What ethics should athletes live by?
Athletes are bound by multiple codes – including the formal rules of the games they play and the informal conventions that define what is deemed to be acceptable conduct.
Professional athletes are often bound by a more stringent code that governs many aspects of their public and private lives. In an era of social media and phone cameras, lucrative sponsorships and media rights, online sports betting and performance enhancing drugs, there is very little that isn’t regulated, measured or scrutinised.
The culture of sport
The formal rules of any game establish the minimum standards that bind players and officials equally in order to ensure a fair contest. Not surprisingly, the formal rules are relative to the sports that they define: you can tackle someone to the ground in a rugby match (provided they’re holding the ball), but it would be deemed unacceptable in tennis.
But there are also conventions and informal obligations that define the culture of sport. For example, most sports establish informal boundaries that seek to capture a spirit of good sportsmanship. The cricketer who refuses to “walk” after losing their wicket – or who delivers a ball under-arm – may not be breaking any formal rule, but they’ll be offending the so-called spirit of cricket.
The sanctions for such an offence may be informal, but may blight that player’s career.
A question of trust
In sport, the bottom line is trust. Sportspeople are stewards for the games they play – with an obligation not to destroy the integrity of the sports in which they participate. Athletes tend to be intensely competitive, seeking victory for themselves, for their team or sometimes their nation.
Professional sports sell themselves to the public on the basis that the contests are real and, hopefully, fair. Every time two teams or competitors walk out onto the field of play, they place so much at stake – far more than just the result of one game.
That is why evidence of match fixing, doping or cheating is so destructive – it destroys public trust in the veracity of the competition that people pay to watch. It damages the reputation of the sport. And it is ultimately self-defeating – always leaving doubt in the dishonest victor’s mind, denying forever the satisfaction of a honest win.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
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.
Film Review: If Beale Street Could Talk
James Baldwin was one of the great American writers of the twentieth century.
His elegant, articulate and keenly perceptive work bore witness to the hostile, day-to-day realities in which African Americans lived, and the psychological implications of racism for society as a whole.
His fifth novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, is no exception. Forty-four years after it was published, Moonlight director Barry Jenkins has adapted it for the screen.
A different type of love story
A hypnotic, visually sumptuous and intimate love story, Beale Street has little of the structure of a traditional romance. The film begins, for instance, with the generic arc of courtship already complete. We first see the two young protagonists – Tish Rivers and her boyfriend Alfonzo ‘Fonny’ Hunt – walking slowly together in a park, their affections clear and perfectly mirrored. Growing up as childhood friends in the Bronx, there was never a time they did not love each other.
The story instead bears testimony to the resilience of love, and the strength it endows those who have faith in it. Here, we witness its many forms arrayed against a vast, malicious and coldly impersonal system which is rigged to destroy black lives and fracture the most precious of bonds.
Barely a minute into screen time, the plot throws Fonny (Stephan James) behind a glass wall. He’s in jail after being accused of rape. To his accuser and certainly the police, his innocence is irrelevant. As a black man, his identity in the white cultural imagination is as a violent savage – he was always-already condemned, regardless of his actions. It is through this transparent barrier that Tish (KiKi Layne) tells him that she is carrying his child.
When the past and present merge
Following this revelation, the story diverges in two interweaving streams of past and present. One, filled with hope and secret joys, sees the young couple come to understand each other as man and woman, while nursing dreams of a future together. In the second narrative, hope is not a simple impulse but an inviolable duty, as their baby swells in Tish’s womb, Fonny’s case stagnates and despair threatens. Each scene is freighted with the viewer’s knowledge that the lovers’ destiny is not their own.
Tish’s tale
This second narrative is also very much Tish’s story, and shifts its focus to a different kind of love. Beale Street is most affecting in its portrait of the Rivers family, who support Tish wholly and will do whatever they must to fight for her and the new life within her. Regina King won a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Tish’s mother Sharon, who embodies a fierce, calm and indominable maternal courage. Her father Joseph (played with a rich, growling warmth by Colman Domingo) and older sister Ernestine (Teyonah Parris) readily take on the role of advocate and defender.
Their unity has its foil in Fonny’s family, the Hunts, who refuse to partake in any struggle they did not ask for. Headed by a spiteful and Godfearing mother, who curses her unborn grandchild and rationalises prison as a place in which Fonny can find the Lord, theirs is a pride born of self-serving weakness. The Rivers’ contrasting pride is one born of unassailable dignity and a determination to act, in spite of the odds arrayed against them.
