This is the beginning of a series of newsletters dedicated to the question of what it means to be ethical as a middle manager. This first post will serve as a general overview of ethics to lay the groundwork for future posts.
What is Ethics?
Ethics, specifically normative ethics, is the study of how people ought to behave. This assumes, of course, that there is a correct or good behavior. Indeed, what is the right thing to do is contextual to some extent, but that need not lead us to conclude that normative ethics cannot exist or that all decisions about good and evil are relative.
This week, we will look at three major categories of ethics: Virtue Ethics, Consequentialism, and Deontology.
Virtue ethics
Virtue ethics focuses on moral character as the core driver of ethics. This is most associated with Aristotle, although it appears quite a bit in contemporary thought, particularly around leadership and management. It is a view that focuses on the traits of the leader.
For example, a good leader is empathetic, honest, supportive, has integrity, etc. (the lists are everywhere on LinkedIn, so I won’t repeat them here).
This isn’t to say that you are either born virtuous or not. These virtues can be chosen, and virtuous traits must lead to virtuous actions:
On the Aristotelian view, moral virtue is chosen, virtuous acts themselves are the result of deliberation and choice, and the agents so deliberating are good deliberators – they possess practical wisdom that allows them to make the correct decisions about what they ought to do. 1
Of course, no one is perfectly virtuous, so virtue will always be a matter of degrees, and there is such a thing as going too far. You can be “honest to a fault,” so being virtuous includes using wisdom to understand a situation’s context. Thus, under virtue ethics, it is about being someone “who understand[s] what is truly worthwhile, truly important, and thereby truly advantageous in life, who know[s], in short, how to live well.” 2
This can be seen in workplace value statements. Some value statements are more rule-oriented (which would fall under deontological ethics), but others describe virtues that employees are expected to have.
Two challenges to virtue ethics are worth talking about. First, being virtuous is not enough to ensure that people will behave well. We certainly know some non-virtuous people who do the right thing at times and virtuous people who fall short. Being virtuous alone is not enough to define what behavior we should or shouldn’t do.
Another challenge to virtue ethics is that our behavior often has less to do with our cultivated traits than our context. We may be more honest in some situations than others, and more or less honesty may be the right thing in specific contexts.
Consequentialism
A second dominant form of normative ethics is consequentialism. This is the idea that whether an action is good is based on its consequences. The most common form of consequentialism is known as utilitarianism. This has also had a resurgence with Effective Altruism. 3
The challenge, of course, becomes how we measure how much good is created and how we compare the good values of one action against another.
One of the most common approaches is hedonistic and based on measuring happiness and pain.
Within this, we still need to measure how much pleasure (and pain) a certain action will cause for all those impacted. This means we need a way to score both pleasure and pain. Is eating ice cream or reading a good novel more pleasurable (for example)?
Even with basic scores, there is a question of intensity vs. impact. Say we can measure the pleasure of a particular activity as a 5 for one person and a different activity as a 2 for two separate people. Do we look at the second activity as generating more pleasure since more people had pleasurable feelings or the first as the total score of 5 is higher than 4 (2×2)? There is also an essential question of whose pain and pleasure matters and how much. Do those closest to me (family and friends) demand consideration?
Various approaches to consequentialism answer each of these challenges in different ways. I won’t go into them in any great detail here.
It is worth pointing out that some degree of consequentialism is alive and well in the workplace. This is usually the process that we go through when prioritizing work to decide what is good to do. What will cause the most benefit with the least adverse effects? 4 When making those decisions, we often don’t consider some of the abovementioned questions. Perhaps we should.
The biggest challenges to consequentialism are measuring the positive and negative impacts of actions and how you can know in advance what the effect of an action will be. Indeed, there is the risk that things that are more difficult to measure can be undercounted. 5
Deontological ethics
Deontological ethics is, in many ways, the opposite of consequentialism. Where consequentialism is about an action’s result, deontological ethics focuses on the actions themselves via rules and principles. The Ten Commandments is an early form of Deontological ethics. As is the New Testament’s Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” A more modern conception of deontological would be Kantian Ethics (from Immanuel Kant), driven by the categorical imperative. 6
Deontological ethics are often exemplified as clear rules for leadership: “A leader never micromanages” or “a leader always removes obstacles.” We also see examples of this in the workplace, where there are rules and guidelines for being a good employee. As mentioned above, some organizational values are rules, such as “move fast and break things.”
The problem with deontology is that we can all imagine exceptions to any rule, and following rules in all cases could lead to disastrous consequences.
Moral Relativism
It can be easy to see how, via different ethical systems, something could be deemed good or bad. This leads many to think that any view on right or wrong is relative to culture (or even the person).
Moral relativism is not really a system of ethics, as much as the belief that there can be no universal ethics and that all definitions of good and bad are relative to historical and cultural context.
I would agree that, to some extent, context matters when discussing ethics. However, I would also argue that we can apply a level of universality, at least when discussing ethics within a context like work.
Ethics for Middle Managers
Ethics is not talked about enough in management.
This broad framework can help us understand how to behave ethically at work, but a much larger question is what specific normative ethics make sense for managers. We would need to examine particular ethics examples and see how they apply.
Future posts in this series will look at specific ethical systems and how they translate into practice for middle managers. Still, for now, I want to end with some suggestions on how to use these three frames to think about behaving ethically.
- Virtue ethics: Consider an ideal leader and ask, “How would this ideal leader behave in this context?”
- Consequentialism: “What choice would maximize the most good and minimize the most harm?”
- Deontological ethics: “What rule or principle could I apply here?”
- Julia Driver, Ethics ↩
- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/ ↩
- Effective Altruism takes many of these principles even further to the point of being dangerous, but that is another post. ↩
- Positive effects are usually related to revenue, margins, or customer satisfaction, and the amount of effort and costs are considered among the adverse effects. ↩
- This is one of the issues with the afore mentioned Effective Altruism that tries to focus aid where it is most beneficial. ↩
- There are multiple phrasing of the categorical imperative, the two most common are “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” and “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.” ↩