How Democratizing Ethics Helps Us Heal

8 Accessible Steps to Ethics for Everyone

It’s time to democratize ethics. To make ethical decision-making available to people from all walks of life. To assure that we all have a say in the ethics of the most critical decisions of our time. Collective healing depends on it. Ethics underpin grieving unspeakable loss from Covid-19, rebuilding our economy and health systems, and repairing global relationships and reputation.Two reasons ethics are not democratic: First, we’re depending on our President and Vice President and government elites to restore moral decline. They cannot do it alone. Second, we are allowing those controlling innovation to drive the ethics — or failed ethics — of our society. They aren’t doing it alone. Ditto experts on humanity-defining technologies such as AI and gene editing.

We each have power and responsibility: for restoring our nation’s moral foundation, rebuilding trust in institutions and each other, and tethering ethics to innovation.

Here are eight steps to deploying the ethics power available to all of us — to democratizing ethics:

• Banish binary thinking. We have a global epidemic of binary thinking — dividing ethics questions into “all or nothing,” “yes or no,” “do it or don’t do it,” or one side of a wall or the other. Taking sides does not lead to ethical decisions. Instead, seek to maximize opportunity and minimize risk. Ask, “when and under what circumstances should we proceed?” Avoid condemning people as “unethical” or putting them on a pedestal as “ethical” for example, for a single vote or affiliation with a party.
• Get in the arena. Ethics is not a spectator sport. Learning from Ibram X. Kendi’s condemnation of neutrality (we must be “anti-racist” not just “not racist”), ethics require being proactive. We can wear masks, seek news outside of social media’s passive algorithmic bubbles, and embed ethics in education from an early age. We can’t “opt-out” or watch ethics from the sidelines any more than we can duck responsibility for the result of the presidentialelection we don’t vote in. We don’t get to decide life won’t happen — that children don’t suffer from school closures or there won’t be a new president. Tolerating neutrality makes us complicit in the contagion of moral decline.
• Fight for truth as if our life depended on it. Because it does. Ethics hinge on truth. Democracy requires sharing a common view of facts, exploring diverse opinions, and recognizing the difference between fact and opinion. There’s no such thing as alternatively factual ethics. Inciting violence is neither fact nor a diverse opinion; it’s an illegal act. Today’s assault on truth topples social relationships and institutions (including democracy and health systems). It threatens our national healing and trusting. Compromising on truth — from wishful thinking to cherry-picking convenient facts — is the greatest global systemic risk of our time. It catalyzes all the others, from pandemics and inequality to racism and climate change.
• Get close. Ethics are proximate…even when we are socially distanced. In this era of unprecedented aloneness, we may mistake physical and emotional isolation for protection from risks. But ethics are so contagious that they make the future, and far-away places, proximate. Think food waste or racially biased facial recognition technology infiltrating the criminal justice system. The cautionary note that no one is safe from Covid-19 until everyone is safe applies to our ethical risks and opportunities. Our choices today affect generations to come (responsible gene editing…or not) and people on the other side of the planet (vaccine distribution to developing countries…or not). Zoom does not come with an ethics filter or alert.
• Don’t allow ethics to become a luxury item or an elite activity. Beware of the undemocratic sequestering of humanity-defining knowledge in the brains of a very few experts and controllers of innovation. I am staunchly pro- beneficial innovation. But those with the power to unleash technologies on society increasingly also control society’s ethics…edging the rest of us out. Individuals shouldn’t need to understand the details of gene editing to have our view on the ethics count…any more than we need to understand the workings of an internal combustion engine to know that we don’t want drunk driving or 12-year-olds with drivers’ licenses.
• Demand that experts, governments and companies support our access to ethics. Start with transparency–the open sharing of the information in plain language about the implications for individuals. What are our choices? What information are they not giving us — whether because they are protecting IP (by not disclosing how an algorithm targets ads) or because they just don’t know (the long-term mental health consequences of bot therapists)? The “Smoking Kills” warning for technology. Society has become the unregulated beta tester, the laboratory, for corporations and innovators — without our consent.
• Listen to what people are really telling us — not what we want or expect to hear. Listen to the more than 74 million citizens who voted for former President Trump. They are not all violent extremists, deniers of science or political facts like Covid-19 and lost elections, or participants in disinformation campaigns. Consider the nuance among the diverse constituencies within that 74 million, without assumptions or pre-baked conclusions. And listen to President Biden’s supporters. And those who didn’t vote.
• Ask, “What’s my part in the problem?” Even when we genuinely want to help, often we do so by positioning someone or something on the “other side” and then reaching a helping hand across from our (responsibility-free) “side” We like to be seen only as part of the solution and not as part of the problem. But we’re all part of today’s problems, and we all can be part of the solution. Both democrats and republicans must assure accountability for the unspeakable assault on the capital and on democracy on January 6, 2021. As a white woman I have much more to learn about any part I may unwittingly play in racism.

Democratizing ethics is an integral part of national healing, shoring up democracy, and positive innovation. It is within each of our power to contribute. It is the responsibility of government and corporate leaders to support us in doing so.

© Copyright 2021 Susan Liautaud & Associates Limited. All rights reserved.