ill for some time, had died in a Sierra Leone hospital due to disruption caused by civil war. He managed to attend the next class (of course), during which his classmates watched him carefully for signs of trouble.

The second story takes place in my business school classroom in the United States. The room was packed with some seventy-five MBA students, nearly all of whom had several years’ experience in the business world. During a team presentation, one of the presenters suddenly stopped speaking, became beet red, and literally collapsed into a chair. I was alarmed, as I had no idea what could cause this reaction in a young man. I rushed to the front of the room and asked his teammates if they knew anything about his condition. They shrugged. I was about to telephone medics when the stricken student recovered enough to tell me that someone in the hall was waiting to take care of him. He later explained that he had a problem with a slipped disk in his spine (as I understand it) that could suddenly cause unbearable pain. He had arranged for someone to be nearby in case of emergency. This was an occasion on which I had no problem beating his classmates to the rescue. I distinctly recall that during the entire episode, they chatted casually and checked their Facebook pages, with no apparent concern for a classmate in agony. A few, well aware of the value of their time, seemed annoyed at the delay in the proceedings.

My purpose is not to pass judgment on my African or American students. Neither I nor the field of ethics has any interest in judging character. My point is that the degree of altruism in our behavior is largely dependent on our social conditioning. The Shona and other ethnic groups represented in my African classroom are strongly collectivist cultures in which people are expected to take care of their neighbors. People will literally give the clothes off their back to those in need (I know of an actual incident of this). Competition is frowned upon, even in the classroom, where students who excel too much over their fellows are subject to reproach. It is better to spend time helping others to succeed rather than trying to outperform them. Some students make it to college in the first place because the people of their village pooled their meager assets to help pay the tuition fees.

My MBA students are the product of very different backgrounds. Many of them grew up in the world’s most highly individualistic culture, that of the United States.^* All have been shaped by a business environment that relies heavily on competition and individual incentives as organizing principles. They also preach what they practice. It’s not only college sophomores who embrace psychological egoism, because MBA students are even more enthusiastic about it. If I suggest that altruism plays a role in the business world, they ridicule the thought. I personally know seasoned business people who want to make a positive contribution for its own sake and use business as a powerful instrument to accomplish this. Many of the twenty-somethings in my class bristle at this idea, viewing it as a fairy tale. One particularly outspoken student, who apparently learned about Thomas Hobbes in a philosophy course, kept insisting that a Hobbesian dog-eat-dog world is a far more accurate portrayal of human nature than my naïve faith in altruism. He instantly became a class hero.

The lesson in these stories is that our behavior is largely a product of our own self-conditioning and the ideology that goes with it totally so. Ethical analysis is, therefore, far from pointless. We can teach ourselves to reason together about ethics and, over time, condition ourselves to act in accordance with our conclusions. We can’t afford to let specious theories like psychological egoism distract us from this vital task.

MORAL DEVELOPMENT

Still another source of resistance to ethical analysis is the notion that ethics is something we learn from Mom and Dad in early childhood. By the time we are old enough to think analytically, our values are already set. So again, ethical reasoning is pointless.

This flies in the face of decades of research in developmental psychology. Early childhood is important, but we can grow ethically throughout life, right up into old age. The well-known psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg identified six stages of moral development, characterized by increasingly sophisticated forms of moral reasoning. In his view, most people never reach the final stage, but if they do, it is likely to be late in life.^* Robert Kegan, Carol Gilligan, Martin Hoffman, and John Gibbs provide alternative perspectives on moral development.^† Kohlberg’s work inspired a related literature on faith development, involving figures such as James Fowler and Sharon Parks.^‡

The two main lessons from this literature, for our purposes, are that moral development is closely tied to cognitive and social development, and it can continue throughout life. The precise sequence of stages is less important, because there are alternative ways of usefully conceptualizing the developmental process. I find it helpful to recognize three broad phases that illuminate how the various facets of personal development relate to each other.

