Ethics: How to make good choices in a complicated world

and you know if i had to say one thing about sort of punishment to your earlier question it would be that unethical behavior is the great disconnector it disconnects us from other people it isolates us it destroys trust it destroys community it destroys organizations and so i'm constantly trying to get them to see humanity front and center if we're talking about robots humanity front and center if we're talking about one of the more classic examples car keys and a grandmother who's 90. you know what are the human consequences hello welcome to cambridge forum today coming to you live by zoom i'm mary stack the director of cambridge forum and today we are tackling a tricky question for us all how do we choose to do the right thing has it ever been more complicated to make the right decision well fortunately today we are traversing these murky waters with a knowledgeable transatlantic expert on the subject of ethics susan leoteau is coming to us from palo alto california have i said that right susan leon where she's teaching a new cutting edge class at stanford university on ethics for everyone when she's not in the us susan serves as chair of the board of trustees for the london school of economics and she's founder of the non-profit platform the ethics incubator in addition to advising global corporations and ngos on complex ethical matters susan is equally at home battling with her students at stamford she's just published a new book entitled the power of ethics how to make good choices in a complicated world and i'd like to welcome you susan and i'd like you to tell us a little bit about how you ended up with such a multifaceted career um is ethics popular today and how do your students take to applying socrates and aristotle to everyday life decisions so i'll let you uh have a little talk about that first so mary thank you so much for having me it's really a pleasure to be here i actually started my career as a lawyer and i started in a very very excellent wall street firm so i saw the nuts and bolts of corporate law but i also saw the limits of the law and i saw all the things that happened notwithstanding the law and all the places that the law didn't prevent didn't guide and i started thinking even when i was a lawyer that there had to be more and there had to be a different way of getting guidance for our decisions um seven or eight years into my law career i had to move uh to california and the firm didn't have an office there i had to move because my husband was being moved and uh i started as an associate dean at stanford law school in charge of international and there i decided to launch some new classes on global ngos and on international business transactions and see really test the limits of the law and i continue that kind of work both teaching and advising so looking at corporations looking at ngos and after a while also looking at government governments and i came to the conclusion that we cannot have siloed ethics we can't have just corporate ethics or ethics of a particular specialty other than perhaps medical ethics which is very very precise and i wanted to come up with a synthetic way of thinking about ethics that could be used across all different sectors and the reason for that is that these sectors bump into each other so corporations are regulated they have to deal with governments they have corporate philanthropy so they deal with the ngos and and individuals each of us as consumers are also their stakeholders so um it didn't work and a lot of the drama that we were seeing in the news um was in my view because people were trying to silo different types of ethics um fast forward my current thinking is really about how to democratize ethics and by that i mean how to make ethical decision making available to people from all walks of life not just stanford students not just corporate leaders and that's the origin of this new class i'm teaching at stanford called ethics for everyone and the idea is to think about how a privileged group of stanford students can learn a high caliber ethical decision making that is practical and grounded in reality including grounded in today's tech reality but most importantly how they can share that learning much more broadly and how they can make uh make that accessible to many other people so that's the the purpose of the book um the power of ethics is to provide a i provide a forward framework that becomes a habit it's not something that is a big labor to memorize um to your point mary it's it isn't about choosing your favorite philosopher um and it is highly practical that anybody can use and i set out six forces that i believe drive the ethical decisions we have to make today in all walks of life and it can be anything from do you take the car keys away from an elderly relative to what are we going to do about facial recognition technology or the opioid epidemic um well first of all are people taking this class because it's uh you know part of the compulsory number of other options electables or is it because there's a genuine thirst for people to really understand how to operate as an ethical human being we have got this huge absence really now the church going and is dropping off um people often times are not getting the kind of ethical upbringing perhaps they're used to in the past and maybe not so much time is spent at home talking about these kind of things or contesting them so in the absence of that is it down to schools perhaps to try and fill in that huge blank in raising a moral citizen so at the at the level of my stanford students i teach several different classes um one is called ethics on the edge that i've been teaching for seven or eight years that really goes after cutting edge technology cutting edge biotechnology one is called ethics of truth in a post-truth world and that gets at all kinds of things from disinformation to gender identity and who gets to define our truth to what happens when we disregard truth what happens to our history what happens to our memory today's compromise truth is tomorrow's falsified skewed memory in history so i teach i teach ethics from a number of different angles none of which are sort of what i would call classic surveys of philosophers um the stanford students there's a combination i take students from all over the university and they're interested in how ethics is going to affect their own lives personally but also their careers but more broadly your question is so important mary because in this mission for democratizing ethics i want to start with five-year-olds i want to see elementary school curriculum uh and indeed i'm i'm looking for funding now to to develop curriculum that is appropriate for elementary school students that is appropriate for middle school students that really difficult age i would say between sort of 10 and 13 9 and 13 and then for high school students um and again very practical very human and at the same time the kind of ethics that help them realize what the context in which they're living a social media context a context in which truth seems to be negotiable