Extending the education pathway
In the course of 2019, The Ethics Centre reviewed and adopted a new strategy for the five years to 2024.
The key insight to emerge from the strategic planning process was that the Centre should focus on growing its impact through innovation, partnerships, platforms and pathways.
We focus here on just one of those factors – ‘pathways’ and, in particular, the education pathway.
The Ethics Centre is not new to the education game. To this day, the establishment of Primary Ethics – which teaches tens of thousands of primary students every week in NSW – is one of our most significant achievements.
As Primary Ethics continues to break new ground, we feel it’s time to bring our collective skills to bear along the broader education pathway.
With this in mind, we’re delighted to report that The Ethics Centre and NSW Department of Education and Training have signed a partnership to develop curriculum resources and materials to support the teaching and learning of ethical deliberation skills in NSW schools, including within existing key learning areas.
This exciting project will see us working with and through the Department’s Catalyst Innovation Lab alongside gifted teachers and curriculum experts – rather than merely seeking to influence from the outside.
In addition, we have also formed a further partnership with one of the Centre’s Ethics Alliance members, Knox Grammar School. This will involve the establishment of an ‘Ethicist-in-residence’ at the school, the application of new approaches to exploring ethical challenges faced by young adults, and the development of a pilot program where students in their final years of secondary education undertake an ethics fellowship at the Centre.
In due course, we hope that the work pioneered in these two partnerships and others will produce scalable platforms that can be extended across Australia. Detailed plans come next, and we believe the potential for impact along this pathway is significant.
We believe ethics education is a central component of lifelong learning – extending from the earliest days of schooling through secondary schooling, higher education and into the workplace.
The broadening of the education pathway therefore provides new opportunities for The Ethics Centre and Primary Ethics to work together – sharing our complementary skills and experience in service of our shared objectives, for the common good.
If you have an interest in supporting this work, at any point along the pathway, then please contact Dr Simon Longstaff at The Ethics Centre, or Evan Hannah, who leads the team at Primary Ethics.
Dr Simon Longstaff is Executive Director of The Ethics Centre: www.ethics.org.au
Evan Hannah can be contacted via Primary Ethics at: www.primaryethics.com.au
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Want to live more ethically? Try these life hacks
If you’re looking for ways to support a more ethical life, here are five simple lifestyle changes that can help get you there.
Get back to nature
Aristotle believed everything in nature contains “something of the marvellous”. It turns out nature might also help make us a bit more marvellous. Research by Jia Wei Zhang and colleagues revealed how “perceiving natural beauty” (basically, looking at nature and recognising how wonderful it is) can make you more prosocial. Specifically, it can make you more helpful, trusting and generous. Nice one, trees.
The apparent reason for this is because a connection with nature leads to an increase in the experience of positive emotions. People are happier when they are connected with nature and other research suggests happy people tend to be more prosocial. Inadvertently, Zhang and his colleagues learned, this means nature helps make us better team players.
Read literature to develop ‘Theory of Mind’
In psychology, ‘Theory of Mind’ refers to the ability to understand the emotions, intentions and mental states of other people and to understand other people’s mental states are different from our own. It’s a crucial component of empathy. Like most things, our Theory of Mind improves with practice.
David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano think one way of practising and developing Theory of Mind is by reading literary fiction. They believe literature “uniquely engages the psychological processes needed to gain access to characters’ subjective experiences” because it doesn’t aim to entertain readers but challenge them.
Work up a sweat
As well as the health benefits it brings, exercise can make you a more virtuous person. Philosopher Damon Young believes exercise brings about “subtle changes to our character: we are more proud, humble, generous or constant”.
Pride is usually seen as a vice but exercise can give us a healthy sense of pride, which Young defines as “taking pleasure in yourself”. Taking pleasure in ourselves and recognising ourselves as valuable has obvious benefits for self-esteem, but it also gives us a heightened sense of responsibility. By taking pride in the work we’ve invested in ourselves, we acknowledge the role we have making change in the world, a feeling with applications far broader than the gym.
Take meal breaks when you’re making decisions
In 2011, an Israeli parole board had to consider several cases on the same day. Among them were two Arab-Israelis, each of them serving 30 months for fraud. One of them received parole, the other didn’t. The only difference? One of their hearings was at the start of the day, the other at the end.
