Some pondering on ethics and morality

This months' Human Resource Director Magazine had an interesting piece on ethics interviewing the GM HR of ANZ, Suzette Corr.

The big takeaways from the interview are actually two quotes. They obviously struck the HRD editor as well as he (Ian Hopkins) also referred to them in his editor's note inside the front page.

Firstly was this:

My take on integrity is it's the personal drive to do what's right. It's to advise on in what's right. It's to advise without fear or favour and to have the moral character to not just know right from wrong, but to speak up and challenge as necessary... It's in the actions you take rather than just a trait of who you are. 

What really struck me from this quote is it moves beyond just an ethical stance but rather looks towards one's actions and to be able to take those actions with courage of unbiased thought. 

The other was in reference to how CHRO's and HRD's can often find themselves leading organisations of thousands or tens of thousands of people and their capacity to drive positive change is particularly significant. 

Imagine the powerful force for good HR could be if these people, whose profession is humans, embraced an understanding of ethics and integrity and acted upon and spoke up to ensure the right thing was done?

This got me thinking back to a podcast I heard from Radio National's All In The Mind years ago about morality and so I went on a search. Fortunately I found it surprisingly quickly! It's titled Moral Minds: The Evolution of Morality and while it doesn't directly reference the organisational context, I believe it still has worthwhile items to ponder on. Here All In The Mind interviews Mark Hauser, Professor of Psychology and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and Richard Joyce, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney.

Below are two extracts from the show. Both have differing and interesting implications when we look back to the workplace. With Marc it relates to distance (physical and hierarchical/organisational), action vs inaction and why sometimes people might be inclined "put things under the rug". With Richard it delves into areas like organisational politics, unwritten cultural norms and conflicting obligations.   

Marc Hauser: 

So where we're making progress on this is that we built about three years ago a website called The Moral Sense Test which now after about three years has somewhere like 300,000 subjects from around the world. And on that website people log in and tell us where they're from, their religious background, or educational background, age and so forth. And then they proceed to take many of the kind of classic moral dilemmas that you know people like Richard and other moral philosophers have invented to try to get some purchase on the nature of people's intuitions. 

Here's some examples of the kind of things that seemed to cut across culture, at least with the sample we have. 

As far as we can tell across this very large sample of people, people judge actions that cause harm as worse than omissions of an action that caused exactly the same harm. People consider a harm that is intended as worse than the same harm that is foreseen... 

...why is it that people think that using somebody as a means to an end is not OK, whereas something that maybe harms one but for a greater good, under certain circumstances, it might be OK.

Richard Joyce: 

If it's true that human ancestors lived in an environment where reciprocity was extremely important to them, which almost certainly they did, then there's a question of 'well, what does morality actually add to the reciprocal exchange'? And the idea that I've been examining is that it bolsters motivation. It's all very well to give something to somebody cause you like that person, but if in addition you feel that you're morally obligated to pay them back in exchange for something they gave you on a previous occasion - that is perhaps the evolutionary function of the moral faculty. That it bolsters motivation in the social sphere to make us better co-operators.

If you have the time and interested in the subject, I highly recommend you check out the article and podcast.

Corporate Sustainability

In light of the Daily Telegraph's three part series into climate change and Copenhagen upon us I thought it could be fun to kick things off with a look into corporate sustainability; ethics and change management.

Sustainability often conjures up the theme of sacrifice. Something must be sacrificed for the greater good. The irony that Tony Fry mentions is that what we are ultimately trying to sustain is unsustainable, that is sustaining our current lifestyles.

We're at a watershed. The future of humanity as we understand it is really before a choice which says do we change direction or do we try to maintain what we already have?

Now the question in terms of sustainability and sustainable development, to a large extent kind of reduces to the proposition of sustaining what we already have, sustaining in a sense, the unsustainable. (Fry, T. Innovation Cities, radio broadcast, Future Tense, ABC Radio National, Sydney, 20th August. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/futuretense/stories/2009/2656432.htm) 

I wont go into the technicalities of climate change as this is not a science blog, however the concept of sacrificing on altruistic terms is an interesting one when viewed in the light of capitalist organisations. Sacrificing on monetary terms is easy to comprehend and essentially easier to justify as there is no personal value attached to a dollar or number. What about sacrificing values however?


In my final year of university I investigated big for profits partnering with Environmental NGO's looking at both the possibilities and complications arising from such a event. I came across a successful partnership between Greenpeace and npower. To the open disapproval of the World Wildlife Fund, npower's father company, RWE dealt with coal and nuclear power. Regardless of this Greenpeace went ahead and developed windfarms with npower. The result was a green customer base which grew from 5,000 to 50,000 in 5 years. (Webb, T. 2005, Does it pay to get into bed with business?, The Guardian, Viewed 1st October 2009, http://www.spinwatch.org.uk/-news-by-category-mainmenu-9/173-pr-industry/724-does-it-pay-to-get-into-bed-with-business)


Essentially the conclusion I came to was this:

...Environmental NGO’s may need to lower their ethical standards and step of their high horse in order to actually drive change in the corporations their targeting. What this ultimately means is associations and partnerships with the processes, products and models in big business that initially go against the NGO’s standards of practice. However the partnership itself is used to place the NGO in the strategic position to drive real change, internally as opposed to relying on external influences. (Braithwaite 2009)

I confess there can be a number of counter arguments to this statement. Firstly it is arguably a utilitarian point of view; the means justifies the end essentially. Secondly, it in a sense oversimplifies the the issue of challenging ethical standards as it suggests the breaking of them to be a black and white issue.  Was Greenpeace really lowering its ethical standards when its end goal was to produce windfarms? For a similar analogy. Is the environmental activist lowering their standards when they have to fly across country to give a keynote address possibly affecting hundreds?


I'll leave you with this food for thought and in my next blog attempt to look at this issue on a more personal level, within the workplace, between people rather than the clash of two organisations.