Ethical reasoning

1.

At the end of the last module, we realized that we needed to develop our capacity for ethical reasoning in two key ways: being morally principled and being morally sensitive. We’re now going to focus on how moral theory can help us develop principled ethical reasoning. Moral theory is the academic discipline dedicated to establishing plausible, reliable, and general moral claims in light of the full range of human experience.

Moral theory has a long history in written and oral traditions from all over the world. We won’t be able to canvass most, much less all, of the traditions and methodologies of thought it encompasses. We’re going to focus, first, on some basic features of how moral theory works – how does it rigorously derive general moral principles? And how can we use those principles to improve our reasoning when we face tough situations in business, like Kathleen FItzgerald’s?

2.

A general moral claim, or principle, lays out how people morally should or should not respond (or act, or behave) in a wide range of situations. To say that it’s a claim about how people morally should or should not respond means two things. First, its truth does not depend on whether people happen to agree with, want, or have their personal goals promoted by following the principle. If some version of the principle we should not deceive others when they justifiably rely on us for information is correct, then it doesn’t matter whether we agree with this principle, or if we want to follow the principle, or if our career aspirations are well-served by following it. It applies to us, and we ought to follow it, regardless. (Sometimes scholars put this point by saying that moral principles are categorical. Second, moral claims are connected to our blaming practices. When someone culpably violates a moral principle, we take them to be blameworthy and deserving of angry, accountability-focused reactions. (This is different from when someone culpably makes, say, an arithmetic mistake when doing a calculation in their head. We wouldn’t angrily blame them!)

How do we discern general moral principles, so understood? We start with widespread, enduring moral convictions and practices that are supposed to embody received wisdom about moral right and wrong, which has been refined through millennia of human social experience. Morality is the sort of subject matter that all humans have direct access to; it is not as though one needs specialist training and tools (like microscopes or spectrograms) to have an informed view about morality. Moral practices arise across all organized human societies, and while there is some variation in which values are emphasized or prioritized in different human subgroups (as we discuss in Ethical Theories and Their Limits; see also Haidt, 2012), there are several common moral convictions that provide a sound basis for moral theorizing. One example is the “Golden Rule,” which is a principle of reciprocity that calls on us to treat others in ways that, if we were in their shoes, we would endorse being treated. (Wattles, 1996)

These common convictions are just a starting point, though. The next step for moral theorizing is to make rigorous, systematic sense of our convictions by formulating general principles that purport to capture (or summarize) our convictions. Suppose that one of our convictions is the Golden Rule. How do we formulate this in a systematic, rigorous way? Notice that, while at first blush it seems to be a positive principle (a principle about what to do), it doesn’t make systematic sense that way. We shouldn’t do everything for others that would be acceptable to us if we were in their shoes. If so, we could never stop doing “unto” others! Instead, we should understand the core idea behind this conviction as a negative principle, about what not to do: We should not treat others in ways that, if we were in their shoes, would not be acceptable to us. It would also be good to bring greater precision to the idea of being “in someone’s shoes.” Obviously, it’s not to be understood literally, as being about footwear. Rather, it’s about facing the same, relevant kinds of circumstances and having the same, general kinds of interests as someone else. This gives us the following moral principle:

This is a rigorous, general principle about how we should not act, which is rooted in a deep, widespread moral conviction (the Golden Rule). This is the start of moral theorizing.

The next and final step of moral theory is to test candidate moral principles, such as the GRS, against potential counterexamples and refine them accordingly. Counterexamples are cases in which applying a moral principle leads to an objectionable or counterintuitive verdict about what should or should not be done. A potential counterexample to GRS is a case in which an action that is harmful to someone is necessary, and intuitively justified, to forestall a wider catastrophe. For instance, perhaps a boss needs to let go of one of the employees on her team in order to meet the budget target she’s been given; otherwise, the entire team will be cut. Now, suppose that all members of the team are more or less equally high performers, and that they differ only on the basis of how long they’ve been with the company. The boss decides to let go of the most junior employee. Now, if she were in his shoes, would the decision to terminate his employment be acceptable to her? It’s not obvious that it would be. After all, it’s not his fault that he’s the most junior employee, and he’s performing just as well as everyone else on the team! This suggests that the GRS would not permit the boss to fire the junior employee. But it seems clear that she should let go of someone on her team, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone else for whom the decision to fire them would be more acceptable. So we have a potential counterexample to GRS: a case where it reaches a counterintuitive verdict.