Researcher Shai Danzigner and co-authors concluded “decision fatigue” explained the difference in the judges’ decisions. They found the rate of favourable rulings were around 65% just after meal breaks at the start of the day and lunch time, but they diminished to 0% by the end of the session.
There’s some good news though. The research suggests a meal break can put your decision making back on track. Maybe it’s time to stop taking lunch at your desk.
Get a good night’s sleep
We’ve been starting to pay more attention to the social costs of exhaustion. In NSW, public awareness campaigns now list fatigue as one of the ‘big three’ factors in road fatalities alongside speeding and drink driving. It turns out even if it doesn’t kill you, exhaustion can lead to ethical compromises and slip ups in the workplace.
In 2011, Christopher Barnes and his colleagues released a study suggesting “employees are less likely to resist the temptation to engage in unethical behaviour when they are low on sleep”. When we’re tired we experience ‘ego depletion’ – weakening our self-control. Experiments conducted by Barnes’ team suggest when we’re tired we’re vulnerable to cutting corners and cheating. So, if you’re thinking of doing something dodgy, sleep on it first.
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Violence and technology: a shared fate
Don’t be distracted by the exploding sheds, steamrolled silverware and factory pressed field of poppies.
Many of the best works in Cornelia Parker’s exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) are small and unassuming. They are the quiet pieces that ask us to contemplate the nature of the technology we use in acts of violence.
A small pile of dust, some short leads of wire, a child’s doll split in two. These found object artworks – sculptures, just not those carved into marble or clay – are less about the state you see them in, but the journey they have taken.
On closer inspection (and with a little gallery guidance) we find intentional transformations of objects often associated with brutal violence: a gun, its bullets, the blade of a guillotine.
But don’t be alarmed. There is a dark sense of humour at play here. The disemboweled doll, a ginger-haired child in his newsboy cap and overalls, has a cartoon quality to his expression that echoes less of screams of pain than the shock of a bee sting. The boy has been severed at the waist by a guillotine. The very same guillotine that beheaded the infamous Queen of France, Marie Antoinette.
We understand a guillotine as a tool of violence and power, designed to distribute French revolutionary justice at speed to behead the head of state. Here Parker has used the same tool that once transformed European history, to split a stuffed toy of Oliver Twist. Its title suggests a shared fate, that this piece of technology link the iconic Dickensian poor boy and the poster woman for opulence.
Shared Fate (Oliver), Cornelia Parker (2008)
The works on display in the gallery often ask us to consider what these tools of violence are used for, and our role in using them.
Sawn Up Sawn Off Shotgun (2015) has a similar tale of transformation. The story goes: a factory manufactured a shotgun, a criminal cut off its barrel to make it deadlier. He used it to murder an innocent person. It was collected as evidence by police to convict the man, before being decommissioned by being cut into smaller segments. It sits lifeless in front of us now in this quartered state.
In what way was the gun designed to kill? How did the modifications by each person impact its deadliness? And how does its use reflect on the ethics and values of those who designed, manufactured and modified this once-deadly artefact? It’s a neat example that calls to mind some of The Ethics Centre’s the principles for the ethics of design.
The design of the original shotgun, manufactured and distributed legally, embodied a set of values. Options include: the ‘good’ of farmers protecting their livestock from predators or the ‘good’ sporting competition using firearms. However, it was also a feature of the shotgun that beyond shooting ducks and foxes, it had the capacity to take a human life including during the commission of crimes. To what extent was that violent possibility actively noted and considered? Did the designer and manufacturer take any steps to protect against unintended uses?
Of course, we know also that the shotgun was modified and used beyond its intended purpose. By cutting off the barrel, the gun was deliberately modified to aid concealment and increase its deadly effect at close range. Whatever values might have been explicit in the original design are subverted by the modification where the explicit aim becomes to maim and kill in confined spaces.
This is what we consider the post-phenomenology of technology. We describe this in Ethics by Design: Principles for Good Technology as “…when a hitman picks up a firearm, he sets the purpose of the gun as a murder weapon. However, he also uses the gun to constitute himself as a murderer.”
We are told that the user in this case used this shotgun for just that purpose and in doing so made himself a murderer.