“What do you think is going to happen?” asks Mr Hunt when Joseph lays out a plan for them to steal from their workplaces to help their children.
“What we make happen.”
“Easy to say,” Hunt protests.
“Not if you mean it,” Joseph levelly responds.
Emotional explotation
Through these characters, Beale Street puts forward the case for love as the single most steadfast bastion against the dehumanising machine of systemic oppression. Those characters without this vital force are vulnerable to emotional exploitation – betraying family and friends to protect themselves. Hunt’s mother sacrifices her son rather than align herself with his fate.
Fonny’s old friend Daniel also deserts him when his words could have saved him, his integrity broken by the terror of returning to a prison that broke him. And Fonny’s accuser is so traumatised, she is locked in a prison of her own pain, insensible and insensitive the suffering of others.
None of these individuals are free. Living in a constant wash of fear without refuge or reprieve has deprived them of their integrity, transforming them into actively complicit agents in the perpetuation of a racist structure. This, Baldwin’s story reveals, is perhaps the most wretched and insidiously effective mechanism of tyranny.
Racial tensions
Daniel is sure that white man is the devil. But Beale Street itself doesn’t espouse this view. At crucial junctures, white allies take risks to intercede against social, economic, police and court racial injustice. A Jewish real estate agent grants the lovers a path to an affordable home. An old storekeeper stands up to a reptilian policeman. And Fonny’s lawyer is a ‘white boy just out of college’.
At two hours, the film is languid and poetic, with gorgeous cinematography by James Laxton. The deliberate slow pacing and the use of frequent close-ups demands of the viewer they recognise the central (and very beautiful) characters as subjects. In a culture which frequently effaces black bodies, fetishises them, or arbitrarily fashions them into villains, these images are quietly radical. The film plays out between the steady gaze of the two lovers, and plays within the gaze of an audience that can’t look away.
Quietly significant too, is the film’s inclusion of moments which are superfluous to the plot, but vital to the immersive legacy of Beale Street. One, impossible to forget: Tish’s parents swaying before a jazz record in the family loungeroom, holding each other close, smiling in the new knowledge of themselves as grandparents to be.
Final thoughts
Opening in Australia on Valentine’s Day, Jenkins’ film is a tender dream of two lovers trapped in a too-real nightmare. It is not difficult to remember that this nightmare still torments the freedoms of racial minorities in America, ‘the land of the free’, and other nations too – whether they characterise themselves as progressive democracies or not.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
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.
Is it time to curb immigration in Australia?
To curb or not to curb immigration? It’s one of the more polarising questions Australia grapples with amid anxieties over a growing population and its impact on the infrastructure of cities.
Over the past decade, Australia’s population has grown by 2.5 million people. Just last year, it increased by almost 400,000, and the majority – about 61 percent net growth – were immigrants.
Different studies reveal vastly different attitudes.
While Australians have become progressively more concerned about a growing population, they still see the benefits of immigration, according to two different surveys.
Times are changing
In a new survey recently conducted by the Australian National University, only 30 percent of Australians – compared to 45 percent in 2010 – are in favour of population growth.
The 15 percent drop over the past decade is credited to concerns about congested and overcrowded cities, and an expensive and out-of-reach housing market.
Nearly 90 percent believed population growth should be parked because of the high price of housing, and 85 percent believed cities were far too congested and overcrowded. Pressure on the natural environment was also a concern.
But a Scanlon Foundation survey has revealed that despite alarm over population growth, the majority of Australians still appreciate the benefits of immigration.
In support of immigration
In the Mapping Social Cohesion survey from 2018, 80 percent believed “immigrants are generally good for Australia’s economy”.
Similarly, 82 percent of Australians saw immigration as beneficial to “bringing new ideas and cultures”.
The Centre for Independent Studies’ own polling has shown Australians who responded supported curbing immigration, at least until “key infrastructure has caught up”.
In polling by the Lowy Institute last year, 54 percent of respondents had anti-immigration sentiments. The result reflected a 14 percent rise compared to the previous year.
Respondents believed the “total number of migrants coming to Australia each year” was too high, and there were concerns over how immigration could be affecting Australia’s national identity.
While 54 percent believed “Australia’s openness to people from all over the world is essential to who we are as a nation”, trailing behind at 41 percent, Australians said “if [the nation is] too open to people from all over the world, we risk losing our identity as a nation”.
Next steps?
The question that remains is what will Australia do about it?
The Coalition government under Scott Morrison recently proposed to cap immigration to 190,000 immigrants per year. Whether such a proposition is the right course of action, and will placate anxieties over population growth, remains to be seen.
