Ethics for the Real World: Creating a Personal Code to Guide Decisions in Work and Life

tags: Ethics for the Real World, Ronald A. Howard, Clinton D. Korver, book review

We are confronted with seemingly small ethical choices every day of our lives, ranging from whether we should plagiarize a homework assignment, cheat on an exam, "pad" our resumes, pilfer office supplies, tell a "white lie" to a loved one ... if the average person cannot trust himself to behave in a consistently ethical way in such small matters, is it any wonder that most people do not trust their colleagues, neighbors, friends, families and even their elected officials? Unfortunately, small lapses in ethical behavior are cumulative events that gradually desensitize us to larger lapses in judgment and distort our thinking as we seek ways to rationalize more obvious breaches in our ethics. How can we develop our own code of ethics that can guide us through small and large decisions? Fortunately, Ronald Howard and Clinton Korver wrote the wonderfully insightful book, Ethics for the Real World: Creating a Personal Code to Guide Decisions in Work and Life (Boston: Harvard Business Press; 2008), which presents a step-by-step process for developing your own code of ethics -- a code of ethics that is clear and concise enough to write on a piece of paper that you can refer to every day.

The well-organized book begins with a chapter entitled "Almost Ethical" by describing timely examples from the news to illustrate the "temptations" we are faced with; to lie, to deceive, to steal, to harm. The authors then move on the examine the tragedy of desensitization, where for example, individual doctors, scientists and engineers explain away -- in their own words -- the reasons for their willing collaboration in the killing millions of Jews during World War II. Surely, these intelligent and highly educated people did not start out their careers as murderous monsters, so how did they come to be that way? In fact, according to the authors, these people are examples of a social malady that affects almost every living person today: they suffered from what Socrates described as "an unexamined life."

The next chapter teaches essential thinking skills to identify and clarify faulty thinking patterns that desensitive people to unethical behaviors, that allow the boundaries between right and wrong to become clouded and emphemeral. The first thinking skill learning how to classify dimensions of action into one of three realms: prudential actions that pertain to our self interests; legal actions that are governed by the law in our social system; and ethical actions that conform to our predefined standards of correct behavior. The second thinking skill is a comparison of negative (and more definitive) to positive ethics, the "Thou should nots" versus the "Thou shoulds" -- which are those fuzzier ethics that place obligations upon people, such as "you should feed the hungry." The third thinking skill is "actions or consequences" ethics; Kant's ethics where one's actions are one's own responsibility, regardless of the consequences versus Bentham's ethics where one's actions are judged solely based on their consequences. After you have mastered these thinking skills, the authors teach you how to identify two thinking traps to ethical behavior; rationalization and the distorting power of context.

The third chapter provides a starting point for formulating your ethical code: consulting the touchstones that you were raised with; your religious, secular and professional ethical legacies. This chapter cautions you to recognize that morals are not ethics, that morals change as one's religion or society changes, but ethics are unchanging, firmly rooted in one's personal code of correct behavior.

The fourth chapter is the one that we've all been waiting for because this is where you begin to develop and draft your own code of ethics. You begin by defining your principles and the exceptions to those principles, reconcile clashes between the touchstones that you grew up with and your "inner voice", and then you test-drive your nascent ethical code for usefulness. After that, you refine your thinking by drawing boundaries between yourself and your relationship with others who engage in behaviors that are against your code of ethics. This chapter also considers the positive aspects along with the pitfalls of developing an ethical hierarchy where you define which of your ethics takes precedence when two ethics conflict.

By the end of chapter four, you have written a prototype ethical code, and you also can peek into Appendix B to read three of the authors' students' ethical codes to help you clarify your work. In the final three chapters of the book, you test and refine your ethical code by applying it to a variety of personal and professional situations and you then learn how to transform your ethics into life habits.

This well-written and useful little book is a surprisingly short 212 pages long. In addition to the text, it contains two appendices, the second of which contains three example ethical codes that were developed using the principles described in the book, a 12-page outline that serves to reinforce the authors' primary messages, 14 pages of footnotes and an 8-page index.

As you might have guessed from reading this review, I found this book to be invigorating and thought-provoking. I was relieved to discover that I am basically an ethical person, but I need to work at clarifying my ethical boundaries -- how closely will I allow myself to be associated with those who engage in unethical behaviors? For example, would I put my money into a credit union that I know to have racist lending policies? (No). But would I work for an organization that invests in a company that promotes racist policies in another country? (Ummmm .. ) So my dilemma lies in how many degrees of separation I will tolerate between myself and behavior that I deem to be unethical.

I think this book would make a fabulous textbook for a personal ethics class -- a class that I surely wish I had taken when I was in high school or college. So it should not surprise you when I highly recommend this book to both high school and college graduates. I also recommend this book to those who have never thought deeply about their personal values and how they impinge upon their professional and personal lives, and I recommend this book to everyone who thinks their professional and personal lives are at odds with each other. Further, this book is an essential addition to the collections of every public and school library in the country. The course of study described in this book is so important and applicable that I plan to make it an integral part of rethinking my ethical code every year.

Ronald A. Howard is a professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering in Stanford University's School of Engineering, and the director of the Department's Decisions and Ethics Center. He coined the term "decision analysis" to describe an approach that is now a professional field providing decision assistance in business, medicine, engineering, and personal decisions.

Clinton D. Korver is the founder and CEO of DecisionStreet, which provides Web-based tools to help consumers make important life decisions. He has taught ethical decision making at Grinnell College. He lives in Silicon Valley.