In its final transformation the design is changed once more. Using the same means as the criminal, cutting the shotgun again, the police officers have rendered it effectively useless. It no longer possesses the affordances of a weapon: no trigger to pull, no barrel to aim. It is a disembodied mess of its former designs, purpose and values. Here then the police constitute themselves as peace-keepers, because by destroying the deadly weapon they embody law and order.
Embryo Firearms (1995) Cornelia Parker.
If you take away from this the mantra that ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’ then there is another piece we are challenged to consider. Embryo Firearms (1995) presents two solid lumps of metal in the crude shape of pistols. At this point in their manufacturing they are absolutely harmless, resembling the type of gun you might cut from wood as a prop. These ‘guns’ are mere symbols – no more dangerous than any other lump of metal of equivalent heft.
We are informed though that this metal was intended to become a Colt firearm; one of millions produced each year.
The fact that any resulting weapon of this production process could be used for multiple purposes does not mean that it is ethically ‘neutral’. While guns themselves don’t have agency or intentions, their design and function shapes the user’s agency and open up a range of possible value-laden activities.
In their embryonic state these handguns provide as much agency as any slab of metal. We know at some point though, as the barrel is hollowed out, the firing pin is placed and the trigger is pulled, a tool of violent potential is born.
Transformation of intended design and purpose is taking place throughout Cornelia Parker’s works. Bullets are reduced to metal threads used to create geometric patterns, murder weapons are reduced to harmless dust via chemical precipitation, and our expectations about technology, art and violence are flipped on their heads.
The Ethics Centre is presenting The Ethics of Art and Violence a special event inspired by the work of acclaimed British artist Cornelia Parker currently on exhibition at the MCA. For more about the event click here.
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The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Five dangerous ideas to ponder over the break
If you’re gifted with downtime this holiday season, we’ve curated some big ideas for you to read, watch or listen to. These top picks will challenge your thinking over the holiday break.
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The lost the art disagreement
In his keynote at the last Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Stephen Fry told us that “a Grand Canyon has opened up in our world and the crack grows wider every day. As it widens, enemies speak more and more incontinently about the other side.” Within this great fissure lies the lost art of disagreement. Hear how Fry suggests we begin to navigate through a world of seemingly opposing ideas.
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Curb immigration, curb growth
Our cities are overcrowded, and our ecosystems are degrading at a rapid rate. Is population growth to blame? This year’s first IQ2 Debate: Curb Immigration, heard from environmental scientist Dr Jonathan Sobels, journalist Satyajet Marar, counter terrorism expert Dr Anne Aly and urban planner Professor Nicole Gurran. Watch the debate and hear their perspective on issues from urban planning and government policy, to environmental impacts and economic advantages.
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An age of anger
Anarchy, resentment and the urge to smash the system seem to be spreading. What caused us to become so angry? How can we understand and navigate interactions with those who are? Author and academic Pankaj Mishra explains why society seems to be so quick to become outraged, and how transformative thinking might solve the epidemic.
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Politics and populism
We are seeing a rise of nationalism, racism and authoritarian regimes across the world. Will democracy survive the new decade? At last year’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas Niall Ferguson contemplated the future of populist movements. Pankaj Mishra, Angela Nagle and Tim Soutphommasane joined a panel to explore if freedom is just too heavy a burden in the new world in the ‘Rehearsal for Fascism’.
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Masculinity is not so fragile
Following the fallout of the #MeToo movement, many men feel that masculinity is unfairly under attack. David Leser, Zac Seidler, Raewyn Connell and Cath Lumby joined our IQ2 debate: Masculinity is it really so fragile, to share their views on modern masculinity and unpack the dangers or virtues of male normative behaviour.
The Festival of Dangerous Ideas returns in 2020, bringing a host of big thinkers and new perspectives to the dangerous issues we face. Gift vouchers are on sale now.
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Renewing the culture of cricket
On March 24, 2018, at Newlands field in South Africa, Australian cricketer Cameron Bancroft was captured on camera tampering with the match ball with a piece of sandpaper in the middle of a test match.
It later emerged that the Australian team captain Steve Smith and vice-captain David Warner were complicit in the plan. The cheating was a clear breach of the rules of the game – and the global reaction to Bancroft’s act was explosive. International media seized on the story as commentators sought to unpack cricket’s arcane rules and its code of good sportsmanship. From backyard barbeques to current and former prime ministers, everyone had an opinion on the story.