Join us
We’ll be debating IQ2: Immigration on March 26th at Sydney Town Hall, for the full line-up and ticket info click here.
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.
Ethics programs work in practise
New research released today reveals that organisations with clear ethics programs are more likely to be seen as responsible in their business practises by their employees.
The new survey, undertaken by The Institute of Business Ethics (IBE) in partnership with our team at The Ethics Centre (TEC) found that the majority of Australian employees are aware that their organisations have each of the building blocks of an ethics program; a code of ethics, training, and a ‘speak up’ line.
“Ethics at Work” was launched to The Ethics Alliance members this morning through an intimate panel discussion that explored the implications of the findings, featuring Philippa Foster Back of IBE, John Neil and Cris Parker of TEC and Jill Reich of Uniting.
The survey reveals that awareness of ethics programs positively impact how employees feel their company deals with stakeholders. Those with an ethics program are significantly more likely to feel that their organisation acts responsibly in business dealings, at 84 percent. This compares to less than half of those without an ethics program (49 percent). There was one counter-intuitive result where 42 percent agreed their line manager rewards employees who get good results even if it’s through questionable practises.
We’ve spent the last 30 years working with individual organisations to establish ethical frameworks, and worked with many major organisations in recovery from ethical failure. The impact of clear lived values and principles at all levels of an organisation is tremendous, and instrumental to a positive, supportive culture.
The survey also illuminated the role managers play in upholding behaviours within the workplace. Managers were more likely than non-managers to view their organisation positively, both in engagement with stakeholders (77 percent vs 71 percent), and in application of social policy (75 percent vs 67 percent).
It further identifies pressures felt and attitudes toward management positions:
- Managers are more likely to feel pressure to compromise their ethical standards than those not in a management position (by nine percent)
- They were also much more likely to have lenient views toward charging personal entertainment as expenses and using company petrol for mileage
- Employees who have felt pressure to compromise their ethical standards were also more likely to feel their manager failed to promote/reward ethical behaviour (43 percent).
At an employee level, almost one in four reported awareness of misconduct in the workplace, yet worryingly only one in three of those workers decided to speak up.
Of those who have experienced misconduct at work, the most common types were bullying and harassment (41 percent), inappropriate or unethical treatment of people (39 percent) and misreporting of working hours (32 percent).
In addition, more than one in ten (13 percent) have felt pressured to compromise their ethical standards in the workplace.
The Ethics Centre, and our membership program The Ethics Alliance are committed to raising the ethical standards of business in Australia. To find out more about our work visit www.ethics.org.au
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
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.
The Ethics Centre: A look back on the highlights of 2018
Sometimes, good people do bad things. The last year confirmed this. Banks, schools, universities, the military, religious institutions – it seems 2018 left no sector unshaken.
These are the sorts of issues we confront every day at The Ethics Centre. In our reviews and confidential advice we have seen similar patterns repeat over and over again.
Yes, bad apples may exist, but we find ethical issues arise from bad cultures. And even our most trusted institutions, perhaps unwittingly, foster bad behaviour.
That’s why we have an important job. With your support we help society understand why ethical failures happen and provide safeguards lest they repeat.
As The Ethics Centre approaches its 30th birthday, we’d love to say we’re no longer needed. We hoped to bring ethics to the centre of everyday life and think we’ve made a small dent into that task. But there’s no point pretending there’s not a long way to go.
We thank you for supporting us and believing in us and are proud to share the highlights of another busy year with you.
If you’re short on time to read the full report now (and we’d really love you to take a look some time at what a small organisation like ours can achieve), here are seven highlights we’re particularly proud of:
• We launched The Ethics Alliance. A community of organisations unified by the desire to lead, inspire and shape the future of how we do business. In one year, 37 companies have benefited from the innovative tools that help staff at all levels make better decisions.
• We published a paper on public trust and the legitimacy of our institutions. Our conversations with regulators, investors, business leaders and community groups, revealed a sharp decline in the trust of our major institutions. We identify the agenda they need to in order to maintain public trust and contribute meaningfully to the common good.
• We ramped up Ethi-call. Calls to our free, independent, national helpline increased by 74 per cent this year. That’s even more people to benefit from impartial, private guidance from our highly trained ethical counsellors.
• We reviewed the culture of Australian cricket. When the ball-tampering scandal hit the world stage, Cricket Australia asked us to investigate. We uncovered a culture of ambition, arrogance, and control, where “winning at all costs” indicted administrators and players alike.