in which we're even questioning the importance of truth so absolutely education is critical it's absolutely critical interesting um brought up a lot of stuff there first of all somebody has asked a question here which is a very good one uh in your book you allude to six basic frameworks or ideas what are those six basic frameworks so i basically i um have distilled six forces that i believe are applicable to any ethical decision we make to greater or lesser extent and the six forces are the following the first is that we need to banish the binary we're in an epidemic of binary thinking of yes or no in or out do it or don't do it and in fact what we need to be doing is looking for opportunities and risks really mucking around in the nuance and the gray and in fact with my students but also with my clients and even in boards that i chair i don't allow the words ethical and unethical even in my ethics classes because i don't want people taking sides and this binary thinking is sort of part of a historic moment we're in of taking sides as opposed to solving problems so i'm looking for what are the opportunities and what are the risks more than yes or no all in or all out the second is i call scattered power and in a nutshell what that is about is that we all have more power than ever before to do good or even to do harm so simple example a cell phone we can tutor a child on the other side of the planet through a cell phone or we can commit a terrorist act and the real question of scattered power is is it tethered to ethics or is it just a rogue power uh the kind of thing that we saw for example in china when a rogue actor hojin kuey edited the gene the embryos of twin girls um so the the question about power is we we all have much more than we ever did how are we going to use it that's partly our choice but also what are big corporations distributing in terms of power you know what are what is what is happening what is their responsibility when they distribute social media to three billion users um the third is contagion and um this is part of an effort to answer the question why do we keep saying the same stories in the news over and over and why do why does it seem like these stories get bigger and bigger it's one crisis after another and the magnitude seems to seems to increase can you give an example of what you mean by that yeah so i mean one example of the same thing over and over and for example in 2008 we saw the subprime mortgages it was one bank after another it seemed like just like a disease the unethical behavior was spreading and sometimes it actually mutates into other forms of unethical behavior so you start having the same actors all over the world for example disinformation you have the bigger and bigger scale so wells fargo bank you have 3.5 million fraudulent accounts um boeing you start to see it's one one crash and then it's another crash and then it's another problem um and so this this force is about identifying the things that drive the spreading of unethical behavior or indeed the pushing of positive ethical behavior as opposed to just looking and saying i don't want fraud i don't want corruption i don't want sexual harassment um and the drivers i put into two categories to keep it really straightforward one is very techy so techy drivers of contagion can be things like social media or gene editing any any technological device that can spread the internet um through which people can spread things like disinformation or other or you know uh join a terrorist group for example but there are also non-techie things that are familiar to all of us so pressure or greed or skewed incentives or perfectionism this is a particular passion of mine is banning perfectionism because when you push for perfectionism people can only react in two ways one is to try to achieve perfection which is not achievable and cheat to do so so that drives the unethical behavior or they can keep trying and trying and trying and that's where we see this tragic epidemic of mental health crises where it's just literally sort of banging one's head against a wall so we can get into any of these in more detail but though the third one is contagion just uh more quickly the fourth i call crumbling pillars and that is about the fact that we have certain pillars of ethical decision making um like informed consent no signing the consent that you will have your tonsils out and it used to be that we kind of understood the risks and opportunities we trusted the doctor or we trusted the school that was going to take our child on a field trip when we signed the consent form but today we're consenting for things that we cannot possibly understand even something like 23andme we're consenting to knowing things that we cannot unknow we're even consenting to knowing things that affect other people all of a sudden learning that we have a genetic disease and that throws huge responsibility on us like do we have to tell our children um you know so so the pillars of ethics that were quite simple up until recently sort of no longer hold transparency is another one you know if you take an example like a smoking kills on a cigarette package that's transparency everybody knows what it means if you take a social media company's terms of service you know pages dozens and dozens of pages of microprint with lots and lots of cross-references and multiple other policies and then at the end one big disclaimer saying you know basically the company's only liable to you for a hundred dollars no matter what happens uh that's not transparency um and then just quickly the fifth is blurred boundaries and that's really blurred boundaries between human and machine we have things like humanoid robots we have things like elon musk's neurolink you know basically turning us into human cell phones planting a chip kind of thing um there are some examples in the book of human animal in the interest of for example growing organs and pigs for human transplant and then the sixth is the single most important one in my view and i call it compromised truth but it's all aspects of the assault on truth and all aspects of calling into question how much truth matters and the reason it's the most important is that you can have ethics with all kinds of nuance with all kinds of imperfection but in my view you can't have any ethics without truth there's no such thing as alternatively factual ethics so those are this it's an awful lot of stuff right there that's an awful lot of stuff um well the first a very basic one do you think that today's in today's world in our efforts to get our kids to succeed that that has been put ahead of being virtuous or being good i mean do you think people want to have on their tombstone as their epitaph she or he was a very good person or he or she was in who's who because they did this that and the other so have we skewed our own values about what's important and therefore that percolates into how people behave so i think that there's definitely a lot of sense that the two can't go together and what i would argue is that you really can't you really aren't successful if you haven't achieved