For the players involved, retribution was swift. Smith and Warner received 12-month suspensions from Cricket Australia, whilst Bancroft received a nine-month suspension. The coach of the Australian team, Darren Lehman, quit his post before he had even left South Africa.
But it didn’t stop there. Within nine months, Cricket Australia lost four board directors – Bob Every, Chairman David Peever, Tony Harrison and former test cricket captain Mark Taylor – and saw the resignation of longstanding CEO James Sutherland as well as two of his most senior executives, Ben Amarfio and Pat Howard.
So, what happened between March and November? How did an ill-advised action on the part of a sportsman on the other side of the world lead to this spectacular implosion in the leadership ranks of a $400 million organisation?
The answer lies in the idea of “organisational culture,” and an independent review of the culture and governance of Cricket Australia by our organisation – The Ethics Centre.
Cricket Australia sits at the centre of a complex ecosystem that includes professional contract players, state and territory associations, amateur players (including many thousands of school children), broadcasters, sponsors, fans and hundreds of full-time staff. As such, the organisation carries responsibility for the success of our national teams, the popularity of the sport and the financial stability of the organisation.
In the aftermath of the Newland’s incident, many wanted to know whether the culture of Cricket Australia had in some way encouraged or sanctioned such a flagrant breach of the sport’s rules and codes of conduct.
Our Everest process was employed to measure Cricket Australia’s culture, by seeking to identify the gaps between the organisations “ethical framework” (its purpose, values and principles) and it’s lived behaviours.
We spoke at length with board members, current and former test cricketers, administrators and sponsors. We extensively reviewed policies, player and executive remuneration, ethical frameworks and codes of conduct.
Our final report, A Matter of Balance – which Cricket Australia chose to make public – ran to 147 pages and contained 42 detailed recommendations. Our key finding was that a focus on winning had led to the erosion of the organisation’s culture and a neglect of some important values. Aspects of Cricket Australia’s player management had served to encourage negative behaviours.
It was clear, with the release of the report, that many things needed to change at Cricket Australia. And change they did.
Cricket Australia committed to enacting 41 of the 42 recommendations made in the report.
In a recent cover story in Company Director magazine – a detailed examination of the way Cricket Australia responded in the aftermath of The Ethics Centre’s report – Cricket Australia’s new chairman Earl Eddings has this to say:
“With culture, it’s something you’ve got to keep working at, keep your eye on, keep nurturing. It’s not: we’ve done the ethics report, so now we’re right.”
Now, one year after the release of The Ethics Centre’s report, the culture of Cricket Australia is making a strong recovery. At the same time as our men’s team are rapidly regaining their mojo (it’s probably worth noting that our women’s team never lost it – but that’s another story).
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The power of community to bring change
On Thursday night, a group of impassioned supporters and philanthropists gathered for a raw look at the work required to get an Ethics Centre program off the ground.
It was our very first Pitch & Pledge event – a unique crowdfunding concept by The Funding Network where charities pitch their funding needs live to a room of curious minds.
The format required three of our program leaders – Alex Hirst, Sally Murphy and Matt Beard – to take to the stage to make a six minute appeal for support for their work. Alex shared why she believes the Festival of Dangerous Ideas is critical to a tolerant society, Sally argued why more people need access to our free counselling helpline, Ethi-call, and Matt canvassed the idea of a budding young philosopher to further our work.
Following their pitches and a barrage of interesting questions from the floor, our leaders were asked to leave the room for a nail-biting window of time while guests pledged their support for their favourite program.
In an electric, emotionally charged and heartwarming hour we raised over $80,000 across the three causes, as well as further pro-bono support. We are incredibly grateful for the generosity of those who attended, and invite you to take a look at the pitches below and consider if there’s one worthy of your backing as well.
1. Support a truly independent Festival of Dangerous Ideas
Alex compelled us to realise that 10 years on from the first Festival of Dangerous Ideas (FODI) in 2010, it’s no longer just a world of dangerous ideas we are considering – it’s the dangerous realities we need to be afraid of. Our modern world of opinion echo chambers and media algorithms that serve to confirm our biases, has lead to an inability across society to have informed and hard conversations about opposing views.
FODI is about challenging our ways of thinking, not confirming them. Sharing personal anecdotes and stories from FODI followers, Alex captured, to a rapt crowd, the sheer necessity of expansive thinking and contested ideas.