•We released a guide to designing ethical tech. Technology is transforming the way we experience reality. The need to make sure we don’t sacrifice ethics for growth is more pressing than ever. We propose eight principles to guide the development of all new technologies before they hit the market. You can download it here.
•We redesigned the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. FODI was created to facilitate courageous public conversation. The Ethics Centre and UNSW’s Centre for Ideas collaborated to untether the festival and produce a bold and necessary world-class cultural event. Every session sold out.
• We grew our tenth year of IQ2. We doubled the number of live attendees and tripled the student base showing audiences are more intelligent and hungry for diverse ideas than they are often given credit for. We welcomed a new sponsor Australian Ethical whose values align with our own. There’s never been a better time to support smart, civic, public debate.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
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.
Ethics Explainer: Existentialism
If you’ve ever pondered the meaning of existence or questioned your purpose in life, you’ve partaken in existentialist philosophy.
It would be hard to find someone who hasn’t asked themselves the big questions. What is the meaning of life? What is my purpose? Why do I exist? For thousands of years, these questions were happily answered by the belief your purpose in life was assigned prior to your creation. The existentialists, however, disagreed.
Existentialism is the philosophical belief we are each responsible for creating purpose or meaning in our own lives. Our individual purpose and meaning is not given to us by Gods, governments, teachers or other authorities.
In order to fully understand the thinking that underpins existentialism, we must first explore the idea it contradicts – essentialism.
Essentialism
Essentialism was founded by the Greek philosopher Aristotle who posited everything had an essence, including us. An essence is “a certain set of core properties that are necessary, or essential for a thing to be what it is”. A book’s essence, for example, is its pages. It could have pictures or words or be blank, be paperback or hardcover, tell a fictional story or provide factual information. Without pages though, it would cease to be a book. Aristotle claimed essence was created prior to existence. For people, this means we’re born with a predetermined purpose.
This idea seems to imply, whether you’re aware of it or not, that your purpose in life has been determined prior to your birth. And as you live your life, the decisions you make on a daily basis are contributing to your ultimate purpose, whatever that happens to be.
This was an immensely popular belief for thousands of years and gave considerable weight to religious thought that placed emphasis on an omnipotent God who created each being with a predetermined plan in mind.
If you agreed with this thinking, then you really didn’t have to challenge the meaning of life or search for your purpose. Your God already provided it for you.
Existence precedes essence
While philosophers including Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche questioned essentialism in the 19th century, existentialism was popularised by Jean-Paul Sartre in the mid-20th century following the horrific events of World War II.
As people questioned how something as catastrophically terrible as the Holocaust could have a predetermined purpose, existentialism provided a possible answer that perhaps it is the individual who determines their essence, not an omnipotent being.
The existentialist movement asked, “What if we exist first?”
At the time it was a revolutionary thought. You were created as a blank slate, tabula rasa, and it is up to you to discover your life’s purpose or meaning.
While not necessarily atheist, existentialists believe there is no divine intervention, fate or outside forces actively pushing you in particular directions. Every decision you make is yours. You create your own purpose through your actions.
The burden of too much freedom
This personal responsibility to shape your own life’s meaning carries significant anxiety-inducing weight. Many of us experience the so-called existential crisis where we find ourselves questioning our choices, career, relationships and the point of it all. We have so many options. How do we pick the right ones to create a meaningful and fulfilling life?
“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does” – John-Paul Sartre
Freedom is usually presented positively but Sartre posed that your level of freedom is so great it’s “painful”. To fully comprehend your freedom, you have to accept that only you are responsible for creating or failing to create your personal purpose. Without rules or order to guide you, you have so much choice that freedom is overwhelming.
The absurd
Life can be silly. But this isn’t quite what existentialists mean when they talk about the absurd. They define absurdity as the search for answers in an answerless world. It’s the idea of being born into a meaningless place that then requires you to make meaning.
The absurd posits there is no one truth, no inherent rules or guidelines. This means you have to develop your own moral code to live by. Sartre cautioned looking to authority for guidance and answers because no one has them and there is no one truth.
Living authentically and bad faith
Coined by Sartre, the phrase “living authentically” means to live with the understanding of your responsibility to control your freedom despite the absurd. Any purpose or meaning in your life is created by you.
If you choose to live by someone else’s rules, be that anywhere between religion and the wishes of your parents, then you are refusing to accept the absurd. Sartre named this refusal “bad faith”, as you are choosing to live by someone else’s definition of meaning and purpose – not your own.