whatever it is you've achieved whether it's you know winning a grand slam tournament or whether it's achieving a certain position um or whether it's finishing a degree or whether it's you know helping your neighbor you haven't achieved anything if you haven't achieved it with some ethical thought that doesn't mean ethical perfection again but it means without integrating ethics into your decision-making um and i think we need to change the way to your earlier point change the way we educate but also change the way we think about this as parents as people who are maybe older and in a position to promote and make sure and when i work with corporations and ngos and the like i'm constantly integrating ethics into performance reviews integrating ethics into hiring processes and the like so hopefully it would be a combination of the two um but it would certainly be that if you've achieved something and sort of left the ethics in the gutter and harmed a lot of people along the way that's not really success so it's pretty much down to your own individual agenda at the end of the day it's how you've got where you got i think it's down to your own individual agenda but it's also down to leaders and corporations and governments and to drive that agenda to say you know what we need to part of our hiring process for example i work with corporations sometimes to do an ethics interview for a hire so somebody has all the skills and somebody um has gone through a process and i'm gonna poke and prod and it's not a quiz like you know what did aristotle say or can you tell me what happened with the enron case it's really about things like have you you know have you had a situation where you've had to really stand up when you had something to lose personally where you had you know have you had a situation where you've had to speak up so i'm asking questions that are a bit more oblique but i do think it's it's both i think it's we have institutional responsibility to educate and to align incentives uh and make decisions so that other people come along i think it's very difficult um if we look at the most successful companies now this is a huge blanket statement but let's just call up a couple that you talk about in the book about boeing i mean boeing as it would happen had another couple of bad things happen this very week um and how many of the big companies will do the expedient thing to to satisfy profit margins and their shareholders unless they are forced mandated to do the right thing by regulations or whatever else i mean there's no way that we can know when we get on a jet that somebody's cut corners on the safety standards in that jet so how do we get how do we get that in the equation for corporate performance so your your point is is really well taken and that we certainly have some egregious examples of corporations you know going for profit so uber in the early days travis kalanick his principles were growth and profit i mean there wasn't you know he made no bones about it um they were things like step on toes that is literally one of the uber's early day principles if we look at some of the social media companies um you know they want maximum number of eyeballs on screens for a maximum amount of time and they're going to do whatever they have to do to get there even though their profit is astounding boeing is a particularly shocking example and i raise it in the book for two reasons one is that human safety it's a life or death situation it is an above and beyond responsibility it's beyond a fraudulent bank account and i find it particularly shocking that you know that greed uh and pressure from competition and the things that i write about in the book can influence decision making at the highest levels even when human life is at stake and we saw that to the extreme when the former ceo dennis mullenberg even after two crashes that were unexplained within a period of a couple of months asked president trump to keep the planes in the air when 65 countries had grounded them so even after the ethiopia crashed there was a crash in indonesia and a crash in ethiopia as many may remember he was still asking to keep the planes flying and what i said is that after a while um the the inspectors decided that it was a particular software problem this mcas software and i've been arguing ever since that it's not an mcas it's not a software problem it's a decision making it boeing problem and that we all need to be very mindful of the fact that that decision making can pop up in many other ways and have created many other problems that are not apparent to the public and so i i never thought that the management of that by the regulators or by the company was adequate it was only about trying to fix this one problem it's um it's difficult so talking about success again which often times you know i'm thinking of the kids that are growing up where they take their cues from so over the last four years now we talk about government we had this kind of ethical bankruptcy in terms of character uh very corrupt behavior lies tweeted daily the whole public consciousness seemed to erode and the idea for the common good certainly i never heard mention of so uh let's bring it to the pandemic first of all i think that definitely i think probably affected the general psyche i don't know if you do um but then i read an article this very weak very interesting article in the harvard gazette about how the pandemic has affected ethics so there are certain people as you know that flaunt about they won't wear masks and they won't distance because it's my choice so choice overwhelms public health or the common good so how do we deal with that how do we wrap our heads around that when we've reached this i me center of the universe um disregard the standing on the shoulders of others thing there's so much in your question so to start with the political context um i am not partisan in the book and i'm not partisan in life in my mission to democratize ethics and what i would say is that no single president is so is solely responsible for moral decline of a nation and no single president can restore uh the moral foundation of a nation so that's again my mission of democratizing ethics we all need to do our part and in these situations there are always um there's always a supporting cast of characters uh and i talk in the book about lyndon johnson um a democrat and somebody who did a lot of good things also um around civil rights and the like but i think it's important to realize um that that's kind of the basis on which i'm looking at these things now the pandemic is very interesting it raises questions of choice versus as you say um public health public good um you know there's a a fundamental um issue with this con what i call conflicting principles and that is that our choice shouldn't be able to in my view harm others to the to you know life or death we would not allow uh people to run a red light we would not allow people to drive drunk and not wearing a mask and not socially distancing can spread a deadly disease and have the same consequence only worse because you might give that disease to someone