“Unchallenged ideas are after all some of the most dangerous, and they are reaching us in more ways than ever before. Reaching right into the heart of the home, and into our everyday lives.”
“If we are unable to have hard conversations, if we are untrained at listening to the ideas that we just don’t want to hear, then our ability as a society to face these dangerous realities together doesn’t exist”.
Ticket sales from the annual festival cover just 50% of festival running costs. Alex, and FODI, need support to bring critical thinking back to challenge dangerous realities in 2020.
Donate here: https://www.thefundingnetwork.com.au/ethics-centre
2. Help Ethi-call guide people through life’s tough decisions
Sally knows challenging situations. As a volunteer Ethi-call counsellor and manager of the service, she’s heard first-hand the difficult and often crippling dilemmas people face, and the impact a call with a trained expert can have.
In a landscape where communities are lacking connection, where neighbours don’t drop in for tea, families don’t spend quality time and friendships take place in text messages, more people feel they don’t have anyone to talk to about the challenging and tricky issues that they are facing.
Ethi-call is a free and independent service. It allows callers to share their troubles, explore their options and think about a path where perhaps there was none before.
Delicately sharing the challenges of two callers to the service, Sally showed the breadth of issues the service can help shine a light on. Whether it’s a young Australian choosing between duty and desire, the very hard choice many of us face around aged care for our ageing parents or a rural farmer forced into making the most heartbreaking choices due to drought, choice is a shared human experience and one that we don’t have to face alone.
Ethi-call only works if people use it. And to use it, they need to know it exists. Sally’s hope was to raise enough funding to let more people in need know that this vital service exists and to upgrade call technology to support additional privacy, a barrier to calling for potential users in the past.
Donate here: https://www.thefundingnetwork.com.au/ethics-centre
3. Plant the seed for a better ideas and fund a Young Philosopher
Dr Matt Beard is a philosopher who knows the value of a curious mind. It’s that itch that makes you wonder why the world is the way it is, that drives you to question what you’ve learnt to find a better way. He’s spent his working life scratching that itch.
Philosophy, Matt believes, is curiosity in motion. The history of philosophy is littered with world-changers. And the history of world-changers is littered with philosophy like Martin Luther King, and the foundations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It’s not just that they changed the world. It’s they were fuelled by the work of philosophy and philosophers.
At The Ethics Centre, we’ve spent thirty years developing new ideas and better worlds. We haven’t always gotten it right, and we’ve never done it alone, but there’s been one constant throughout the process – philosophy. From Primary Ethics in schools teaching children how to think critically, to Short & Curly downloaded over one million times, to Ethical by Design, a research paper that introduces much needed principles for designing ethical technology.
As one of just two philosophers on our staff, Matt says there are less philosophers, and less diversity of ideas than we need to address all the issues rising up out of the cracks in Australia. He says the ideas and possibilities for creating powerful positive change are endless, such as teaching ethics classes prisons, lowering recidivism rates, rethinking media ethics and the limits of free speech or understanding and addressing hate speech and political division in Australia.
But what we don’t have is the capital to support growing our staff. With more funding we can recruit, mentor and house the next generation of budding young philosophers at The Ethics Centre.
Donate here: https://www.thefundingnetwork.com.au/ethics-centre
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
We are pitching for your pledge
In celebration of our 30th anniversary which kicks off in November this year, we are preparing our very first live-crowdfunding ‘Pitch + Pledge’ night on Thursday 14 November.
Meet and hear directly from leaders of three of our flagship programs: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Ethi-call and our Young Philosopher initiative. Each speaker will pitch live on stage for six minutes each, and then answer the audiences questions. What follows is an unforgettable live-pledging experience, based on The Funding Network’s popular format.
1. Support a Truly Independent Festival of Dangerous Ideas
The Festival of Dangerous Ideas is Australia’s original big thinking festival – bringing leading minds from around the world to explore life’s most problematic and divisive issues.
Delivered in partnership with Sydney Opera House for almost a decade, last year marked the start of an exciting new phase for FODI as we branched out on our own. The 2018 festival was a triumphant sell-out, and audiences told us they walked away with a feast of new ideas and perspectives.
