by Ethics Newsline editor Carl Hausman
I began my association with Rushworth Kidder about 20 years ago. As an ex-pat from New York City, I was delighted to start work in idyllic Camden, Maine, where Rush had set up shop in a warren of cluttered offices furnished with dented metal desks.
The small staff — I think it was four or five people then — would sit with Rush for hours and bat around ideas like cat toys. Through this process, he developed many creative approaches and innovations that became part of the foundation of the Institute’s work.
Interestingly, the assumptions that Rush posited in the early days have proved not only durable but prescient. They are astonishingly more salient today than they were two decades ago. They also have undoubtedly gained a greater measure of public acceptance.
Rush would have been the first to caution that that a statistical linkage does not necessarily translate to causation, but I’m sure the Institute played some role in raising awareness of the ideas that have become more or less mainstream today.
Among them:
- Ethics and rules are not synonymous. In the early days, we battled the assumption that dealing with ethical issues was simply a matter of drawing up a detailed code or set of regulations that would enforce good behavior. That view fell out of favor for many reasons, but right atop the list is the global financial crisis that metastasized after a glut of greed propelled by transactions that — while reckless — were often within the boundaries of the law.
- Technology leverages the damage made possible by unethical behavior. Rush’s earliest example of this principle coalesced when he became one of the first Western journalists to cover the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. The tragedy was, Rush discovered, not only a technical meltdown but also a moral one: Irresponsible workers had overridden alarms and intentionally jammed safety devices in order to complete an ill-advised set of tests as quickly as possible. The point he made at the time was that a handful of amoral people in charge of a powerful technological device could create disaster unparalleled in simpler times. The message didn’t always hit home among the unimaginative because nuclear reactors were not household items. But today, computers and internet access are, and the pages of Newsline are replete with examples of how digital technology magnifies the threats posed by someone who intends to bully, defame, or inflame.
- There are global constants in ethics. In the early 1990s, we often would encounter critics who were generally well-meaning but baffled by the contention that there could be universal ethical norms. “It’s all relative,” some said. But research and a growing body of empirical evidence — observable in each day’s news — show otherwise. For two decades, Institute publications, first in print and then online, have focused on how corruption corrodes the welds of confidence necessary to bond commerce and community — in Illinois, India, and everywhere in between. Stories we’ve carried also have documented universal reverence for equity, human rights, privacy, respect for the environment, and fundamental dignity. The names and the datelines are different and those attributes are clearly valued in different proportions by whatever government or cultural institution happens to be in power, but it’s clear that globalization applies also to ethics.
- Ethical reasoning can be learned. Ethics seminars were not unheard of before the Institute began offering them, but Rush changed the modus operandi. Instead of lists of prohibitions, instead of lectures intended to somehow browbeat “reform” into the listener — strategies that generally have a dismal rate of success — Rush showed how ethical behavior can arise from an organic series of decisions balancing attributes such as justice versus mercy or the rights of the individual versus the good of society. He developed a system that teaches not a series of dictates and recipes, but skills necessary to adapt, improvise, and nimbly navigate the ethical obstacle course of everyday life.
These are just a few of the many facets of Rush Kidder’s legacy, of course, and in the space of this column there’s not room for much more. But to paraphrase an old newsroom saying, at least it was brief and we got our facts straight. Rush would have liked it that way.
by Ethics Newsline editor Carl Hausman
I began my association with Rushworth Kidder about 20 years ago. As an ex-pat from New York City, I was delighted to start work in idyllic Camden, Maine, where Rush had set up shop in a warren of cluttered offices furnished with dented metal desks.
The small staff — I think it was four or five people then — would sit with Rush for hours and bat around ideas like cat toys. Through this process, he developed many creative approaches and innovations that became part of the foundation of the Institute’s work.
Interestingly, the assumptions that Rush posited in the early days have proved not only durable but prescient. They are astonishingly more salient today than they were two decades ago. They also have undoubtedly gained a greater measure of public acceptance.
Rush would have been the first to caution that that a statistical linkage does not necessarily translate to causation, but I’m sure the Institute played some role in raising awareness of the ideas that have become more or less mainstream today.
Among them:
· Ethics and rules are not synonymous. In the early days, we battled the assumption that dealing with ethical issues was simply a matter of drawing up a detailed code or set of regulations that would enforce good behavior. That view fell out of favor for many reasons, but right atop the list is the global financial crisis that metastasized after a glut of greed propelled by transactions that — while reckless — were often within the boundaries of the law.
· Technology leverages the damage made possible by unethical behavior. Rush’s earliest example of this principle coalesced when he became one of the first Western journalists to cover the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. The tragedy was, Rush discovered, not only a technical meltdown but also a moral one: Irresponsible workers had overridden alarms and intentionally jammed safety devices in order to complete an ill-advised set of tests as quickly as possible. The point he made at the time was that a handful of amoral people in charge of a powerful technological device could create disaster unparalleled in simpler times. The message didn’t always hit home among the unimaginative because nuclear reactors were not household items. But today, computers and internet access are, and the pages of Newsline are replete with examples of how digital technology magnifies the threats posed by someone who intends to bully, defame, or inflame.
· There are global constants in ethics. In the early 1990s, we often would encounter critics who were generally well-meaning but baffled by the contention that there could be universal ethical norms. “It’s all relative,” some said. But research and a growing body of empirical evidence — observable in each day’s news — show otherwise. For two decades, Institute publications, first in print and then online, have focused on how corruption corrodes the welds of confidence necessary to bond commerce and community — in Illinois, India, and everywhere in between. Stories we’ve carried also have documented universal reverence for equity, human rights, privacy, respect for the environment, and fundamental dignity. The names and the datelines are different and those attributes are clearly valued in different proportions by whatever government or cultural institution happens to be in power, but it’s clear that globalization applies also to ethics.
· Ethical reasoning can be learned. Ethics seminars were not unheard of before the Institute began offering them, but Rush changed the modus operandi. Instead of lists of prohibitions, instead of lectures intended to somehow browbeat “reform” into the listener — strategies that generally have a dismal rate of success — Rush showed how ethical behavior can arise from an organic series of decisions balancing attributes such as justice versus mercy or the rights of the individual versus the good of society. He developed a system that teaches not a series of dictates and recipes, but skills necessary to adapt, improvise, and nimbly navigate the ethical obstacle course of everyday life.
These are just a few of the many facets of Rush Kidder’s legacy, of course, and in the space of this column there’s not room for much more. But to paraphrase an old newsroom saying, at least it was brief and we got our facts straight. Rush would have liked it that way.
©2012 Institute for Global Ethics
©2012 Institute for Global Ethics
