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Ethics course can deepen understanding

June 17, 2010

By Janet Keeping

The federal report on the inquiry into suspicious business dealings between Karlheinz Schreiber and former prime minister Brian Mulroney raises important ethical questions. Among his many recommendations, Honourable Jeffrey J. Oliphant urges that civil servants and MPs receive better “ethics education and training.” It’s a great idea.

Some commentators consider ethics training pointless. They argue ethics are something you either have or you don’t. But surely this is wrong: reflecting upon what ethics demand in a variety of scenarios could be of considerable help in public life.

Ethics cannot be codified

Of course, much depends upon what you think ethics are. Some suggest that all that matters is having the correct code of ethics. But ethics are never completely encapsulated by a code – they can’t be.

Codes set out precise rules, and ethics are less about rules than applying principles to concrete circumstances. One such principle might be “avoid doing harm whenever possible.” But no code can provide the answer to every ethics question. For example, to apply the harm principle, you often have to weigh competing harms and assess probabilities.

Organizations, such as governments, increasingly recognize the inherent limitation to ethics codes. They have responded by adding clauses, such as “the examples listed below of disrespectful behaviour toward co-workers – such as yelling at them, except in an emergency – are not exhaustive.” In so doing, their codes are transformed from mere lists of rules to something more like guidelines for applying principles to different circumstances – in other words, ethics training, just as Oliphant has called for.

Ethical character develops over a lifetime

The development of character – our ability to sort right from wrong – is not something fixed forever at one stage of our lives. Early moral upbringing is crucial, but that’s not the end of the story. Any one of us could over time forget what we’ve learned or succumb to unethical pressures. Periodic refresher courses in ethics might be useful to all of us, not just civil servants and politicians.

Some may insist that people should intuitively know what is right or wrong. Such a claim is false because so many people plainly do not intuitively know that profound evils – such as racism and sexism – are wrong. But it is also partially true. Stealing $ 2.3 million from fare machines, as an Edmonton transit worker did over a period of 13 years, is indeed “intuitively” wrong. Sun Media columnist Peter Worthington is correct that no one needs “a graduate course in ethics” to know that.

Ethical questions can be more complicated than our intuitions allow. For example, access to information held by government is a lynchpin of modern democracy, but there are ethical questions around just how free that access should be. Although there may be some self-serving motives behind the federal government’s resistance to letting Parliament see all that is known about transfers of Afghan detainees, there are also genuinely competing values at stake – freedom of information versus protection of military or state secrets. Exactly how the balance should be struck is a matter of great ethical gravity, and is not intuitively obvious.

Debate a necessary part of ethical thinking

Worthington also dismisses ethics courses because, he writes, “right and wrong are not usually debatable topics.” This is obviously false. Some things – rape, for example – are obviously wrong. But most situations we encounter are complicated.

Imagine the position of a social worker who is told by superiors not to inform client families of additional available provincial funding. (This is a real example from Alberta’s not-so-distant past.) When confronted with exceptional need, is it unethical to ignore such a rule and pass on the forbidden information? It’s a matter worthy of debate.

What about offshore drilling, in light of the Deepwater Horizon blowout: Would it be ethical for government to authorize more such wells? Given that there are serious questions about the technology to cap wells quickly when emergencies occur, allowing more drilling looks wrong. But given that substitute sources, such as the oil sands, are also environmentally destructive, allowing more offshore drilling might be ethically supported.

While scandals involving envelopes of cash may dominate the media, the most important ethical issues faced by Canadian public servants and politicians are of a different type.

Most wrongdoers eventually get what they deserve. But when we engage with the great policy questions of the day – such as, how should we weigh environmental risk against our energy needs – then we are into real ethical complexity. Intuitive knowledge of right and wrong is relevant but less than adequate for decision-makers. A graduate course in ethics might be just what is needed.

Janet Keeping is president of the Sheldon Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership, Calgary.

Published in the Calgary Beacon, June 18, Moncton Times and Transcript, New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal, June 24, Guelph Mercury, June 30, Sicamous Eagle Valley News, Ashcroft Cache Creek Journal, July 19, 2010.

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