While FODI is well-attended and widely loved, it’s also a hugely risky and expensive event to stage. Our insistence on finding the best international storytellers, and keeping ticket prices affordable for broad audiences, pushes us into uncomfortable financial territory.
Your support will help us stage FODI as a break-even event, and allow us to keep doing it, year after year.
2. Help Us Reach More People in Need with Ethi-call
We’re enormously proud of Ethi-call. It’s our free, independent, national helpline available to all. The service provides expert and impartial guidance to help people make their way through life’s toughest challenges, when there’s nowhere else to turn.
Calls can be about almost anything – from professional issues (fraud, corruption, conflicts of interests) through to the deeply personal (birth, death, relationships, families).
There’s no other service like Ethi-call, so we receive calls from all over Australia, and all over the world. Your assistance will allow us to train more counsellors and ensure more people in need know the service exists.
3. Fund a Young Philosopher
Thirty years ago, a young philosopher with a keen interest in ethics and democracy, Dr Simon Longstaff, was appointed as The Ethics Centre’s first employee and Executive Director – a position he continues to hold today.
We’ve engaged a number of budding minds over the years to bring fresh thinking to our work, most recently Dr Matthew Beard, who plays an increasingly vital role in what we do.
We’re seeking funding to secure another bright young philosopher into our team – to apply their learnings to deliver insights and tools to help people build the skills and capacity to live according to their values and principles.
An opportunity to create a ripple effect of change
It will be a highly engaging and memorable evening for everyone involved and is an opportunity for you to get involved in some very exciting, critical projects here at The Ethics Centre.
We are putting our hearts and work on the line for your support. Pitch and Pledge will kick off at 5.30pm Thursday 14 November, at Clayton Utz offices, 1 Bligh St Sydney. Pledging starts from $100.
Please RSVP to rosemary.smithson@ethics.org.au with your details and your guests’ names to book your place to join us.
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Big Thinker: Peter Singer
Peter Singer (1946—present), one of world’s most influential living philosophers, is best known for applying rigorous logic to a range of practical issues from animal rights, giving to charity to the ethics of abortion and infanticide.
Singer was born in Melbourne in 1946 to Austrian Jewish Holocaust survivors. As a teen he declared his atheism and refused to celebrate his Bar Mitzvah. After studying law, history and philosophy at Melbourne University, he won a scholarship to Oxford University, writing his thesis on civil disobedience. In 1996 he ran unsuccessfully for the Greens in the Victorian State Parliament, and he has held posts at Melbourne, Monash, New York, London and Princeton Universities. His impact on public debate and academic philosophy cannot be overstated.
A key aspect of Singer’s contributions is the idea of ‘equal consideration of interests’. This informs both his views towards animals and charity. It means that we should consider the interests of any sentient beings who have the capacity to suffer and feel pleasure and pain.
Singer is a consequentialist, which means he defines ethical actions as ones that maximise overall pleasure and reduce overall pain. Part of what makes him such a challenging and influential thinker is his application of utilitarianism to real-world problems to offer counter-intuitive yet compelling solutions.’
Are you speciesist?
While at Oxford, Singer recalls a conversation with a friend over lunch that was the “most formative experience of [his] life”. Singer had the meat spaghetti, whereas his friend opted for the salad. His friend was the “first ethical vegetarian” he’d met. Two weeks later, Singer became a vegetarian and several years later published his seminal work Animal Liberation (1975).
Singer’s argument for not eating meat is more-or-less the same as another utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham. Bentham wrote that “the question is not can they reason or can they talk, but can they suffer?” Similarly, Singer argues that animals have the capacity to suffer. Just as we rightly condemn torture, we should also condemn practices like factory farming that inflict unjustifiable pain on non-human animals. He coined the term ‘speciesism’ to describe the privileging of humans over other animals.
Giving to charity
In Singer’s essay “Famine, Affluence and Morality” (1972), he argues that people in rich countries have a moral obligation to give to charities that help people in poverty overseas. He uses an analogy of a drowning child: if we were walking past a shallow pond and saw a child drowning, we would wade in and save the child, even if this meant wrecking our favourite and most expensive pair of shoes. Likewise, because we know there are children dying overseas from preventable poverty-related diseases, we should be giving at least some of our income to charities that fight this.
