I was on the #Cardstock Zoom call today.
Matt Ballantine mentioned the difficultly in determining ethics within an organisation.
I said I could help.
Because ethics is something that comes up more than once within systems thinking.
The biggest problem with ethics is that people assume you mean morals.
While they share the same house, they are definitely in different rooms.
Morals are personal, whereas ethics are defined by the group.
And therein lies the problem.
It’s a group activity.
Ethics can’t be rushed, either.
They should not be provided as a static way of being.
Instead, ethics should be malleable, almost as if they were a start-up within an organisation.
This allows for new worldviews to be brought to the table for discussion.
We’ve seen how this might play out with the current Covid-19 pandemic and the dilemmas that doctors are finding themselves in with regards to who gets treatment and who doesn’t.
It’s not as cut and dried as it might seem.
Morally, it should be everyone.
Ethically, the choice is not binary.
This is why hospitals have ethics committees, so that one person’s morals don’t override what is best for all parties involved.
It also means difficult decisions need to be made.
But it also means that as new data are made, so that committee can shift their ethical policy.
Heinz von Foerster (1992; Ethics and second-order cybernetics. Cybern Hum Knowing 1:9–19) states that ethics are “desirable and undesirable conditions inherent in any action and in the consequences of the action.”
The conditions of our ethics are not abstract, but are a core part of a form of action. This is clear in the example above about our current medical situation.
So, how do you go about creating ethics?
Discussion.
Reflection.
Knowing, and accepting, each other’s worldviews (which will include morals).
And a big bucket of compromise.
Because ethics are emergent.
They are not static and solid.
Despite what we think.
Those practices that we can agree upon, as a group, are what make up our ethics.
As Ray Ison points out in his excellent book, How to Act (Ison, 2010, pages 108-109), it is the working on the code of ethics (or conduct) that is important, not the code itself.
If that all sounds like it’s obscuring the obvious, it’s not meant to. What it means is: we need to have the difficult conversations in order to determine where we are willing to draw our boundaries.
That’s where the ethics are.