So, what’s the meaning of life?
If you’re now thinking like an existentialist, then the answer to this question is both elementary and infinitely complex. You have the answer, you just have to own it.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
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.
Ethics Explainer: Hope
We hope for fine weather on weekends and the best for our buddies – an obvious statement that hardly screams ethics.
But within our everyday desires for good things, lies a duty to each other and ourselves to only act on reasonably held hopes.
The ethics of hope
One of Immanuel Kant’s simple but resonant maxims is ‘ought implies can’. In other words, if you believe someone has an ethical responsibility to do something, it must be possible. No person is under any obligation to do what is impossible. You might call me a bad person for failing to fly through the sky and save someone falling from a great height. But your condemnation will be rejected as ill-founded for the simple reason only fictional characters can perform that feat.
Many other things – including extremely difficult things – are reasonably expected of others. A person might promise to climb Mount Everest (or at least make a serious attempt) prior to their 50thbirthday. This might present the greatest challenge imaginable. Yet we know scaling the heights of Everest is possible. As such, the person who made this promise is bound to honour their commitment.
Of course, at the time of making such a promise, no person can know with absolute certainty they will be able to meet the obligation they have taken on. There are just too many variables outside of their control that can frustrate their best laid plans. Weather conditions might lead to the closure of the mountain. The need to provide personal care to a loved one could extend well beyond any anticipated period. Given this, our ethical commitments are almost always tinged with a measure of hope.
What is hope?
Hope is an expectation that some desirable circumstance will arise. Hope sometimes blends into something closer to ‘faith’ – where belief about a state of affairs cannot be proven. However, for most people, most of the time, ‘hope’ is a reasonable expectation.
For example, if a person makes commitments that critically depend on other people keeping their promises, that person cannot know for certain they can honour their word. Yet, if these people are known and trusted, perhaps based on past experience, then a hopeful dependence on their performance would be reasonable.
The same can be said of other commitments, such as promising to meet for a picnic on a particular day. You might make the plan in the hopeful expectation of fine weather and do so with good grounds based on a checked forecast predicting clear skies.
There are two things to be noted here. First, some aspects of hope depend (for their reasonableness) on the ethical commitments of other people (for example, to keep promises). It follows there will often be a reciprocal ethical aspect to the practice of ‘reasonable’ hoping.
Second, it’s not enough to be naively hopeful. Instead, one needs to take reasonable efforts to ensure there is some basis for relying on a hoped-for circumstance. This is especially so if the hoped-for circumstance is of critical importance to matters of grave ethical significance – such as making a promise to someone.
Given this, there may be good grounds to calibrate commitments in line with the degree to which you might reasonably hope for a particular circumstance to prevail. For example, rather than making an open commitment to meet for a particular picnic on a particular day it might be better to qualify the point by saying, “I promise to meet you if the weather is fine”.
‘It’s not enough to be naively hopeful.’
We often see the absence of this kind of forethought when it comes to the promises made by politicians during elections. They will make promises – probably based on hopeful projections about the future – only to find themselves accused of lying or having acted in bad faith when the promise is not honoured.
It’s insufficient for the politician to say they merely ‘hoped’ to be able to keep their word and that they now find their situation to be unexpectedly different. It would have been far better and far more responsible to qualify the promise in line with what might explicitly and reasonably be hoped for.
Two final comments. First, it should be understood a person often has some control over whether or not their hopes can be realised. As such, each person is responsible for those of their actions that impinge on the way they meet their obligations – we are not simply ‘bystanders’ who can idly hope for certain outcomes without lifting a finger to make them manifest.
Second, given our inability to know what the future holds, hope always plays a role in the process of making ethical commitments. The key thing is to be reasonable in what we hope for and to calibrate our commitments accordingly.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
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: Temple Grandin
Turning a perceived disability into a new way of solving problems, Temple Grandin (1947—present) has revolutionised the meat-processing industry and changed the way the world views autism.
Temple Grandin is an autism advocate and animal scientist who works to improve animal treatment in the livestock industry. Grandin has also changed public perceptions of autism, helping educators to maximise the strengths of those with autism, rather than focusing only on deficiencies.
An animal lover and meat eater, Grandin has used her autistic trait of “thinking in pictures” to design livestock facilities and educate meat produces on how to minimise animal suffering. As a result, she says there’s been ‘light years of improvement’ in an industry where half of all cattle in the United States are handled in facilities she designed.
This isn’t enough for some animal rights activists though, who accuse her of trying to soften the image of a ‘violent’ sector.