Opponents to Singer argue that his view about giving to charity is psychologically untenable, and that there are differences between giving to charity and saving a drowning child. For example, the physical act of pulling a child out from water is more morally compelling than sending a cheque overseas. Other arguments include: we don’t know the child will definitely be saved when we send the cheque, fighting poverty requires a collective global effort not just an individual donation, and charities are ineffective and have high overhead costs.
Singer concedes that there may be psychological reasons why people would save the drowning child yet don’t give much to charity, but he says even if it seems strange, rationally there are no relevant moral differences between the cases.
Responding to the criticism that charities may not be effective has led Singer to be a proponent of ‘effective altruism’. In his book The Most Good You Can Do (2015) he describes how a number of charity evaluators can recommend the most cost-effective way to do good. Singer recommends giving on a progressive scale, depending on one’s income.
Instead of pursuing careers in academia, some of Singer’s brightest past students have decided to work for Wall Street to make as much money as possible to then give this away to effective charities.
Controversy around infanticide
Singer has faced sustained criticism and protest throughout his career for his views on the sanctity of life and disability – especially in Germany, where in the 90’s, his views were compared to Nazism and university courses that set his books were boycotted. While he has always been a staunch supporter of abortion on the grounds that a foetus lacks self-consciousness and the criteria of personhood, he argues there is no moral difference between abortion in the womb and killing a newborn. Furthermore, because a newborn cannot yet be classified as a person, if its parents do not want it to survive, or if it has an extreme disability meaning that keeping it alive would be very costly, there is potential justification in killing it.
Religious sanctity-of-life critics argue that Singer’s ethics ignore the fundamental sanctity of human life. Disability rights advocates argue that Singer’s views are ableist, explaining that the quality of life of a disabled person is less than that of a non-disabled person ignores the socially-constructed nature of disability – its harms and inconveniences are largely because the built environment is made for able-bodied people.
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Why purpose, values, principles matter
In advising organisations about ethics and culture, our Ethics Centre consultants often start by asking a simple question: “Do you have an ethical framework?” What we’re trying to understand is whether the company has a well-defined purpose, supported by values and principles. It’s the bedrock upon which every successful and well-run company is built.
Over the last twenty years we have witnessed a veritable roll call of organisations who have faced an ethics crisis. And for some, this crisis has threatened their very existence. And while the individual factors will vary, there is often one underlying root cause of this failing – a drift from the organisation’s ethics framework.
An ethics framework is a critical foundation for any organisation. It expresses their purpose, values and principles – quite literally, what they believe in and what standards they’ll uphold. In making these visible, as well as living across everything they do, it allows the organisation to be the best possible version of itself, now and into the future.
If an ethics framework is practically useful, it will provide a way to diagnose ethics failure, apportion responsibility and offer a means to provide justice for victims. However, this is merely the minimum standard. It also provides the ideal that should be strived for.
An ethics framework demands something more than mere compliance. It asks employees to exercise judgement and accept personal responsibility for the decisions they make. In order to be effective, it must be consistently embraced by every member of the organisation.
- Values tell us what’s good – they’re the things we strive for, desire and seek to protect.
- Principles tell us what’s right – outlining how we may or may not achieve our values.
- Purpose is our reason for being – it gives life to our values and principles.
The power of a good ethics framework
A strong ethics framework will unite an organisation’s workforce under a common goal, creating a far better workplace culture in the process. It will help leaders make decisions that are consistent with purpose, and improve decision-making capacity across the organisation. It supports a company to be more adaptable to change and clearly demonstrates to clients, customers and other stakeholders what they stand for and where they’re headed.
A company will struggle to develop consistent workplace policies or a corporate strategy without an ethics framework. But the reverse is also true: with an ethics framework all of these processes become far easier to navigate.
Purpose
In designing an ethics framework, much is made of purpose statements – primarily because they tend to be the most visible, public-facing feature of the framework. Creating a great purpose statement is something of an art form, it needs to achieve a great deal in a few words. It should be inspiring, have an aspirational quality, and capture the essence of your company’s ‘why?’.
Ideally, purpose statements should describe how your company is satisfying a need in society or in the market. Examples include Disney’s “To make people happy” or technology powerhouse Atlassian “To unleash the power in every team”. We’re quite proud of The Ethics Centre’s purpose statement which is “To bring ethics to the centre of everyday life.”
