Teaching Ethics

Thanks to the recent push to produce more ethical people, you’ve probably had to take a course in the subject in the not too distant past. In my profession, accounting, the Minnesota Society of CPAs now requires that every member take eight hours of ethics training annually. According to the theory, unethical behavior among accountants should be a thing of the past any day now.

I am skeptical that these classes are producing any valuable change at all. Most of the attempts to teach ethics with which I am familiar involve a large dose of case studies and role plays. The students are required to study the case from all of the relevant viewpoints that they can identify and reason out what an ethical choice should be. Then everyone sits around and discusses the case, sometimes with students acting out the various parts. If you’re still in school, you’ll probably have to write it up as a paper. The premise is that this approach gives students the tools they need in order to figure out what the ethical choice is in situations they will face in everyday life.

The problem with these case studies is that, while they can approximate the elements of the ethical dilemma itself, they in no way approach the conditions under which the choices must be made. Knowing which of the possible choices are ethical and which are unethical is by far the easier part of the issue. Most of us have been raised to be able to tell right from wrong, and if we stop and think about a situation, we will almost all identify what we ought to do.

There are some scenarios that we face where the competing interests are complex enough that it really would be helpful to have some training in sorting through them. These are the types of situations that instructors try to create for their cases. This really only helps on the margins. When we look at the everyday situations where unethical behavior causes damage, on both the micro and macro scales, rarely is it the case where those involved made an honest effort to do what was right, but just couldn’t figure out what that was. Vastly more common are the instances in which one or more key figures came up with reasons why he could avoid making the right choice, or never really put the effort into determining what that choice would be, figuring (consciously or subconsciously) that if he didn’t, then they it wouldn’t trouble him.

The case study approach fails to create meaningful conditions in several ways, four of which come immediately to mind. The most obvious is that there is nothing at stake for the students. Making ethical choices is easy if there isn’t any payoff to making the unethical choice.

Another is that those examining a case do not feel any pressure. They can make their choice at leisure, and a decision made under stress is very different than one made without it.

The third difference is that no case can capture the details of the situation. We all are filled with little resentments of and affections for the people around us, many that are not even rational but purely of emotion. This web of entanglements affects all of the choices we make, and cause us to be more or less ethical, or even to change what decisions are ethical and which aren’t. Students examining a case evaluate it within a vacuum.

The last problem relates to the role plays that are often used. Most of us are bad, or at least untrained, actors. Put in front of a class and told to be someone else, needing to create the character on the fly, we are uncomfortable. There is stress in the making of the decision, but it is the wrong kind. Students are afraid of looking stupid before their peers. They are thinking less of the ethical choice and more about making sure that they don’t stutter.

All of this means that the environment in which students deal with cases is different in kind from that in which we deal with dilemmas in the real world, and not just different in degree. The exercise does nothing to prepare students to actually be more ethical. It could be made to be useful in a class on the philosophy of ethics, but not in the practical application thereof.

How, then, can we teach ethics. In truth, we really can’t. By the time people are professionals, or even college students, their ethics are largely set. A few may have life altering experiences that cause a major shift, but these are not only rare, but also unpredictable. They are not something to be relied upon to produce more ethical members of a profession.

The thing is, while people have been shaped as ethical creatures by adulthood, most people don’t really understand their ethical being. They have a set of beliefs about what is ethical, and they have patterns of behavior, but they are largely unexamined. To get adults to become more ethical, this is what needs to be changed.

The ancient Greeks understood this. It was simply an accepted truth among their thinkers that the only life worth living is one that comes from rigorous knowledge of the self. This is harder than it sounds. The Greeks meant this much more broadly than just ethics, but that was a very important part. Of course, they believed that women, slaves, the working classes and often non-Greeks were incapable of doing this, and that the only life truly worth living was that of a male Greek of leisure.

I don’t let the rest of the world off that easily. The vast majority of us are capable of the self-reflection necessary to understand our values. It is simply that most of us don’t make the effort to do so. We have the ethical structures through which we make life’s decisions, but we mostly do so on autopilot. Even the choices we agonize over often fail to spark real reflection on the beliefs that guide them.