Thinking like a cow
Temple Grandin did not talk until she was three and a half years old. She struggled to communicate throughout her childhood, and other students bullied her at school.But there was one high school teacher, Mr Carlock, who saw something special in her. He mentored the troubled girl and encouraged her to study science.
Shocked by the cruelty she saw in abattoirs, Grandin combined her love for science and animals by fixating on designs to improve animal welfare in these facilities. Grandin knew she learned better by visualising, rather than reading and hearing long strings of words. In this respect, her thinking pattern was similar to animals, who don’t ‘speak’ a language.
She observed cattle in slaughterhouses, seeing how they responded to fear, senses, smells and visual memories. When cows can see they’re about to be killed, they panic, fall and injure themselves. To combat this, Grandin invented the curved loading chutes, which block their vision of what’s ahead, keeping them calm.
This not only improves animal welfare, it saves producers the cost of cattle death, injury and bruising – which also reduces the quality of meat. Grandin has spent her career designing livestock facilities to improve the way animals are treated.
In 1997, she worked with McDonalds after activists exposed animal torture on their production plants. She helped the fast food chain clean up cruel practices and restore its public image.
In 2010, Time Magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world for her work in animal welfare.
We need autistic minds
Grandin has also changed public perceptions of autism, a condition relatively unknown when she grew up. She argues people on the autism spectrum – who tend to struggle with verbal communication but think in pictures – can provide more insight in certain fields than those who think in a more conventional mathematical way.
“Visual thinking is an asset for an equipment designer. I am able to ‘see’ how all parts of a project will fit together and see potential problems.”
Grandin encourages teachers to develop the strengths of autistic children, and has devised clever ways to combat perceived flaws.Like many on the spectrum, she is oversensitive to touch. “I always hated to be hugged”, she says.
So at age 18, she built a ‘squeeze machine’ – two hinged wooden boards lined with foam rubber, which allows users to control the amount and duration of pressure applied. Therapy programs across the United States continue to utilise squeeze machines, with research showing they help relieve stress in users.
Hero or villain?
While considered a hero in the autism community, Grandin’s work divides animal welfare activists. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the world’s largest animal rights group, appreciate and publish her work. Others, like biologist Marc Bekoff, hold that no animal in captivity can enjoy a pleasant life. Bekoff would rather see Grandin encourage people not to consume factory farmed animals; to him, “‘slightly better’ isn’t good enough”.
“No animal who winds up in the factory farm production line has a good or even moderately good life.” – Marc Bekoff
Grandin’s retort is that without meat eaters, farm animals would have no life at all. She argues if animals are going to die anyway, it’s important to minimise their suffering.
Does this apply to humans too?
The New York Times once asked her if she’d consider helping to make capital punishment more humane. Her response was blunt.
“I have read things about the malfunctions of the electric chair… I know how to fix it, but I will not use my knowledge to have any involvement in that. I will not cross the species barrier to help kill people. Period.”
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
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.
Perils of an unforgiving workplace
s
Public relations executive, Justine Sacco, thought she might get a few laughs when she tweeted what she thought was a poor-taste joke to her 170 followers. Instead, she was sacked from her job and found herself in the centre of a social media shaming frenzy.
Sent as she embarked on a flight, the tweet posted by Sacco in 2014 read: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”.
This is the nature of the internet, where a crass and thoughtless “joke” is likely to taint Sacco’s whenever anyone types it into a search engine.
But while the internet may not forget, her employer has already forgiven her. US-based internet and media company IAC, rehired her after she spent a few years working elsewhere.
IAC CEO, Joey Levin, welcomed her back. “With one notable exception, Justine’s track record speaks for itself,” he wrote in a statement.
Business leaders are often encouraged to be tolerant of human frailties. Influential Harvard Business School professor, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, has written:
“Leaders must be firm and foster accountability, but they also must know when to forgive past wrongs in the service of building a brighter future”.
What about hiring a former criminal?
Humans are fallible. We do dumb stuff, we can take leave of our senses in times of stress, we let our emotions get the better of us and we make bad choices.
However, while employers may be prepared to forgive thoughtless actions made with “a sudden rush of blood to the head”, a criminal’s past may be something altogether different.
A substantial segment of the population will have some sort of criminal record, ranging from minor traffic and drug offences to serious jail time. Statistics from the UK, Canada and the US indicate around 20 to 25 per cent of their male populations and up to six per cent of women have a criminal record. Australia is assumed to be similar.
