50bookchallenge #9/50: How Good People Make Tough Choices, Rushworth M. Kidder

I don’t think I’ll find answers to eth­i­cal dilem­mas in a book, but this was a thought­ful if some­times less than thor­ough explo­ration of the deci­sion­mak­ing process­es involved when faced with right-ver­sus-right situations.

The author clar­i­fied the ques­tion of eth­i­cal rel­a­tivism ver­sus eth­i­cal abso­lutism that has haunt­ed me for some time. On the one hand, sit­u­a­tion­al ethics seems like a dan­ger­ous slide into a total lack of val­ues, where there is no right or wrong except as deter­mined by the con­text of a giv­en sit­u­a­tion. On the oth­er hand, eth­i­cal abso­lutism does­n’t pass the smell test either by insist­ing that sit­u­a­tions and con­text don’t come into play in ques­tions of right ver­sus wrong. In either case, we hear peo­ple talk of “grey areas” where there is no right or wrong but only a series of prag­mat­ic compromises.

The author posits that right-ver­sus-wrong ques­tions are easy, that all we must do is clear­ly see the ques­tion as one of right and wrong, and that we can then take appro­pri­ate action. More dif­fi­cult are the ques­tions of val­ues in con­flict. What do you do, for exam­ple, when asked a direct ques­tion about a sub­ject that you know of only because the infor­ma­tion was dis­closed in con­fi­dence? These ques­tions point out the prob­lem with abso­lutism: loy­al­ty is a virtue, yet so is hon­esty. How can one prac­tice absolute loy­al­ty and absolute hon­esty in such a sit­u­a­tion? Both are right, and you can’t do both.

Yet these also point out that any sit­u­a­tion­al inter­pre­ta­tion relies on a clear asser­tion of per­son­al val­ues. With­out believ­ing in hon­esty and loy­al­ty, the ques­tion comes down to whether or not you can get away with lying or break­ing a con­fi­dence. That lev­el of pure prag­ma­tism can only be descibed as amoral.

This book then deals with the sticky ques­tions that arise around ques­tions of val­ues in con­flict with one anoth­er. It acknowl­edges that right and wrong need be con­sid­ered not in a vac­u­um where sit­u­a­tions have no play, but rather that sit­u­a­tions need be inter­pret­ed in terms of our own clear­ly-defined values.

Three meth­ods of resolv­ing these con­flicts are pre­sent­ed, and fre­quent­ly the answers dif­fer depend­ing on the means of solv­ing the prob­lem. These meth­ods are pre­sent­ed as tools to help resolve ques­tions of ethics, and none is pre­sent­ed as supe­ri­or to the oth­ers. We are left to devel­op our own answers, as the rel­a­tivist would insist, but only after a search­ing def­i­n­i­tion of our own prin­ci­ples, as the asbo­lutist demands.

This was a thought-pro­vok­ing read, and I think I learned some valu­able tools from it. It is by no means a ground­break­ing or author­i­ta­tive def­i­n­i­tion of ethics to fol­low, but instead a clear-head­ed look into the kinds of ques­tions we so often have to wres­tle with.