who unwittingly especially if they're asymptomatic will go on and give it to many many other people than would be harmed in say a tragic automobile accident so the other thing is there was a wonderful photo in the economist about a month or two ago and i'm going to get this wrong but there was a sort of people in the street and a placard saying something along the lines of imagine if it were a member of your family and i think what happens and one of the things i tried to tell my students but also for example last year i actually had some of my students parents come to office hours i invited parents to office hours for the first time since everybody was home and one of the things i talked about was you know if you want a simple way of looking at this put yourself in someone else's shoes you know classic and decide would you like that to happen to you and the number of news stories we see on on networks of all kinds of you know if only i had thought about it if only you know now that i'm in this position i know meaning now that i'm in the hospital watching somebody die of covet or suffering the other thing about choice is that right now there's so much about covid we don't know we don't know the long-term consequences of the disease we don't know the terrible consequences of this so-called long covet so this choice to take the risk is a very uninformed choice because by definition we don't know everything but you know mary we do know enough we know that this is a potentially deadly disease um so so it's it's been very tricky and we've had to ask ourselves our own ethics we've also had to ask ourselves where should government come in so in france where i've just been for six months masks are mandatory nobody's making any choices because it's mandatory um and i'm not arguing one way or the other but i think um as you're saying it's this disease has definitely thrown a number of ethical questions into the fore fascinating the cultural aspect you've just raised about ethics and about what people are willing to do within certain countries obviously we know the asian countries are a lot more willing to undergo real quarantine and you know are monitored heavily monitored similarly in england uh you probably know huge fines if you're caught in groups or having a rave up massive amounts of fines so it's actually enforced whereas here it's been very kind of wishy-washy i agreed each state has a different kind of view on these things but the question is is it just the pandemic or is it is it more about this idea of i think you said to me that impunity the sense of impunity spreads unethical behavior so people will do a quick risk reward calculation and rather than thinking of doing the right thing in the in a more lofty sense it's the right becomes a euphemism for what's good for me um and i agree that that perhaps this hasn't of course we've always had problems with tricky dicky you know i was here when nixon you know resigned but the level and scale of this now seems to be much larger than i recall um you know in in japan if an official is caught doing something corrupt there's a kind of you know atonement attached to it you know um now i know you said that you thought shame could be a kind of a toxic thing and indeed it can but is there's a kind of healthy thing about being um apologetic and feeling some sense of shame for doing the wrong thing because it damages not just you but others well so i do believe that blame and shame and finger-pointing um and calling people out as a general matter doesn't drive ethical behavior um what you're saying about the scale of the problem and the scope of the problem is exactly what i was referring to earlier about contagion the unethical behavior associated with covid is as contagious as the disease itself and so this is a perfect example of just how in today's world things spread so much and similarly social media disinformation um but but i do agree that um with your word apology and i believe in ethical resilience and recovery i believe that we all go off the rails you know my hand up first we make judgments in hindsight don't look so great we make judgments that in hindsight look fine except for the fact that circumstances you know collided against us and we've had you know there was unexpected uh unexpected things happening so we all need to be able to sort of stand back and i'll start again with tell the truth this is what happened resilience and recovery hinges on truth just like ethics hinges on truth in the first order um you know take responsibility so that's your apology and make a plan and say this is how i'm going to act going forward and i think on the basis of that we give others a way to engage with us also and i believe that ethical decision making the biggest sort of reward is that it connects us to other people it builds trust and it can build trust even in a recovery situation when we take it that way but shame in the sense of you know to come back to the uk there was a minister in the uk that was encouraging people to call out their neighbors to actually look for a neighbor who might have had an extra person or who might have gone out and put their mask on across the street instead of on their doorstep and actually call it out if not outright photograph it and report it and the like that kind of thing i have no patience for whatsoever that is not solving any societal issues or contributing to public health so i want to ask people to start sending us some questions of their own about ethical dilemmas i'm interested in what most people or anybody really which is to tell us about the common ethical dilemmas that they confront today and and while we're waiting for that um and also what they feel the consequences for immoral behavior should be um because usually if you're caught doing something and it's illegal and immoral you end up paying some price for it um you don't just say oh that was too bad um okay i was going to ask about one of the other questions here okay do you think that people are inherently good um and do you think when you test out i imagine you have scenarios with your students where you put them in ethical dilemmas do they play act and you say if this happens and that happens and then one jumps off the ship what do you do now to get them to kind of think about great big ideas in one-on-one situations is that how you do things or how how do you get people a lot of different ways i don't do uh the classic sort of trolley car things um i'm very interested in reality and i tell my students that you know we can do ethics out of reality all we want we can cherry-pick convenient facts or convenient circumstances we can curate our social media to have only the reality we like but reality will always come back to bite so i'm constantly saying okay today's reality is there is facial recognition technology today's reality is we have this particular situation in government and this particular thing happened on january 6th so i'm very much uh making them face reality and in in doing so i'm also trying to give them an opportunity to learn about politics to learn about technology to learn about bio ethics