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Home » Opinion » Book review
It's an ethical quagmire out there: Where's your compass?
By Wan Lixin |
January 17, 2009, Saturday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
MY son recently asked me to describe my job, as a part of an assignment from his kindergarten.
I told him a columnist is one who, after observing social manners, feels he has something true and useful to say, and when his insights are multiplied tens of thousands of times on newsprint they can help improve the state of the world.
It remains a craft that is relatively harmless.
My son was obviously unimpressed.
He said in giving such a description, people are usually expected to present the better side, adding that one of his classmates' father is a laoban (business owner).
When I was about my son's age, laoban was still regarded as the object of proletarian dictatorship and suppression, but after decades of semantic amelioration, the word now simply suggests wealth, and with it, prestige.
As Ronald Howard and Clinton Korver say in their "Ethics for the Real World: Creating a Personal Code to Guide Decisions in Work and Life," ordinary life poses myriad ethical challenges.
In the case of my son, he is already assessing the advantages of telling the truth against its potential impact on his prestige among his young friends.
As the authors advise, avoiding temptation is one simple way to remain ethical.
But in real life there are many sticky situations where decision making can be hard, and thus the book is unusual in suggesting that you craft a personal ethical code as guidelines.
"Unless we develop ethical reasoning skills, we get comfortable with transgression," says the book.
A friend of mine complained that her daughter, fresh from college, refused to work with an auto company. Her expat teacher told her that, as a heavily polluting sector, the auto industry is poisoning China's land and air and will have disastrous long-term consequences.
She ended up working with another company. I told her father that her public-spirit idealism deserves encouragement.
But I know full well that as she grows, she must live with more and more ethical compromises.
The book raises the question of whether you should take a job with a company that indirectly harms others, like a weapons manufacturer.
That problem is probably easy to resolve, given explicit ethical codes.
But the issue get more complex, and the answers more elusive, when you keep asking more questions.
Working for a machine gun maker is not good, but should you work for Boeing that also manufactures jet fighters? Should you work for a Chinese company that supplies bearings to Boeing?
Should you work for any businesses that have business ties with a country that sells weapons to others?
When we continue asking questions in this vein, we find that ethical scruples are probably a luxury in this industrialized age, because in this black box of mechanized and globalized processes, most individuals are utterly powerless in influencing the process, not to say the results.
"The big ethical topics of the day often figure far less into our daily lives than a host of small persnickety ones," the book observes with great perspicacity.
Thus the book's pragmatic value would probably be more restricted to the three categories of ethical lapses it sums up: Deceit, theft, physical harm.
In tackling these temptations, conduct a litmus test by asking the following questions:
? If you were on the receiving end of this action, how would you feel?
? Would you want a loved one to be on the receiving end?
? If your action was covered on the evening news, how would you feel?
? How would you feel if your mother knew about this?
All good questions. The book does not, however, address larger questions of the moment, such as: Is it ethical to inject billions and billions of dollars into the very banks and financial institutions that caused the credit crisis in the first place?
Is it ethical to bail out the auto industry?
Still, the book is a good starting point for thoughtful adults to examine the many embarrassing situations confronting them today.
I told him a columnist is one who, after observing social manners, feels he has something true and useful to say, and when his insights are multiplied tens of thousands of times on newsprint they can help improve the state of the world.
It remains a craft that is relatively harmless.
My son was obviously unimpressed.
He said in giving such a description, people are usually expected to present the better side, adding that one of his classmates' father is a laoban (business owner).
When I was about my son's age, laoban was still regarded as the object of proletarian dictatorship and suppression, but after decades of semantic amelioration, the word now simply suggests wealth, and with it, prestige.
As Ronald Howard and Clinton Korver say in their "Ethics for the Real World: Creating a Personal Code to Guide Decisions in Work and Life," ordinary life poses myriad ethical challenges.
In the case of my son, he is already assessing the advantages of telling the truth against its potential impact on his prestige among his young friends.
As the authors advise, avoiding temptation is one simple way to remain ethical.
But in real life there are many sticky situations where decision making can be hard, and thus the book is unusual in suggesting that you craft a personal ethical code as guidelines.
"Unless we develop ethical reasoning skills, we get comfortable with transgression," says the book.
A friend of mine complained that her daughter, fresh from college, refused to work with an auto company. Her expat teacher told her that, as a heavily polluting sector, the auto industry is poisoning China's land and air and will have disastrous long-term consequences.
She ended up working with another company. I told her father that her public-spirit idealism deserves encouragement.
But I know full well that as she grows, she must live with more and more ethical compromises.
The book raises the question of whether you should take a job with a company that indirectly harms others, like a weapons manufacturer.
That problem is probably easy to resolve, given explicit ethical codes.
But the issue get more complex, and the answers more elusive, when you keep asking more questions.
Working for a machine gun maker is not good, but should you work for Boeing that also manufactures jet fighters? Should you work for a Chinese company that supplies bearings to Boeing?
Should you work for any businesses that have business ties with a country that sells weapons to others?
When we continue asking questions in this vein, we find that ethical scruples are probably a luxury in this industrialized age, because in this black box of mechanized and globalized processes, most individuals are utterly powerless in influencing the process, not to say the results.
"The big ethical topics of the day often figure far less into our daily lives than a host of small persnickety ones," the book observes with great perspicacity.
Thus the book's pragmatic value would probably be more restricted to the three categories of ethical lapses it sums up: Deceit, theft, physical harm.
In tackling these temptations, conduct a litmus test by asking the following questions:
? If you were on the receiving end of this action, how would you feel?
? Would you want a loved one to be on the receiving end?
? If your action was covered on the evening news, how would you feel?
? How would you feel if your mother knew about this?
All good questions. The book does not, however, address larger questions of the moment, such as: Is it ethical to inject billions and billions of dollars into the very banks and financial institutions that caused the credit crisis in the first place?
Is it ethical to bail out the auto industry?
Still, the book is a good starting point for thoughtful adults to examine the many embarrassing situations confronting them today.
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