Values and principles
Values and principles enable employees to distinguish between what is regarded as important and the means by which they should be pursued. They help to frame business activity to ensure it stays true to its purpose and contract with society. A good framework will be;
- Stable – will not change significantly (in its essence) over the long term
- Understandable – by all of those required to apply it in practice
- Practical – able to be applied in practice and with consistency
- Authentic – it will ‘ring true’.
Good for business
Having an ethics framework isn’t designed to maximise profits – it’s designed to protect and improve the relationship between business and society. But it does often benefit business as a commercial enterprise as well. By motivating employees and demonstrating the value and purpose of the business to them, they serve as ambassadors for the organisation.
Although purpose statements, corporate values and organisational principles aren’t a guarantee of perfect ethical conduct, they are a crucial ingredient in building a culture in which bad behaviour is discouraged and dis-incentivised. They’re also a flag of goodwill to stakeholders that an organisation is looking to serve humanity and not simply turn a quick buck.
Ethics frameworks are not magic bullets to solve an organisation’s problems – they won’t guarantee that all employees will do the right thing every time. But approached with the proper degree of care and sophistication, the very process of developing these codes can have a profoundly positive effect on the culture of an enterprise. In establishing the things you believe in and identifying the behaviours you wish to encourage, you establish a framework for a great corporate culture – one based on respect, trust, collaboration and accountability. And who wouldn’t want that?
Creating an ethics framework
It may surprise you to learn that many companies have no ethics framework at all. And of those that do, many are working with largely meaningless statements that offer little in the way of guidance. Some were written decades ago. Some were cooked up by marketing strategists as part of a corporate branding exercise. Whatever their provenance, there’s a sense that the framework has ceased to have any meaning for the people who work at the company.
Developing an ethics framework is only the starting point. Ensuring the framework is fully embedded and understood throughout an organisation and lived by its people is the harder challenge. Over three decades of consulting work, we’ve helped countless organisations to develop and embed their ethics frameworks. We’ve worked across multiple sectors and with companies of many shapes and sizes.
If you’d like to talk to The Ethics Centre about creating an ethical framework for your organisation, we’d love to hear from you.
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BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Save the date: FODI returns in 2020!
Festival of Dangerous Ideas (FODI), Australia’s original provocative ideas festival, returns in 2020 for its 10th festival. April 3 to 5 will be a milestone weekend of provocation, contemplation, critical thinking and preparation for the battles of the next decade.
Presented by The Ethics Centre, FODI 2020 will once again feature leading thinkers from Australia and around the world to interrogate the issues of today and prepare for the major shifts of tomorrow.
FODI Festival Director, Danielle Harvey said: “Over the past decade the number of avenues for people to talk and share their opinions has steadily increased, we are more connected than ever with like-minded people, but the cost has been significant. We are losing the ability to listen.
“Without the tools to listen to other opinions and contemplate new ideas, society risks fracturing like never before.”
“Without the tools to listen to other opinions and contemplate new ideas, society risks fracturing like never before. The Festival of Dangerous Ideas has always been an opportunity for deep thinking, carving out precious space for disagreement, difference of opinion and critical thinking.
“As we brace for 2020, FODI will celebrate its 10th anniversary by looking again to the future and presenting a cohort of FODI alumni, representing the world’s best thinkers, journalists, creators and specialists, giving Sydneysiders an opportunity to listen to what will be shaping the world tomorrow.”
The Ethics Centre Executive Director, Dr Simon Longstaff said:
“The Ethics Centre is thrilled to once again be presenting the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. One of The Ethics Centre’s strategic priorities is to build and sustain the ‘ethical infrastructure’ that underpins a free, dynamic and democratic society.
“Fragile societies break apart when challenged. The resilient cohere around a common desire to face the truth – even if it is hard to bear.”
“Fragile societies break apart when challenged. The resilient cohere around a common desire to face the truth – even if it is hard to bear. FODI tests the truth of the claim that we are a ‘civil’ society – and proves that even in moments of profound disagreement – we have the strength to live an ‘examined life’.”
Last year’s sell-out festival featured Stephen Fry, Rukmini Callimachi, Niall Ferguson, Megan Phelps-Roper, Chuck Klosterman and Toby Walsh.
More information, including the full program and festival venue, will be announced in the coming months. Visit festivalofdangerousideas.com to subscribe to be the first to hear our news.