and things like that as well um but i do make them understand a very human uh consequences and this is all i i say to them and this is my mantra that ethical decision-making tethers us to our humanity and you know if i had to say one thing about sort of punishment to your earlier question it would be that unethical behavior is the great disconnector it disconnects us from other people it isolates us it destroys trust it destroys community it destroys organizations and so i'm constantly trying to get them to see humanity front and center if we're talking about robots humanity front and center if we're talking about one of the more classic examples car keys and a grandmother who's 90 you know what are the human consequences somebody has just asked that very question in the chat box can you please talk more about how to sort out driving by an old person who is somewhat but not totally disabled you know it's it's such a wonderful question i'll come clean and say that i face it myself discussions with my husband and siblings and all that um this is a real issue of um if we look at principles it's a real issue of autonomy um versus safety and and it's also a real issue of who's responsible do we just sort of look the other way and say the elderly person is an adult and they should be able to do what they want or do we as younger adults who have a relationship with them somehow it doesn't matter whether it's biological or not do we have some responsibility and where i come out on this is when i look at the potential consequences of a decision i always ask what are the consequences that are important and irreparable and in a case like that the consequences that are important and irreparable are that that person or an innocent person could be harmed and or innocent people and um and also they wouldn't we wouldn't want them to have to live with that you know it is a terrible thing to have to live with having harmed somebody else um so so that's kind of the foundation but there are practical ways through this because because i'm just like all of you i mean we need actual you know action items here so sometimes the situation is such that really we do have to take the car keys away they're just you know they're just at a stage in life where they shouldn't be driving um other times um we have a situation where uh where we can say okay maybe they shouldn't drive at night so it's not it's the not the binary thing again it's not all or nothing it's um when and under what circumstances so they don't drive at night maybe they don't drive on the highway maybe they don't have anybody else in the car um maybe they you know or maybe we find replacement options that may not be comfortable for elderly people like uber if it's affordable or a friend to drive them so um so i try to be practical but if these are very difficult decisions and in the end um that moment where we decide that safety is paramount and we just have to take the car keys away isn't going to be easy but it's going to be perhaps the situation that allows us not to have any important or irreparable harm i tried to have that conversation with a friend of mine in california whose mother had totaled three cars in a row and had great explanations for why that occurred um and he could keep saying oh it's her only freedom it's her only and i just didn't know what the potential i think three i think three crashes is pretty much evidence that it's time yeah you know and let me say one more thing which is that when we're looking at risks and opportunities there are times when the opportunities are so great that we might be willing to take a risk so for example we wouldn't want to eliminate social media we wouldn't want to eliminate gene editing that can help cure cancer and huntington's disease right even though there are potentially some risks in this case there are alternatives you know it may not be as comfortable it may not be the same level of independence but the person can get from point a to point b in most cases one way or another without potential harm good point um somebody has put a comment in catherine about the comment about neighbors tuttle tattling on each other and uh she said it reminds me of what the nazis did encouraged um i i felt that and you're saying it and then the second thought i had was that comment that's such a wise reference to yeah it's a very good one uh the the only problem is if someone was having a rave up and when i mean you know 50 or 100 people having a house party i think i would be tempted to call the police on that i don't consider that i consider that to be a huge public health issue yeah i mean yeah i would i would agree with that and in fact you know there there's there they're always you know extenuating circumstances i think that is definitely one of them particularly because we know the the the vast consequences of that yeah massive okay so shelby has said how do you how do you think what do you think about issues of cultural values or moral relativism in terms of ethical choice and dilemmas what if two cultures view truth differently wow that's a great question it is a phenomenal question and thank you for that let me start generally with culture there's no way to extricate ethics from culture in general so i'll give you a concrete example in europe data privacy you know is paramount and i once interviewed a very senior member uh advisor to the g7 and she said to me and she was french and she said you know you could no more sell your data then you could sell your kidney and that's why we see such excellent data privacy law by the way coming out of the eu so very different cultural sense of that other kinds of areas where this comes up are things like surrogacy transplants all kinds of things around that cultural culture comes into it but also we see it to the earlier point as well about nazism in germany there are laws that you cannot have pro-nazi propaganda on twitter for example and the companies actually abide by the laws so this is a very very important point that this question raises um that said cultural uh culture can't become an excuse we need to understand that it exists we need to understand that it influences ethics but in a global world in particular but even within a culture we can't just say well that's just the way it is that's just the way you know american people are or that's just the way ex-people are and uh and so it's okay culture is not an excuse yeah it's interesting what people will tolerate in certain cultures like um hate crime which has gone on and on and on here um under what all species i don't understand uh on the internet uh is definitely punishable it's an offence in europe and in england it's not just they take the post down you actually get prosecuted for a hate crime so i think we're all the internet of course is another huge area of how we police the internet and how we protect our information and feel secure but before we do that someone's typed a question in uh shannon i was horrified during the summer of 20 2018 by news reports of the treatment of immigrants at the u.s mexican border oh my god yes i was very wrong in thinking that