Why most discussions about ethics are really a debate about values and what is missing
Which approach to ethics is correct? The rights approach, the fairness and justice approach, the common good approach, the virtue approach, or the personal need approach?
Most ethicists and ethical institutes, such as the Markkula Center–a resource and consultant group for ethical frameworks and decision making–do not define ethics but do discuss different ethical approaches. This is likely due to the age-old philosophical debate about the meaning of ethics. They–Markkula Center, AI Now Institute, University of Washington, UN Human RIghts office of the High Commission, and many others–will, however, (1) tell you what ethics is not (for each organization this definition changes, but it often centers around not knowingly doing emotional, physical, psychological, or other harm to others), and then (2) note that making good ethical choices arises by asking the right questions. Companies have picked up on this trend and have begun introducing ethical frameworks. Most of these frameworks either state ideals or pose a litany of questions to answer before making an ethical decision. Kathy Baxter from Salesforce has led the charge on comparing the various frameworks and their merits; follow this link to see the current list.
To begin, it is helpful to know that a “classical” definition of ethics is defined as the practice of determining concepts, virtues, or principles as good or evil, right or wrong, virtue or vice, justice or crime. However, I have observed that in ethical conversations individuals, groups, or companies — even if they use the word ethics — usually are not arguing about ethics. Instead, they are arguing the difference between which value(s) are right or wrong when making decisions. In essence, the conversations are less about morality or good and evil (the foundation of ethics) and more about “rightness” or the sense that one’s own opinion is correct, right, or ethical.
I seek to provide a new model, which I call “the ethical complex,” by which to consider regular day-to-day ethical decision-making practices and methods to overcome the ethical fading that occurs when conversations and decisions are focused on “rightness” rather than ethics.
The ethical complex model
At the top of the ethical complex pyramid is principles (or beliefs) — virtues, as Peterson and Seligman and others call them — that remain relatively consistent across cultures and countries, such as knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. For my example I will use a near-universal transcendent belief that promotes the idea that all life is sacred.
Just below belief often lies a moral such as, “removing life from any living thing — whether through abuse or killing — is wrong,” meaning that the preservation of life is paramount in upholding this value. Morals tend to be black-and-white decisions, wrong versus right, and follow classic definitions of ethics. Thus, any decision made should avoid any Machiavellian tendencies of allowing the ends to justify the means and be more aligned with strict moral adherence, as suggested by Thomas Aquinas or Plato.
Each combination of belief(s) and moral(s) hosts a spectrum of values, which is the third tier of the ethical complex. These values tend to be a spectrum of grays. In my example, on one end of the spectrum, someone may have a value that preserving the sanctity of one’s own life is paramount and thus justifies the depletion of the life of another in order to preserve his or her own life, family, or life-sustaining needs. Further along the spectrum, someone may have a value that the removal of life is justified (Cicero) to preserve country or ideologies. Someone else may exhibit the value that hunting deer to provide meat for their community is right and does not contradict the moral. And on the far end of the spectrum may sit fair trade agreements monitoring the “safe” growth and harvesting of food or Jain vegetarian (or ethical vegan) who will not eat any living plant (the most strict vegans wait until a leaf has naturally separated itself from the parent plant before eating it) or any animal regardless of how it has been harvested or killed.
Each of these individual’s ethical perspectives is correct (to him or her), but who gets to decide which segment of values is “ethical” or right? This is where I believe the majority of tensions arise. Making ethical decisions amid the cognitive dissonance of competing value sets, all while trying to avoid such dissonance, can be disquieting or even traumatizing.
In most instances today, individuals and corporations are engaging in value-based debates and not true ethical debates at the “moral” level. In this example, this means they are debating the values around whether ethical veganism or hunting animals to feed one’s family is most correct action and rarely discussing ideas at the moral or belief/principle level.
…but what about the trolly problem?
We see this debate about values highlighted by the trolley problem examples (and attendant alterations) concerning what one would do if you were a trolly operator and could choose to slip the track in a moment of need to either kill one person or multiple individuals. Molly Steenson, David Danks, Kathy Baxter, and others have extended this discussion into a conversation around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ethics while encouraging individuals to weigh the difference between values and ethical judgments. Below you can link to a sample of their work
As noted above, I believe when individuals say ethics what they really mean is values. This value-based conflict of ideas, can be considered using three new lenses.
Academic, business, and public discussions of ethical behavior are on the rise. The Facebook-Cambridge analytics scandal may be the most public organization-centric discussion on ethics and values in recent memory, but they are not the only organizations facing these challenges. I believe that when individuals say ‘ethics” what they really mean is values.This value-based conflict of ideas, can be considered using three lenses.
New lenses for Ethics
The first lens is to approach ethical conversations from several points of view, using a second-order cybernetics perspective. This allows individuals to more clearly create a mental model around the underlying motives, goals, and intents of ethical conversations and how value ranges are selected as either “ethical” or “unethical.”
The second lens for consideration is to consider a human tendency to follow the common path of “ethical fading.” Ethical fading defined as one’s diminishing sensitivity to ethical decisions over time is closely tied to the concept of moral ambiguity and is highly entangled with decision and judgment heuristics. These heuristics lead individuals to become less sensitive to making system-level or cognitively critical choices about ethical decision making as decision criteria either increases in complexity or fades from memory — either by creating a defensive position or via natural judgment heuristic traps.
The third lens is the effect of value-based design on ethical decision making and how aspiring practitioners of ethics can create cognitive speed bumps that move individuals from B.J. Fogg’s Behavior Change Model (that tends to remove critical cognitive engagement in favor of addictive simplified media) toward conscious forms of decision making, especially as it pertains to ethics. Here I will suggest two design or ethical process models for thinking about designing for engaged ethics.
So, what?
I am not insinuating that classical definitions of ethics are wrong nor that ethical frameworks are unhelpful. Instead, I seek to examine the difficulty of ethical decision making and highlight how a new working model of ethics could allow us to become more aware of our thought processes. This model utilizes the disciplines of philosophy, decision sciences, cybernetics, and design and leads toward developing new approaches in order to make more evidence-based decisions.
By considering the ethical complexities and highlighting the debate as values based, we can use the three lenses of ethical conversation, ethical fading, and value-based design to create new scaffolds for decision making.
