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Ever since I chose “ethics” as the focus of my career and teaching some 50 years ago, I have enjoyed widespread acceptance (tolerance?) for my work—but much less often enthusiastic support, particularly among my more “liberal” friends. It has been much easier to sell notions of “social benefit,” “solving social problems,” “human rights,” or even “corporate responsibility” than to invoke ethics. Why is that? A constant debate in my work at Stanford and later at Santa Clara University has been whether to call my courses, programs, and centers by some other name than ethics. Can’t we find a more acceptable term? What makes us uncomfortable about ethics as a concept? Is it that ethics is most often derived from religious writings and beliefs? Isn’t liberal Western society post-religious? Is it that ethics immediately focuses on individual responsibility rather than a more fluid collective or societal responsibility? Is it that live-and-let-live liberal beliefs hesitate to embrace black-and-white judgements that some things are ethical while others are not? To be sure, I have had strong support from the universities where I have worked and from selected leaders who fully embraced notions of ethics, including the two CEOs who chaired my advisory board at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. One of them stated it baldly: “We have to motivate someone in the executive suite and someone on the board to ask the ethics question. Is what we are proposing to do ethical?” But ethics and morality (an even more uncomfortable word) continue to make us uneasy—at the very time our ethical values are arguably most challenged in the U.S. I was attracted by the analysis of a New York Times critic, Jennifer Szalai, in an article this week: “Liberals Are Preaching Moral Values. What Took Them So Long?” (see here). She cites a growing literature lamenting that liberals have ceded talk of ethics and morality to right-wing politicians. Szalai cites several possible reasons liberals have all but abandoned ethical language. One reason she cites is that liberals may be guilty of excessive optimism, confidence that the end of Jim Crow and the founding of institutions of global generosity had permanently altered our landscape. She suggests this complacency has certainly been upended by recent developments. A second reason she cites is excessive fatalism, the belief that a harsh, illiberal, and immoral world forces us to focus on clearly defined individual liberties and human rights to make any progress. I chaired a global symposium some years ago pitting three advocates of a universal declaration of human responsibilities (including its author, the theologian Hans Kung) against three global human rights advocates. The human rights advocates accused the human responsibility advocates of naivety and creating the risk that human rights progress since World War II would be lost. In her rich essay, Szalai suggests several other reasons, among them that liberals are so eager to show support for changing times that they tolerate or even embrace developments and policies that do moral harm. Finally, she cites some liberal thinkers who deny that liberal principles are moral at all, that they are either so ingrained in human nature and the human person that we need not emphasize that they are moral choices, or that in a post-religious world there are no moral values, only policy choices. When my co-author Marc Epstein and I wrote Rotten: Why Corporate Misbehavior Continues and What To Do About It in 2021 (see here), we hoped to bring attention to the reality of ethics in business, that there were “bad apples,”(individuals), “bad barrels”(companies), and “bad orchards” (bad industries, geographies or political contexts). We argued active management and governance were necessary to fight against these enduring realities. Over the last 18 months, I have written much in this newsletter about the reality of ethical cruelties and moral violations of the current administration. (See particularly my list of needed moral values here). On our 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it is certainly an appropriate time to identify and recommit to the basic morality embedded in that document “We hold these truths to be self-evident” (see here) and in the U.S. Constitution “in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, …” (see here). We also need to update our ethical beliefs to a globalized and technologically advanced world. (Originalism definitely does not work in ethics!) So ethics and morality are a choice, never more so than at the current time, but always. Several Democratic candidates, whom Szalai cites, are staking out campaigns for this fall and for 2028 in those moral terms. But it falls to all of us to make our own choices based on ethics and morality, and to call out choices made by others, particularly those made in our name, that lack any semblance of moral good.
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