the ethics of my nation's leadership precluded the traumatic separation of children from parents and i feel that similarly appalled by those in power are increasingly this is being normalized beyond the obvious civic imperative of voting how can an ethically responsible person take action that's a great question it's a great question and it's a great example i was horrified and i just i still have these images and some of you may have these images as well of these kind of foil blankets that the children had and these scenes of separation i couldn't imagine that that was happening in my country you know as you say in 2018 it was mind-boggling to me and the word normalized in the question is critically important and thank you for that um and that's normalization is the consequence of the contagion i was talking about it's the consequence of um the scope and scale of unethical behavior of the spreading um being far and wide of upping the ante all the time and we start to think that more and more things are normal it's normal that a president you know doesn't tell the truth it's normal that we see this kind of behavior and that nobody's you know actually shutting it down i also love the reference in the question to voting and i i write in the book and i've written an op-ed about integrating ethics into voting so it's very very important but you know we were talking earlier before the show with mary about protests um one of the things and it sounds perhaps mundane but we do have a lot of free speech in this country and we can use social media for the good and we need to get up get out there and speak up and just say you know this is absolutely unacceptable but it's very very difficult because as individuals we don't have that much control over what happens at a specific place in the border um but we certainly can see the benefit of some of the positive contagion so black lives matter or malala yousafzai you know the youngest nobel laureate who has spread support for girls education all around the world and i really believe that the positive contagion is is necessary and possible um i am an ethics optimist um but we have to be proactive you know there's no such thing as neutral and ethics and and many of us have read ibra max kennedy there's no such thing as neutral with racism well my pitch um borrowing from his wonderful phrase is there's no such thing as neutral and ethics so we you know we can start with speaking up we can start with um supporting or organizations that are going to support better immigration but it's not an easy problem and it's a critical one i think you're absolutely right about how much can be done by enlightened politicians now aos has done a lot this last week raised i don't know how many million two million was it for the people in texas because it wasn't being done at the federal level or it wasn't being done fast enough so she got people activated social media um so as you say the internet can be a great source of you know information and activism totally the problem is it seems to be a super highway for all sorts of unethical behavior and uh you can have identity theft unquestionably terrorism yeah terrorism harvesting our information selling our information i mean it's countless yes so uh is it too late do you think in terms of you talked about the the safeguards that we have in france which are marvellous and some other parts of the world is it has the horse left the stable in this country in terms of trying to to fix something that should have been regulated right at the beginning so the internet isn't something that the us can regulate alone and the challenge of the internet and indeed the challenge of many of the technologies today that are borderless is that no one nation can regulate and no one's ethics can control so we have this unprecedented question of global ethics and i'm saying global ethics and not global regulation because i don't believe global regulation is ever going to happen in a lot of ways the horse has you know has left the barn and there's no question that i argue all the time that when we know something or when we could know something we're responsible for it and there's been a way too much time has gone by since we knew that there was risk uh when we haven't acted we haven't acted to regulate we have enacted to sort of to integrate the ethics but it's a huge challenge and it's one that i'm very interested in thinking about in terms of what does global governance look like in these borderless challenges what does global ethics look like and indeed what does my you know again back to my personal mission of democratization of ethics i don't mean that to be an american concept i mean that to be a global concept and what does that mean and we're going to need that because the law will never be in sync with these technologies the law will always lag far behind the technologies so being as you walk into these classes filled with these very bright shiny ivy league students what are some of the ethical concerns that they bring up in your classes what what are their questions or concerns some of them are very very um human they're family questions you know i had a student whose father was living out of his car during covet because he was a bartender and he lost his job um and so when i did office hours with the students i literally was communicating with this gentleman from his cell phone in the car where he was that was also his home uh some of them are big tech questions you know the things like we're talking about the internet some of them are questions like immigration uh and certainly you know some are specific depending on uh you know on the the area specialty of the students but i think the most the the cut to the core human questions people dying of covet immigration these are the things that really really really you know resonate in terms of what i was saying earlier about the importance of tethering uh our decision making to ethics as a way that we stay tethered to our humanity so they're really focused on those and then just as a matter of interest they're out they're interested in the very very cutting edge tech as well they're also interested in questions of gender identity racism you know we we deal with all these subjects and especially in my truth class um and these are just again very fundamentally fundamental questions about who are we as individuals um what is our identity how do we respect identity as a society so all of those kinds of questions as well so i just realized we have a whole slew of questions for you that was in the not the chat books but the q and a box so here's one matthew what do you suggest when it's almost impossible to reach the people in charge i live in a condo the board defers to the property management vice versa the individuals hide behind an ambiguous group you can't contact them but they sure can contact you for money or penalties what do you suggest i suggest you're not alone we all have these situations where everybody in the world is reachable via anything from facebook to linkedin to you know i mean literally shouting from the rooftops except property managers