If employers insist that all their employees must have a “clean slate”, a lot of people will be left on the employment scrap heap. This discrimination is illegal anyway, unless said conviction prevents them from performing the inherent requirements of the job.
One person working to get former offenders back into the workforce is Rabbi Dr Dovid Slavin, CEO of Our Big Kitchen – a Bondi-based charity that trains and employs prisoners and former offenders. Last year, they distributed more than 80,000 meals to disadvantaged people.
Rabbi Slavin says work release programs are only available to around 1.5 per cent of inmates, who are in the final year of their sentence.
Once they are looking for employment, former inmates will have a more successful relationship with an employer if they are open about their criminal past, he says.
“The most important thing that I found is where an inmate is able to freely talk about what he or she did and they’ve come to terms with it,” he says.
“If they feel hard done by the system, rightly or wrongly, it can be very difficult for them to integrate and move forward because they carrying baggage from the past.”
If they are coming in a work-release program, they must be willing to have their bags checked, for instance. “They can’t be overly-precious about how they are treated,” he says.
“We here [at Our Big Kitchen] always treated them like family, treated them with a great deal of respect and comfort and that made them want to be extremely co-operative and extremely forthcoming.”
Two reasons to offer a second chance
The CEO of employment assistance organisation Joblink Plus, Christine Shewry, says employers have two compelling reasons to give former prisoners a second chance.
Firstly, people with troublesome backgrounds can make outstanding employees if they get the right support and training, says Shewry, whose service helps people who face barriers in the employment market in regional NSW.
“Those people who have not had the best start in life, who have had a challenge, can become amazing employees because of the discretionary effort they will put in when you give them a go.”
As a second motivation, offering redemption can have transformative effects on society.
In Glasgow, once regarded as the “murder capital” of Europe, non-sexual crimes of violence have fallen by 44 per cent over ten years – a feat credited to a police-initiated program to get offenders off the streets and into training and work.
Scotland’s police force adopted a public health approach, co-operating with the education system and health service to tackle the root causes of crime.
According to researchers Eileen Baldry and Sophie Russell at UNSW, the majority of prisoners in Australia have severely disadvantaged backgrounds, with serious health, mental health and disability concerns.
They say 60 per cent of inmates are not functionally literate or numerate, 64 per cent have no stable family, and 60 per cent of males and 70 per cent of females have a history of illicit drug use.
Shewry points to the effectiveness of back-to-work programs in turning people’s lives around. She says Joblink Plus has run programs for ex-offenders where 70 per cent have never reoffended, while national recidivism rates are at 44.8 per cent (the percentage of prisoners released during 2014-15 who returned to prison within two years
Rabbi Slavin says out of more than 40 former inmates employed through his program, none have returned to jail.
“If we, as a society, continue to shun anybody who has a criminal past, then we are really sentencing ourselves to that person having to re-offend because of the way he or she will be able to support themselves emotionally and physically and financially, he says.
“When somebody comes out of out of incarceration, very often their families have abandoned them, very often they’ve abandoned themselves. They don’t believe in themselves anymore.”
They have to adjust to a world where a correctional officer no longer dictates their every move. It could take 20 minutes for them to choose between soft drink brands because they are unused to making decisions, he says.
Managing the risk
Former CEO of logistics group, Toll Holdings, Paul Little, has been a strong supporter of helping former inmates into work. Under his stewardship, Toll ran a program, Second Step, which has helped more than 500 people to move from drug addiction and jail into permanent employment.
Little told The Australian newspaper that he regretted being unable to convince other ASX 200 companies to introduce a similar scheme. (Neither Little of Toll Holdings would comment for this article).
“It is a massive disappointment. People aren’t willing in business life, in corporate life, even in government, to try to manage that risk. We saw an opportunity for people to become amazing employees, and invariably they did.”
Shewry says some people, who are assessed by the government as ready to work, will have to be closely supervised if their criminal history dictates that. Those jobs may be in manufacturing, labouring, food processing, or rural work.
Emily Roy, Joblink Plus’ executive manager for community partnerships says is not a simple matter to place former offenders in work. “One of the big supports that we can offer employers is to not pretend that everything is going to be fabulous all the time,” she says.
“There are a lot of practicalities when working with someone who, for example, has a history of child-related offences. But we do work with them and there are employers who are able to do that because there is work that needs to be done. So, you put things in place and there is no opportunity to engage with children at all.”
Roy points out that employer concerns about hiring former offenders are not always rational. “It is interesting that we get concerned about the people who are known to us as being offenders – so these are known entities that we can manage, that we can support and put things in place.