This method carries us through much of life. Making choices without understanding is sufficient for many, if not most, of the ethical decisions we make. However, it can break down at the worst possible times, when we must make the most important, and most difficult ethical choices.

This system can break down in two ways: the lure of self-interest and conflicts between different values. The first is obvious, and what ethics classes are generally designed to bolster us for. The second is more subtle.

Rigorous self-knowledge can help with the first, though it can be limited in its efficacy. Thorough knowledge of what we value, why we value it and how intensely that value is held can inform us as to the price that would be paid by making the unethical decision. It forces us to confront ourselves.

In economics, the cost of something is the total reduction in value of all assets affected by an economic decision. The price is the amount of the cost that is borne by the person making the decision. It is a basic principle that proper decisions can only be made when the price of something equals the cost, and that the price is explicitly known by the decision maker. Neither the cost or the price must necessarily by measured in money or even capable of objective definition, as much as economists strive to assign a number to everything.

An example of this comes every time you drive your car, particularly if you do it in rush hour. The cost of driving includes not only the gas you burn and the wear and tear on your car. It is also the time you spend driving, the wear and tear on the roads, and the time of every other driver along the route as soon as there is any congestion; they would arrive at their destination sooner if there were fewer other cars on the road, and you contribute to that delay through your presence. The price you pay to drive somewhere is your time, the required maintenance and buying the gasoline you use. A portion of the damage to the roads you cause is covered in taxes on the gasoline, but in most American locales, it is insufficient to cover all of the damage. There is rarely any price paid for the consumption of other drivers’ time. That the price of driving is less than the cost leads to more driving than is optimal.

This principle holds true in ethical decision making as well. We get a situation in which the apparent payoff of making an unethical choice is known to us, but we do not understand our values well enough to appreciate the cost to our psyche of that choice. In that instance, we are prone to underestimating that cost when assigning a price to that choice. As with driving, when the price is less than the cost, we make the wrong decisions. By possessing the knowledge of self capable of assigning the correct price, we can enhance the incentive to be ethical.

The issue of conflicting values arises because many ethical decisions, and most of the really tough ones, are not simple questions of the violation of a single value that we hold. Multiple values are often involved, and they can pull in opposite directions. Running our decision making on autopilot breaks down in the face of values that impel us to make different, incompatible choices. Only knowledge of our beliefs can help resolve this, and it’s too late to acquire it when the dilemma arises. At that point, the stress of the situation reduces our ability to discern ourselves rationally.

A lack of self-knowledge both reduces our ability to make choices in accord with our ethical beliefs, and reduces the incentives for us to do so. Fortunately, while inculcating ethical beliefs is largely beyond the power of post-secondary educators, helping students to understand those beliefs should not be. Helping them to understand what they believe, and how the actions they take interact with those values, is the key to teaching ethics at the university and professional level.

This is easier said than done. Over the course of a semester, it would be possible to put together a series of assignments, both in class and as homework, to walk students through this progression. It would be labor intensive, for both the students and the instructor, but it can be done. In a continuing education setting, there isn’t the time needed to do this in any comprehensive way. Typically, there is just one classroom session, with no time for outside assignments.

Class sizes are also large enough to preclude much discussion. Limiting interaction between the instructor and the students to only what can be done in a large lecture setting is problematic. I am still struggling to come up with ideas for overcoming this. I toyed with simply announcing at the beginning that every student was going to pass, and that those who were uninterested in anything else should just sit in the back and do whatever they want, so long as they didn’t disturb those of us who were trying to educate ourselves. I’d be happy with 10% of the class actively participating, and would think that this would lead to better overall improvement than is accomplished by other approaches.

The main problem I see with it isn’t the essential fakery in terms of providing continuing education to the rest of the class. Professional continuing education classes are notoriously hard to fail, and the students currently treat them accordingly. The approach would do nothing more than explicitly acknowledge what is already true. The issue is that the students that choose to participate in the discussion are probably the ones that need the education the least. If the students already possess significant self-awareness, there is much less to teach them.

As of now, I still have not come up with a good way to overcome this problem. I have a few ideas that are in a rudimentary stage of development. It’s uncomfortable knowing what the problem is and not knowing any solution, but that’s where I stand.