so somehow they seem to have you know shells on top of shells on top of shells and nobody's discovered email in that industry so i have to say i'm very very sympathetic sometimes this is going to be you know if things are really bad sometimes the only solution is to hire a lawyer um but generally it depends on the situation i mean generally you know just continuing to fight and holding your ground i've literally helped students in apartment buildings just say i'm sorry i'm not paying the rent increase or i'm sorry you know i'm not moving out until you return my deposit because you're threatening x and it's it's as mundane as that but it's as important to normal people as that i mean all of us get you know um and it's important to send the message that it isn't because you have power that you can use it without ethics and that's an example of it as much as you know powers at higher levels of government is there any evidence that people who say they're committed to their religious beliefs faith have higher ethical standards than the rest of us let me put it this way i'm not aware of evidence that doesn't mean there isn't evidence this is something that i haven't studied and i never talk about things that i that i haven't studied myself so it's an excellent and extremely interesting question um i'm not aware of any evidence what i would say is that when i talk in the book about you know we each choose our set of principles it's interesting that some people choose their principles on things like um just things that come to mind for them honesty or integrity or compassion or the like very religious people sometimes uh derive their personal principles from religion so we see it come into their ethics in that way um but but it's a wonderful question but i don't i'm not aware of that research um ooh bit of a cryptic one here aren't ethical behavior or isn't ethical behavior and american capitalism diametrically opposed to one another no i don't think so i think we can have ethical capitalism i think it can't run rampant i think we need to be mindful of some of the things i talk about in the book like greed and skewed incentives and information silos and the kinds of things we saw at boeing there is no reason that boeing had to make the decisions that way so it's a very important question it is it's a question that i love because it is really a fundamental question of our time but i don't again coming back to my banish the binary it doesn't have to be one or the other it doesn't have to be capitalism or ethics we can have ethical capitalism now i won't say that there aren't some sacrifices that there might be a bit of cost or there might be a bit of you know sacrificing profit but we can still have a capitalist model and indeed on the flip side we need to think about the ethical consequences of not having that model and make sure that we're not just assuming that a non-capitalist model would be ethical or would do more good for more people kathy said corporations are not required to admit responsibility when cases are resolved they just pay fines what does that achieve nothing um it achieves absolutely nothing now it's it's that they're not required to but it's more that they negotiate that so they negotiate settlements um and generally for reputational purposes and also for not setting a precedent for future litigation purposes one of their highest priorities tends to be protecting you know admission so they're willing to pay for that but if we look at some of the fines and in particular with some of the silicon valley companies there's such a drop in the bucket that i would actually say that there are cost of doing business that they just plan that it is much cheaper for them to just charge ahead do harm and then pay for the consequences and there's a there's an older example of that several years ago we saw pharmaceutical industry bribery and we saw it all over the world we saw it in china we saw it in iraq we saw it in iceland we saw it in europe in the u.s everywhere and after a while i finally said to somebody this is a cost of doing business these fines from government and the minor reputational hit and the cost of the pr agencies somebody has decided that the bribery in this industry pays off so handsomely that they'll just deduct out of profit the government finds and you know as i said the pr agency if there's a bit of a reputational hit and it just becomes cost of doing business oh i say that's very true for the monsantos and the like of this world into absolutely true um but we won't go there today there are other questions uh odd republican efforts to eliminate or reduce government regulation of capitalism another way of avoiding ethical behavior or being held account so i can't generalize about efforts to reduce regulation or you know and i'm very non-partisan because there are efforts on all sides of the spectrum and in all political systems that that raise or or repair ethics um what i would say is this really needs to be looked at on a case-by-case basis um and did you know certain and we do need to look at regulation for the consequences that it will have on a whole wide variety of stakeholders and we need to look at things like inequality uh in the same way we need to look at inequality um in things like covid vaccination distribution policy so any regulatory decision we need to look at one at a time and very specifically with the consequences on different stakeholders and i would just add the consequences over time not just the consequences this week but what are going to be the medium and long-term consequences that's very interesting because somebody has just written in a point which i think is is interesting because it's a cultural thing i haven't encountered in this country um it says do you think the us will ever embrace a truth and reconciliation process such as the south africans undertook in regard to apartheid i know there's conversations beginning now about reparations here towards slaves and slave ancestors um do you have any comments on that i think it's a wonderful question and i am oh this it's a wonderful question and and we have so much to continue to think about and to continue to learn so i won't predict the future i don't know whether the what the u.s will do but just a couple of points on this you know as a white woman i ask myself all the time two things what is my part in the problem and what can be my part in the solution um i never you know and this is something i've learned um over the years and i've tried to work on myself and my own ethics is it's very easy for someone who is in a privileged position to sort of reach to the other side and say let me help you and try to be seen only as part of the solution somehow white people and you know i am a white person we have to ask ourselves how are we part of the problem and i asked that in my work i asked that in my ethics advising i asked that in my teaching um so the first thing that i that i think we all need to do or ask those two questions i think we also need to uh learn from this wonderful question that truth again you know this with there is no ethical recovery