The first stage begins in childhood and may extend through adolescence or beyond. It is characterized by heteronomy, meaning that we take our beliefs and values from others. We don’t reason critically or independently in any significant way but are dependent on family, friends, school, or some other authority for our views. Our interpersonal relations are similar, in that we rely on others for support or approval, whether it be family in the case of a child or peers in the case of an adolescent. Ethically, we live by norms handed down by others, which may reflect family discipline or school rules in younger years. If this stage persists into later years, we may uncritically accept company values in order to get ahead, or conventional legal constraints as defining right and wrong.

The second stage is one of ideology. It tends to begin in late teens, as we strive for independence. We learn how to think independently and criticize the ideas we passively accepted in earlier years. We may adopt an ideology that purports to explain everything, whether it be religious fundamentalism, Marxism, or laissez-faire capitalism as represented in the “objectivism” of Ayn Rand. Socially, we break away from the family and childhood environment as we consciously select a peer group that reflects our own values or point of view. Ethically, we choose our norms, but they must come in a neat package. They may flow from our religious or political ideology, or they may be based on some such maxim as, “Don’t do anything you wouldn’t want your mother to know about,” or “Don’t do anything you wouldn’t want to go viral on the Web.” Or like some college sophomores and MBA students, we may simply say, “Everybody is motivated by self-interest, so ethics doesn’t matter.”

The third stage brings autonomy in the sense that we work out our own views and values. If all goes well, it arrives in mature adulthood. We not only do our own thinking, but as a necessary part of this process, we learn to tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity. We accept that there is merit on both sides of an argument and that we will never reach a final answer. Nonetheless—and this is crucial—we persist in the quest for a reasonable solution. Socially, we learn to value others even when they have serious shortcomings. Our social circle expands from those of like mind to persons of widely different backgrounds and perspectives. Having established our independence, we are ready again to rely on others in a relationship of mutual support and community. Ethically, we recognize the complexity of issues and the multiplicity of legitimate viewpoints. Nonetheless, we continue working together toward rational consensus.

Notice how ethical reasoning develops in tandem with cognitive and social skills. We can’t make our own ethical choices until we declare independence from those who dictate norms to us, and we can’t declare independence until we find a basis for making ethical choices. Later on, we can’t form community with people of different backgrounds until we develop an ethical perspective that considers their point of view, and we can’t develop such a perspective until we have the intellectual capacity to arrive at rational consensus. Ethical reasoning is part of our development throughout life.

JUST A MATTER OF OPINION

We now arrive at the thorniest conceptual tangle of all. It takes various forms: Ethics is just a matter of opinion. Ethics is just about personal values. There is no objectivity in this field, unlike chemistry or biology. I have my view, and you have yours, and that’s it.

I don’t think anyone really believes any of this, but many claim to believe it—until their own rights are violated. A victim of mugging is not likely to say that the ethics of mugging is just a matter of opinion. My students who insist on moral relativism quickly become staunch absolutists if they think I graded their exams unfairly. There is no hesitation to “impose our values on others” in these cases.

This internal contradiction is particularly troublesome in the United States. Having taught classes and led professional workshops in several countries, I can report that the United States is one of the trickiest places in the world to discuss ethics. On the one hand, many Americans dismiss any possibility of objectivity in ethics, whereas on the other hand they are probably the most absolutist people on the planet. They take it for granted that everyone in the world should agree with their values of individual rights, free markets, and democracy. The last two U.S. presidents espoused very different political philosophies, but both told the world that American values are universal.^*

We first must acknowledge how destructive it is to deny the objectivity of ethics, even if at some level nobody really means it. Ethics can’t be about “personal values.” It must be about interpersonal values, or else it can’t perform its function. Remember that ethics exists precisely to bring us to rational consensus, to put us on the same page, as to how we are going to live and work together. If ethics is just a matter of opinion, it is pointless.