In light of counterexamples, we can either “bite the bullet”—that is, just accept the counterintuitive result—reject the principle, or revise the principle. A good first step is to try revising the principle. For GRS, the trouble in the above case seems due to how it doesn’t adjust for unusual, potentially catastrophic circumstances. The simplest fix would be to add an exception-clause (“unless …”) to the principle:

Of course, if we were really going to drill down, we would need to specify what a catastrophe is and how to rank options for avoiding catastrophes. But we at least have an illustration of how moral theory proceeds when testing moral principles against counterexamples.

3.

Suppose you have a moral principle that has been carefully tested and refined. It’s a good guide for your ethical reasoning. How exactly can you use it when faced with difficult moral situations in business?

One thing you might hope for is a clear, precise answer for what to do in every difficult situation that you’re in. But that’s not how living a life of moral integrity works. Moral challenges don’t admit of “plug and play” resolutions, as if a simple program could be written with the correct moral principles and churn out the answers to life’s most difficult moral questions. Having a sound set of moral principles is more like having a sound approach to coaching a sports team. You have a set of guidelines that you regularly apply and that you know are reliable rules for training athletes and putting them in a position to win games. It doesn’t mean that you’ll always have an easy answer for what to do. You’ll still need to wrestle with difficult decisions and make judgments about, e.g., what play to call, or what position to assign an athlete, or what training regimen to implement. But your coaching philosophy still guides you toward success. It provides a consistent, solid foundation for your decision-making as a coach. Similarly, moral principles, although they don’t provide formulaic answers for what to do, provide a consistent, solid foundation for how to navigate life as a moral agent.

What does this look like in practice? Let’s imagine using moral principles in two different general contexts: the context of individual deliberation, and the context of interpersonal conversation. For an individual’s deliberation in business settings, moral principles can serve to organize and guide the process by which they take account of what’s at stake (or the reasons in play) for a given decision and arrive at a decision about what (not) to do. Return to the Kathleen Fitzgerald case. Imagine that you were deciding, as she had to, whether to go along with the deceptive account-opening tactics that your boss was pressuring you to use. Applying a sound moral principle would help you to identify the factors that are most important—about how customers and employees were being mistreated by the company—and to set aside flimsy rationalizations. You would see that, even if no overt harm was being done to customers, it didn’t follow that there was “no foul”—they were still being treated wrongly, as a principle such as GRS would reveal. Using the principle thus would help you avoid being duped by a rationalization or giving in to an overly self-protective impulse.

Usually, we do not face moral challenges in business alone. We face them together, as members of the same teams or organizations. This was certainly true of Kathleen Fitzgerald. This means that another important context for using moral principles is in conversation—talking with coworkers about a moral challenge you face with them. In this context, moral principles can play an important framing, or question-raising, role, especially if (as is likely) not all coworkers are on the same page about the moral challenge in question. Rather than accuse them of being bad or wrongheaded, you can rely on moral principles to pose targeted, helpful questions. For instance, using the GRS principle, Kathleen Fitzgerald could have asked, “If we were Wells Fargo customers, would we accept having accounts opened in our names without our permission?” Or more simply: “What would our customers say about this?” Principled questions like these set the stage for collaborative, principled responses to moral challenges.

References

Driver, J. (2022). Moral theory. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2022/entries/moral-theory/

Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind. Vintage Books.

Wattles, J. (1996). The Golden Rule. Oxford University Press.