“What is our community response as a whole to people who aren’t known to be doing that?”
Employers, have you discriminated?
When assessing the application of a person with a criminal record, questions that an employer may need to address might include:
1. Has the applicant or employee been informed about the possible relevance of a criminal record to the position?
2. Does the organisation have clear procedures for making decisions about applicants with a criminal record? For example, who makes the decision and how is it made?
3. Does the applicant or employee’s specific criminal record mean that he or she cannot fulfil the inherent requirements of the particular job?
4. Has the applicant or employee been given an opportunity to explain the circumstances surrounding any criminal record?
5. Is there an avenue for the employee to appeal the decision?
Follow The Ethics Centre on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
This article was originally written for The Ethics Alliance. Find out more about this corporate membership program. Already a member? Log in to the membership portal for more content and tools here.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
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.
6 Things you might like to know about the rich
In Australia, where we like to cut our tall poppies down, wealthy people come with an unenviable reputation.
Unless you happen to be reading the business pages, money and power will attract sneering. Otherwise, the lionising coverage of those with outrageous success seems ample reward for their riches.
A multitude of psychological studies conclude rich people are more unethical and selfish than those who are less fortunate. However, one question remains mostly unanswered; what came first; the bad character or the money?
Here, we take a quick look at what research tells us about the collision of money and ethics:
1. Fancy car, poor driving
People driving expensive cars are four times more likely to ignore right of way laws on the road than those who drive cheap cars.
Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley
and his then-graduate student, Paul Piff, tracked the model of every car that cut off others.
“It told us that there’s something about wealth and privilege that makes you feel like you’re above the law, which allows you to treat others like they don’t exist,” Keltner told the Washington Post.
In another experiment, half of the luxury car drivers ignored a pedestrian on a crossing – many even after making eye contact. However, all the cheapest cars stopped.
2. They cheat more on their taxes
Taxpayers whose true income was between $US500,000 and $1 million a year understated their adjusted gross incomes by 21 per cent in 2001, compared to an eight percent underreporting rate for those earning $50,000 to $100,000 and even lower rates for those earning less than that.
According to research, wealthier people were more likely to cheat because it was easier for them to hide sources of income from self-employment, rents, capital gains and partnerships.
3. Less empathetic
Observations that rich people tend to be less generous than the poor may be influenced by the amount of time we spend looking at each other.
By analysing what people look at as they walk down a street (wearing Google Glasses), psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley,
Pia Dietze and Eric Knowles, discovered that social class did not affect how many times people looked at another person – but it did determine how much time they spend looking.
Participants self-nominating as higher in social class spent less time looking at other people.
Dacher Keltner says people in lower socioeconomic classes tend to be more vigilant because they “live lives defined by threat”.
4. Less generous
Middle-class Americans give a far bigger share of their discretionary income to charities than the rich. If the rich live in wealthy neighbourhoods, they give an even smaller share of their income than wealthy people in economically-diverse neighbourhoods.
“Wealth seems to buffer people from attending to the needs of others,” Paul Piff told the New York Times.
5. Cashed-up and sad = bad
People most likely to approve of unethical behaviour are those with a low level of happiness, but a high level of income, according to a survey of 27,672 professionals.
Conversely, the most disapproving of unethical behaviour were those with high income and life satisfaction, according to professor of management and organisations at the Kellogg School, the late Keith Murnighan, and Long Wang of the City University of Hong Kong.
“People who are exuberant and upbeat about life, and happen to have high income, are likely to be more trustworthy,” Murnighan told his university’s Kellogg Insight publication.
“An unhappy rich person might feel bad because of their own unethical behaviour, but it might be that very behaviour that got them rich in the first place.
“Having a comfortable amount of money might allow enough psychological ‘room’ to ethically consider the needs and perspectives of other people, which may then lead to feelings of well-being.”
6. Stereotypes are self-fulfilling
Negative stereotypes of rich people are all-pervasive. According to Adam Waytz, an Associate Professor of Management and Organisations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, studies show that the more profitable a company, the more people linked it to social harm.
“People come to confirm the behaviours that are expected of them (we live up to and down to others’ stereotypes of us), and if rich people and business folks are assumed to behave with the same scruples as Bernie Madoff, these views will likely elicit unethical behaviour from them,” warns Waytz in a blog in the Scientific American.
This article was originally written for The Ethics Alliance. Find out more about this corporate membership program. Already a member? Log in to the membership portal for more content and tools here.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