We can’t deal with this kind of ethical nihilism until we understand why it exists. One explanation may lie the fact that we so often use ethical statements to admonish. When Mom says, “It’s wrong to hit your little brother,” she isn’t just stating an ethical proposition. She is urging big sister not to hit. This is what philosophers of language, beginning with J. L. Austin, call a performative utterance.^† When the minister says, “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” she is not making a statement about what she is doing at the moment. She is marrying the couple. The utterance performs the act of marrying them. Or if I say, “I bet you a dollar,” that very statement makes a bet. In similar fashion, Mom’s statement, “It’s wrong to hit,” is a reproof as much as an assertion. So it’s natural to think of ethical statements as admonitions rather than as claims that can be submitted to intellectual scrutiny. We may, therefore, be inclined to reject the possibility of objective ethical reasoning.

Yet ethical discourse has always had a performative function, and people nonetheless recognized its intellectual content for ages. Ethics is a sophisticated field of inquiry, at least as ancient as mathematics and medicine. As I mentioned earlier, some of the smartest human beings who ever walked the planet made it a central concern of their thought, including Confucius, Socrates, Aristotle, Adi Shankara, Siddhārta Gautama, Thomas Aquinas, and Immanuel Kant. The study of ethics became a key part of Western university education at least as early as the Italian Renaissance, with the establishment of the studia humanitas (humanities curriculum), and some universities today are trying to revive it. There must be other factors involved in our ethical anti-intellectualism.

One possibility is warmed-over Freudianism in popular culture. The field of psychology has long since moved past this stage, but there is a lingering notion that human behavior is determined by irrational impulses emanating from the subconscious mind, and that any perception that we make rational choices is false consciousness. Sigmund Freud’s brilliant and articulate nephew Edward Bernays popularized this interpretation of human nature as early as the 1920s. Bernays was the father of the public relations industry and the foremost propaganda expert of his day. He believed that citizens of a democracy are incapable of governing themselves rationally and must be manipulated from above, using a process he called the engineering of consent. Non-democratic states have also found this kind of engineering useful. According to Bernays himself, Joseph Goebbels relied on his book Crystallizing Public Opinion for his anti-Semitic propaganda campaign in Nazi Germany.^*

Bernays’ techniques have obvious relevance to the advertising industry, and he became a marketing consultant to a number of corporations. An early breakthrough was his successful campaign to induce women to smoke cigarettes. He played into the feminist movement of the 1920s, for which smoking already represented equality with men, presumably (in Bernays’ view) due to the cigarette’s subconscious role as a phallic symbol.

At about the same time, the behaviorist theory of psychologist John B. Watson began to influence advertising, partly due to his employment by a major New York City advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson. A favorite tool was (and is) affective conditioning. By juxtaposing a certain brand of toothpaste with a sexy model, an ad campaign might condition consumers to associate the toothpaste with sexiness. Celebrity endorsements were also a popular technique.

Vance Packard’s bestselling 1957 exposé The Hidden Persuaders revealed psychological manipulation techniques to the public at large.^† His most famous example was the technique of inserting images of popcorn into a movie. The images go by too fast to register with the conscious mind, but they presumably boost popcorn sales at the cinema. This kind of subliminal advertising turns out to be humbug, but Packard’s general point was well taken, and his book further reinforced the popular conception of human beings as directed by hidden impulses rather than rational choice. My conversations with marketing faculty suggest that advertising is still largely associated with “psychological” persuasion, which they see as far more effective than rational persuasion. Note, by the way, how we continue to use the word psychological as a synonym for nonrational.

Advertisers might point out that some of the same techniques Bernays used to induce women to smoke were later used, with considerable success, to induce people not to smoke. Nonrational persuasion can certainly be effective; however, this doesn’t prove that human beings have no rational side. Even Bernays’ pro-smoking campaign resorted to rational persuasion. It told young women that they could keep their slim figure by reaching for a cigarette rather than a snack, which is perfectly valid advice. It is well known that smokers often gain weight when they kick the habit, because eating replaces smoking.

