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.
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This looks like an interesting read.
I'm curious how they avoid some of the more common pitfalls of similar projects. For example, in a very real sense we all already have a personal code of ethics which guides us in life, even accounting for a Socratic criticism of living an unexamined life. Given that we all act, at some level, by a personal code, what is it that makes my personal code any better, or worse, than that of someone like Ted Bundy? It seems that a guide to creating your own code comes dangerously close to advocating ethical subjectivism or relativism, which would then indicate that we cannot judge such horrendous activities as those practiced by the Nazi Doctors.
Related to that, it would be hard pressed to sustain an argument that the Nazi Doctors led unexamined lives and thus lacked personal codes of ethics. On the contrary, it seems that many of the physicians in Nazi Germany who joined the SS thought that they were finally able to engage in morally appropriate behavior on behalf of science and their profession. I'm guessing that the response to this is that their personal codes of ethics are not appropriate because they were rationalized or somehow distorted in context. But then this suggests that there are some overarching ethical principles that everyone should follow...so why don't the authors simply advocate something like utilitarianism, Kantian deontology, or virtue ethics?
In other words, what do we gain by switching from a fairly standardized system of ethics to a personal code of ethics? Ohhhhh, maybe we get to fill in some of the gaps the broad ethical theories seem to have...or we get to eliminate some of the problems they have. Now I want to read and find out!
That said, your review is encouraging and I look forward to picking up the book myself. Do you happen to have a list of "Books everyone should read"?
in the case of ted bundy, his ethical code apparently does not include at least one of the negative "thou shall not" ethics, namely, "thou shall not kill." so as a result, he was breaking a legal action (murder), which then places society in a position to judge his behavior. the same can be said about the nazi doctors, who used a variety of defenses, such as "i only did what i was told" (meaning that, they obeyed the power hierarchy's demands even though it went against their personal ethics and the hippocratic oath to do so). they used fuzzy thinking, combined with a healthy dose of desensitization, to engage in behavior that even they would find reprehensible only a few years earlier.
to answer your question, this book helps you (me) to see where the "cracks" are in our ethics, and to refine what our ethics actually are before the heat of battle. living an ethical life is actually living a life that is consistent, where we know what to expect from ourselves and those close to us (family, friends, colleagues) also know what to expect based on what they've seen us do in other seemingly unimportant situations (the "white lie" situation, for example). it is by our small behaviors that others learn that they can or cannot trust us with the big decisions. situational ethics is where our behavior is dependent upon the context in which we find ourselves .. for example, soldiers who think it is okay to participate in the rape civilian women who then go home to become loving and faithful husbands and fathers .. if a soldier's wife learned that her husband had engaged in such behaviors during a war, could she ever trust him again? indeed, SHOULD she ever trust him again? "but that was war, things were different then" is something that people say to justify such illegal and unethical behavior. but people don't need to sell out their ethics based on a situation, just as some of the German heros of WWII (for example) never sold out their ethics because the situation had changed. i believe there was a movie made about one such hero, "Shindler's List"?
i do have a list of books that i've reviewed, but do not have a specific list of books that everyone should read. if i did have such a list, this book would definitely be on it, though.
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