Fall 2004

The last two issues have been devoted to giving a summary of current events at Gonzaga. I would now like to return to my series on the Jesuit educational mission. In the winter of 2003, I wrote about some of the challenges that American higher education faces in meeting the urgent ethical needs of our culture, for example, the significant transition from principle-based to utilitarian ethics; the seeming unawareness of "the end not justifying the means"; unhelpful false dichotomies; and problems with the use of precedents. How can we (as alumni of a Jesuit university) help our organizational culture to overcome these challenges? I have three suggestions.

First, we must try to reinvigorate belief in principles within our organizations. Evidently, we cannot impose principles that may not be commonly accepted within pluralistic organizations. However, we can ask our organization's leaders to set out principles about which there will be significant agreement. This may be done by a management group that has interest in the topic, members of an organization's audit committee, or another group of board members or executive leaders. This group may want to make recourse to an ethics consultant (such as those who have web sites listed on www.ethicsconsultant.com).

I think it is best to set out principles in the form of questions, because principles ("shoulds") incite people to resistance while questions asked within a decision-making process incite engagement in ethical issues. Thus, instead of saying "Don't cheat!" we might formulate a question that we agree to ask before significant decisions are made, such as, "Is this decision going to create an unlevel playing field?" or "Will this decision cause our stakeholders to believe that we are intentionally unfair?" As can be seen, such questions are much more engaging and much less threatening than imperatives.

The second suggestion concerns "the end not justifying the means." You may recall a distinction I made a while back between "the lesser of two evils" and "evil for the sake of good." The former is viewed (at least within general Catholic circles) as ethically permissible while the latter is not. It may be permissible to seriously injure someone in order to prevent the intentional killing of an innocent, but it is not permissible to seriously injure someone in order to achieve an apparent good which does not prevent a greater evil. There is a tremendous amount of gray area between "evil which prevents greater evil" and "evil for the sake of good which does not prevent greater evil." Nevertheless, it is better for an organization's leadership to reflect on this difference (ambiguous as it may be) than to ignore it altogether. When organizations ignore this principle, for example, they begin to justify such things as "misstating earnings to protect the pension fund's investment in its own stock." Protection of a pension fund seems ethically good, but the fraud used to do it not only undermines the "goodness of the end," but could also cause tremendous harm to investors outside the fund.

My third suggestion concerns resolving ethical dilemmas. This may be done in three steps.

1. Ask the organization's council, or ethics committee, or audit committee, or an ethics consultant to set out the broad categories of precedents which respond to an ethical dilemma. This entails looking at precedents which cover the range from the most "liberal" to the "most conservative" interpretation of principles.

2. Leadership should ask themselves "smell test questions" about each precedent solution. "Smell test questions" are those which evoke discomfort with potentially problematic solutions (e.g., "What would happen to us if we applied this precedent solution and it appeared in the Wall Street Journal tomorrow?" or "What would happen to our relationship with customers, vendors, employees and community stakeholders if we applied this precedent solution and it became known to them?"). If certain precedent solutions are unsettling to the group, they probably should be disregarded.

3. The ethical questions developed above (in Suggestion No. 1) should be applied to the above precedent solutions. Again, if certain solutions violate our principles, or are unsettling to our collective conscience, they should again be disregarded.

Obviously, these matters are far more complex than what has been presented here. If you are interested in more detail, you might refer to my article on the Gonzaga Web site. Simply type in