Psychologists, in fact, gradually came to recognize our rational side, as developmental and cognitive psychology supplanted the Freudian and behavioral schools. Cognitive psychology, in particular, since the 1960s has acknowledged the importance of thought processes in determining behavior. The way we think influences the way we feel, just as feelings influence thoughts, and both influence action. Psychologists now recognize the value of cognitive therapy in treating depression, phobias, addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, and even schizophrenia. Aaron T. Beck, who pioneered cognitive therapy, argued that thought patterns can help lead to a depressed state, as well as help pull us out of it.^* For example, I might infer from a job loss, followed by breakup with a friend, that I am unworthy and incompetent, conclusions that reinforce the depressed feelings I already have. A more careful analysis might show, however, that my misfortune was caused by external factors that have little to do with my personal traits. Without denying the neural and genetic basis for depression, Beck maintained that repeated correction of illogical thought patterns can help tame negative feelings and restore functional behavior.

Cognitive therapy in fact has grounding in neurophysiology. The prefrontal cortex, where the brain carries out rational thought, interacts constantly with the limbic system of the brain, the seat of emotions. Neither completely dominates the other. The limbic system motivates thought and mediates long-term memory formation in the rational brain, while the prefrontal cortex tames emotions emanating from the limbic brain. It is, therefore, no surprise that disciplined thought can get our feelings under control and reform our behavior.

Recent neural research, therefore, confirms the common-sense view that humans are directed by reason as well as emotion. This is not only a common-sense view, but an ancient one. Aaron Beck himself traced the origins of cognitive therapy to such Stoic philosophers as Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Beck could have also pointed to Siddhārta Gautama (the Buddha), who was a cognitive therapist of the first order. His Eightfold Path is a regimen of mental training designed to get us through the ups and downs of life.

Dispensing with specious popular psychology, whether it be psychological egoism or warmed-over Freud, allows us to return to common sense and traditional wisdom. It also reopens the door to rationality-based ethics as a guide to conduct, as Stoicism and Buddhism themselves illustrate. It is no accident that the Stoics viewed ethics as based on what they called universal reason.

THE LIMITS OF REASON

Even those who recognize a rational component of human motivation may question our ability to live by reason. They may point out that Western civilization tried it once, in the Age of Enlightenment, and it led to Robespierre and the guillotine. Left to its own devices, reason is either too weak to direct our conduct, or it slips into ideology and extremism. The wide-eyed innocence of the Enlightenment, with its naive faith in reason, has no place in the real world.

I never said that we should live by reason alone. I’m only saying that we should use our brains as we decide how to live and work together. Reason is not something that came and went with the Enlightenment, but has been a survival tool for eons. Our prehistoric ancestors relied on encyclopedic knowledge of plant species, intimate familiarity with the habits of game animals, and clever strategies for hunting them. Nobody saw this knowledge as “just a matter of opinion.” They had to get it right, because their existence was at stake. Agriculture and industry were not developed on the basis of “personal values.” In today’s crowded world, our environment consists primarily of other people, and we must apply the same intelligence to interpersonal relations. Ethics lies at the foundation of this effort. We have to get it right, because our existence is at stake.

This doesn’t mean that ethics uses the same methods as science, engineering, or even sociology. It is not an empirical field, because it doesn’t formulate theories whose consequences can be tested by observation or experiment. This itself erects a barrier, because in our age of laboratories and data collection, it may be hard to imagine how anything can be established except by empirical methods. On second thought, however, this shouldn’t be so hard to imagine, because there is already an ancient and successful field that uses completely different methods. In fact, these methods are similar to the methods that are appropriate to ethics. I am talking about the field of mathematics.

Wait, don’t panic! I am not saying that you have to be good at mathematics to do ethics, any more than you have to be good at nuclear physics to do botany. Ethics and mathematics resemble each other only in that their methods are analogous. This should be reassuring, not frightening, because it tells us that a nonempirical field can establish a wealth of useful results.

