Language, leadership and morality
So far in this series, we have looked at why the study of languages is so important. But what about the way language is used? This affects us significantly, from the leaders we choose to how we morally evaluate our experiences. This theme is explored in the following blog by Dr Matthew Kuan Johnson, Research Fellow in the Oxford Character Project and the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford University.
Leadership has been much in debate in 2020 and there is a growing consensus that former approaches to leadership are badly in need of an overhaul. Amidst this overhaul, there is a central emphasis on ethics and the importance of leaders building a culture that enables and promotes character as well as competence. One key (and neglected) dimension is the way in which language shapes moral lives. Specifically, language can be used to 1) strongly influence the moral perceptions of stakeholders and employees; 2) create new concepts that enable better moral evaluation of experiences; 3) obscure unethical practices; and 4) function as a means of dividing the in-group from the out-group.
Firstly, the moral perceptions of stakeholders and employees can be strongly influenced by the words that an organization uses to describe their products and practices. For example, while an organization may describe certain methods of obtaining personal data to be “data mining,” other stakeholders may instead describe these methods as “data stealing.”
Secondly, it is important to recognise that sometimes the words that need to be used to describe some event or experience do not yet exist, and this will be significant for our ability to morally understand. The feminist historian, journalist, and activist, Susan Brownmiller relates in her memoir how, prior to the women’s liberation movement, the key terms “workplace sexual harassment” and “post-natal depression” were not widely in use, which meant that individuals routinely failed to adequately morally understand these events and experiences.
Indeed, in the former case, the words and phrases in use at the time (such as “unwanted advances in the workplace”) contributed to individuals failing to appreciate critical dimensions of the injustices involved in such harassment. In the latter case, Brownmiller explains how in the absence of the key term “post-natal depression,” this condition was commonly described and understood as a “personal deficiency,” instead. Brownmiller’s account relates how, once the vocabulary around these events changed, so too did the moral understanding of these events and experiences, including how women understood their own experiences.
The philosopher, Miranda Fricker, has used these examples to argue that it is important to pay attention to who or what determines how language is developed and deployed — when the vocabulary in use within an organization or society does not allow the disempowered and disenfranchised to adequately describe their experience, it affects the ability of all parties involved to morally understand that experience, and constitutes its own form of injustice (which she calls hermeneutical injustice).
Thirdly, language can also be used (intentionally or not) to obscure unethical practices. A major contributing factor to the 2008 financial crisis was the fact that organizations and individuals in the financial sector occluded the public’s understanding of their practices by using undescriptive jargon such as “derivatives.”
Finally, language can function as a kind of shibboleth that signals in-groups and out-groups. The phrase, shibboleth, originates from a story in the Hebrew Scriptures, in which the Gileadites needed a way of identifying enemy Ephraimites. The strategy adopted by the Gileadites was to have their captives attempt to say the word “shibboleth,” which Ephraimites would inevitably pronounce as “sibboleth”, resulting in their prompt execution. Organizational dynamics often have their own “shibboleths”, in which language is used to determine the in-group and the out-group within an organization. For example, elocution has often been used to infer socioeconomic or ethnic background, which is then used to determine career progression and relationships within the company.
In conclusion, language is one of the primary lenses through which we see the moral landscape in which we move and have our being. If an important task of leaders is to build ethical cultures in which teams and organisations can flourish, good leadership will involve carefully attending to how language shapes the moral perceptions and moral lives of all involved.
Matthew Kuan Johnson is a moral philosopher and a Research Fellow of the Oxford Character Project and the Faculty of Theology and Religion. He works on moral perception, virtue theory, AI ethics, and joy.
This blog post features some of the work of the Oxford Character Project, a multi-disciplinary project which is housed in the Faculty of Theology and Religion. Over the next three years the project is undertaking a major research project on character and responsible leadership. Working with industry partners in finance, tech, law and business, the Oxford Character Project is seeking to understand the intellectual and moral virtues (strengths of character such as creativity, courage, honesty, hope) that underpin responsible leadership, how they can be developed, and the organisational factors that enable or oppose them.
