What is ethics  (Page 6/6)

The key to this social transformation is the communitarian belief in balancing rights and responsibilities: "Strong rights presume strong responsibilities." Etzioni states the Communitarian Agenda:

Correcting the current imbalance between rights and responsibilities requires a four-point agenda: a moratorium on the minting of most, if not all, new rights; reestablishing the link between rights and responsibilities; recognizing that some responsibilities do not entail rights; and, most carefully, adjusting some rights to the changed circumstances.

Here, if nothing else, is a frontal attack on the Libertarian mindset of our age.

Communitarianism is not new, at least if one defines it as an approach to ethics and value referencing significant communities of meaning. Most of the world's great religions are in this sense communitarian. It is from a community of faith that the faithful develops a sense of self and responsibility (or in Confucian thought, the extended family which nurtures this development). Ethics cannot be separated from the ethos of the religious or familial community. The modern communitarian movement may or may not be religiously inclined, yet it is clearly a part of a tradition of ethical approach as old as human association.

In the context of teams, the communitarian approach to ethics has much to commend itself. How much of one’s personal agenda is one willing to sacrifice for the overall goal of winning a sailboat race? Under what conditions is one willing to let the values or culture of the team alter one’s own ethical inclinations? To what extent do the relationships one has with team members give rise to duties that one is willing to honor? How willing is one to share the credit when the team succeeds? How willing is one to accept blame when the team looses? Under what conditions would one break with the team? If Ross is correct that duties come from relationships, paying attention to such questions about the company we keep may be more than a social obligation; perhaps, our ethical duty.

There are two pervasive ethical approaches not treated here: ethical egoism and The Divine Imperative. Each has a broad and dedicated following and each is deeply problematic to the ethical maturing of any society. Briefly, and with pejorative intent, here is what these extreme, yet interestingly similar approaches assert.

The ethical egoists say that ethics is a matter of doing what feels right to the individual conscience. If one asks, "Why did you do that?" The answer is, "Because I felt like it." The approach is often dressed up with statements about being true to yourself: "let your conscience be your guide", or "do the right thing". But how does one know what is true for the self? How does one develop a conscience? How is one to know that doing what is right (what feels right to you) is the right thing to do?

If nothing else, ethical egoism is a conversation stopper! How does one communicate to colleagues, friends, children or any other human being when the reference point of behavior or ethical judgment is just about how one feels inside? How does a civil society emerge if we civilians cannot deliberate in common, understandable language about our motives, intents, values, or duties? In essence, ethical egoism is the ethics of teenagers rebelling against being answerable to outside authority. To teenagers, to enter the ethical dialogue is to take the radical risk of having one’s values and actions challenged. Apparently, there are many of us who are just not grown up enough to risk that! Better to repeat the mantra: "I did what my conscience dictated.”

Just as there is no possible meaningful ethical dialogue with the Ethical Egoist, nor is there much hope of creative engagement with Divine Imperialists. For this growing community, ethics is the simple business of doing what God tells one to do. There is therefore no reason or need for discussion. The issue is conversion, not conversation. In a constitutional democracy like ours with a fundamental commitment to "the non-establishment of religion", the Divine Imperialist is stuck with a difficult dilemma: either to make all ethical inquiry "personal" (that is, no social or political value deliberation), or take the ayatollah approach and bring no state into conformity with the revealed will of God. Divine Imperialists do not deliberate. They dictate, simply because there is nothing to deliberate about. God has spoken. It is in the book.

The flaw in the Divine Imperialists' approach is quite clear to everybody but them: If God is good, then He must reveal only good laws and rules. This creates two alternatives. The first is that there is a reference for "good" apart from the Divine itself. The only other, that God is undependable; that God is arbitrary; surely this is unacceptable. God is not only good, but God wills the good. God’s will, then, becomes a reality discoverable even apart from belief in a particular represented manifestation of God. Religion, at its best, should understand that faith confers no special status of ethical insight. Believers, agnostics, non-believers can, and do, contribute to the culture's continuing struggle to understand what is good, what is just, what is true. That is why democracies (as opposed to states founded upon some "Divine Right of Kings") survive.

A Postscript on Narrative Ethics . Among the professions, particularly medicine, law and counseling, narrative has become a powerful tool in developing ethical insights and perspective. To tell a story is to invite participation from the hearer, and it is to also a means of communicating the richness and complexity of human dilemmas. Narrative Ethics is simply diagnosis through story. Its benefit over the four traditional ethical approaches is that story invites both ethical engagement and ethical creativity. In business, as in law, a great deal of teaching is done through the use of cases. This is nothing more or less than using the pedagogy of narrative ethics. The narrative invites the hearer into the complexity of issues involved in personal, professional and organizational dilemmas, and provides a road through the complexity to the simplicity on the other side.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, an American jurist who wrote stunningly comprehensible decisions, even in some of the most complex cases imaginable, has a famous quote: “I would not give a fig for simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity.” It is the role of narrative to lead us through the thickets of overwhelming complexity, to the clarity of enriched simplicity.

Of course, there are some people who congenitally can not stop to ask for directions when lost in life’s thickets. For them, storytelling is a waste of time. The male mantra, “just cut to the chase” comes to mind. This may in part explain why women (feminist like Margaret Wheatley, for example) have such a fondness for narrative. At all stages of the ethical decision-making process, narrative is a useful tool of analysis for exposing the facts, conflicts, feelings, and values that are the stuff of the human predicament.