* See the seminal essay by S. Warren and L. D. Brandeis, The right to privacy, Harvard Law Review 4 (1890): 193–220.

† Pope Francis, Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, Vatican Press (2013): 47–48.

* T. Spangler, Could principles of Islamic finance feed into a sustainable economic system? The Guardian, October 18, 2013; T. A. Myers and E. Hassanzadeh, The interconnections between Islamic finance and sustainable finance, IISD Report, International Institute for Sustainable Development, July 2013. The London-based publication World Finance lists the Arab National Bank of Saudi Arabia as one of the world’s best sustainable banks; Best sustainable banks 2016, June 27, 2016.

* For a sampling of the literature, D. S. Wilson, Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others, New Heaven, CT, Yale University Press, 2015; D. W. Pfaff, The Altruistic Brain: How We Are Naturally Good, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015; M. Tomasello, A. P. Melis, C. Tennie, E. Wyman and E. Herrmann, Two key steps in the evolution of human cooperation: The interdependence hypothesis, Current Anthropology 53 (2012): 673–692.

* G. Rizzolatti and L. Craighero, The mirror-neuron system, Annual Review of Neuroscience 27 (2004): 169–192; S. Blakeslee, Cells that read minds, New York Times (January 10, 2006); C. Keysers, Mirror neurons, Current Biology 19 (2010): R971–R973; S. Acharya and S. Shukla, Mirror neurons: Enigma of the metaphysical modular brain, Journal of Natural Science, Biology and Medicine 3 (2012): 118–124; C. Jarrett, A calm look at the most hyped concept in neuroscience: Mirror neurons, Wired (December 13, 2013).

† M. Ricard, Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World, Boston, MA, Little, Brown and Company, 2013, English translation 2015.

‡ S. Levitt and S. J. Dubner, Freakonomics, New York, William Morrow, 2005.

* A. Smith, The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) Book 1, chapter 2, paragraph 2.

† A. Smith, cited above, Book 4, chapter 2, paragraph 9.

‡ A. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, London: A. Millar (1759); 6th ed. (1790).

* Geert Hofstede famously ranked national cultures with respect to individualism and other traits, based on survey data. The United States ranked first. See his book Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, 3rd ed., New York, McGraw-Hill, 2010. For more extensive survey data of this kind, R. J. House et al., Culture, Leadership and Organizations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies, Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage Publications, 2004. I discuss the underlying concepts in my book, Working Across Cultures, Palo Alto, CA, Stanford University Press, 2003.

* L. Kohlberg, The Philosophy of Moral Development: Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice, New York, Harper and Row, 1981.

† R. Kegan, The Evolving Self: Meaning and Process in Human Development, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1981; C. Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1982; M. L. Hoffman, Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 2000; J. C. Gibbs, Moral Development and Reality: Beyond the Theories of Kohlberg and Hoffman, Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage Publications, 2003. For earlier work, see W. G. Perry, Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years, New York, Holt, 1968.

‡ J. W. Fowler, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning, New York, Harper and Row, 1982; S. D. Parks, Is it too late? Young adults and the formation of professional ethics, in T. R. Piper, M. C. Gentile and S. D. Parks (Eds.), Can Ethics Be Taught? Perspectives, Challenges and Approaches at Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1993.

* For example: G. W. Bush, at a press conference with European Union members, June 20, 2005, in Washington DC; Barack Obama, in a speech to UN General Assembly, September 25, 2012.

† J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisá (Eds.), Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1962.

* As reported in E. L. Bernays, Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel Edward L. Bernays, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1965, p. 652. The book in question is E. L. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, New York, Boni and Liveright, 1923.

† V. Packard, The Hidden Persuaders, New York, David McKay, 1957.

* A. T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders. Madison, CT, International Universities Press, 1975; A. T. Beck, A. John Rush, B. F. Shaw, and G. Emery, Cognitive Therapy of Depression, New York, Guilford Press, 1979.