whatever we're calling it or whenever it happens without truth and as i said earlier also taking responsibility and making a plan forward to assure that we fix the problem and the final thing i'll say is that you know part of democratizing ethics is not just understanding that we each have so much power but it's that we have a responsibility to use it and person by person we can make a huge difference person by person we can do our own little truth and reconciliation and that will add up and sometimes it's institutional like georgetown university um engaging in different efforts uh for example scholarships um for black students and recognizing their history with slaves sometimes it's just as individuals saying what can i do what can i read you know can i uh how can i have a conversation with my children it's a wonderful question um someone's just said this was a superb talk on a very critical topic thanks for coming we need another hour if not seminar so i must ask you before we go off air if there's any suggestions of books people can other than your own of course that people could uh maybe explore uh to kind of give themselves a little more uh ammunition in terms of understanding this how they deal with the gray areas that we all have to navigate i think that's a very interesting thing i i think we all were a lot more sure of things when we were younger i remember i had absolutely certain about everything when i was about 21. this was this and this was that and then i as i got older i realized there was an awful lot of this stuff in between uh more of that than there was in the others it's all very wise as teenagers so my my answer to this really interesting question may surprise you a little bit um a lot of the straight up ethics books are very much about do this and don't do that so to be honest i don't recommend some of them because my point is not to tell anyone else what to do my point is to show a distillation of some learning and let everyone make the best choices for themselves because i will never be walking in your shoes and i would never know your life as as well as you would um there are some i did mention you know ibrahim eggs candy i think for racism to look at the this question of neutrality but my real answer is read fiction um i started out life before i was a lawyer as a comparative literature major and i genuinely believe um well two things fiction and i'll make one other recommendation fiction allows us to use our imagination it gives us practice in wearing somebody else's shoes and good fiction is mired in nuance and complicated things and people who are not perfect and people who have to recover from ethical failures so i think really good fiction um really gets our imagination going and gives us some practice and actually taking the tools in my book and applying it to fiction can be um quite a fun exercise the other thing is i i recommend two presidential biographies um and that is doris kearns goodwin um team of rivals uh many people saw the movie many people have read the book she's extraordinary and what i take out of that even if you don't want to read the book is get your own team of rivals get people around you who will tell you when you're off the mark or who will poke and prod all those times when as you say mary you're so certain you're right um so that one and then um robert carro's lyndon johnson series again it's um i i highlight one part of it in my book on contagion um but it is really almost a case study and all the things i've been talking about brought to life at the highest level but also showing a cast of characters what was the surname robert robert carroll c-a-r-o he's extraordinary very good okay well i shall post those on the website for people um gosh we're nearly running out of time there's a couple more you know a lot more questions now um i know these are difficult because three things one someone's asked do you think some cultures are more ethical than others two are women more ethical than men and three are ethics and morals identical in your mind wow okay so ask them again if you can't remember them no it's okay what an interesting question so uh i don't generalize in fact i have a severe and enduring allergy to generalization and just as i don't allow the terms ethical and unethical in my class that is another variation on the theme of generalizing so i don't generalize um i think this is very much about ethical decisions and i say you know we're only even each of us we're not sort of intrinsically good or bad we're only as ethical as our last decision this comes down to choices for me um this question of ethics and morality you know it's like if you look up the definition of truth or post truth what you'll see is what your third grade teacher told you you should never do which is define a term using it so when you look at all the dictionary definition definitions of ethics it talks about morality and you look at the definitions of morality they talk about ethics and i just sort of don't really worry about it to be honest um you know i think i'm interested in behavior so ethics tends to focus more on behavior um but yeah but it's a really good question because i i was looking this up earlier um because you know morals seems to be about good and bad and all right and wrong and ethics is more or maybe it was either all i i was looking at the two differences um you could be ethical without talking about morality well you first of all i genuinely did this search looking at all a whole bunch of reputable dictionaries and it really is an exercise in you know not doing you know what your third grade teachers told you you're supposed to do um but yes i think the ethics part of it is more about behavior and i include in behavior decision making and my personal focus is on how we make good you know good decisions choices okay i think we've covered a tremendous number of things um yes i don't think we can answer any more questions because we've taken an hour of your time you probably have a class to teach so i'm going to thank everybody that took part today there was about 60 people that joined us which is lovely and i hope they were from all over the world that would be even wonderful more wonderful uh thank you mary also to say it is such an honor and i am so honored that all of you joined your questions were extraordinary you know i i can also take questions in some other at some other time or offline or whatever and so i just want to say what an honor it's been for me mary thank you everybody for joining us but particularly thank you susan for making the time this was a really interesting discussion gave us all food with all really my honor take care thank you [Music]

Channel: GBH Forum Network

Views: 644

Keywords: Boston, WGBH, GBH, Cambridge Forum, Susan Liautaud, right and wrong, ethics, ethical choices, effective decision-making, concentrated power, rapid advances in technology, insufficient regulation, consumer protections, citizen rights, positive decisions, ripple effect, workplace strategies

Id: ZWmga0lxPS4

Length: 61min 32sec (3692 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 29 2021