Being a little bit better can make a huge difference to our mental health
When Hannah first started working at her university, she was excited to work with a group of colleagues who shared her vision of contributing to the public good.
She spent a happy six years feeling like she was serving this goal. Two years later, her GP described her as having symptoms consistent with a mental breakdown.
What changed? Hannah lost her belief that her colleagues shared her commitment to the public good. She explained how “several senior individuals prioritised building relationships with senior staff or performing tasks that were very visible to senior staff, instead of performing their core duties to the community.”
One manager – working as temporary cover for a worker on maternity leave – neglected Hannah and her team, and then took credit for their work. When the maternity leave was done, this manager was promoted into an even more senior role.
Psychologists and philosophers working in various fields of trauma have noted the powerful role played by the ‘just world hypothesis’ – the belief that the world is inherently fair.
The just world belief leads us to assume that if we’re nice, we’ll be treated nicely in return, if we work as hard as someone else, we’ll be equally recognised and so forth. Unfortunately, the just world hypothesis is sometimes disproved, and the results can be psychologically disruptive.
In some cases, people will double-down on their commitment to the just world hypothesis, and conclude that if they’ve been mistreated, it must be because they’ve done something wrong. In other cases, they might conclude that the world simply isn’t fair, and can’t be relied on. In Hannah’s case, it was the latter.
“These issues were structural, existential, ethical and were psychically wounding me,” says Hannah. “I saw evidence that the quality of my work was irrelevant to my job security – it was more about who I rubbed shoulders with.”
Hannah wound up doubling her anxiety medication, taking stress leave and resigning from the university. “I still feel nauseous thinking about work, and had a panic attack last week when I accidentally opened Outlook,” she says.
Hannah’s story isn’t a one-off. It’s backed up by hard data.
The recent Ethical Advantage report commissioned by The Ethics Centre found your mental health was affected by your belief in the following three things:
- Whether or not people keep their word
- Whether or not people honestly honour their agreements
- Whether or not people will step on others to succeed
The more you agree with these statements, the better your mental (and physical) health is likely to be. But the reverse is also true.
The less able you are to trust in the people around you to act ethically, the more likely your health – both mental and physical – is to suffer.
“If I had been able to keep the perception that colleagues around me were ‘good people’ I would have been able to maintain a sort of ‘we’re all in this together’ mentality,” says Hannah. Instead, witnessing competitive, dishonest behaviour led her to lose faith in what the university stood for, and the people she worked with.
Our research has found that all it takes is 10%. If people feel like the people around them are 10% better – just a little bit – it’s enough to give their health a bump. In some cases, it’s enough to keep someone from quitting, from experiencing a mental illness or doing something they think is wrong. From little things, big changes can grow.
For Hannah, those little things are exactly those identified in the Ethical Advantage report. What would have made a difference to her would have been seeing people “doing as they say, and following through.”
“A lot of hurt has happened when senior staff have said one thing, then said a very different, contradictory thing the next week,” she says.
Perhaps the saddest aspect of Hannah’s story is how preventable it all was. She was good at her job. She’s smart and worked hard, and was driven to anxiety and burnout by an environment of competition and manipulation.
This hit especially hard for H because her workplace put a particular focus on health and wellbeing. The university “pays a lot of lip service to health and wellbeing. Senior leaders talk about it all the time, and make sure we stay ‘resilient’ and know that we’re ‘supported’,” says Hannah.
Cass R Sunstein, a legal scholar and author of Nudge, which helped champion a new wave of behavioural economics, believes that we have a deeply-held moral heuristic to punish betrayals of trust.
This means the more we believe we can trust someone, the more harshly we judge breaches of that trust.
In Hannah’s case, her faith in her colleagues, in the purpose of the institution and in the care the university promised her were all let down.
The reason why the university’s culture became so competitive was because of a change of strategic priorities. Hannah’s university put a higher focus on income than education. Hannah explained how her university had become “more profit driven, especially this year.” As a result, “an ‘every man for himself’ attitude proliferated,” she said.
Ironically, because of the mental health implications of drifting away from its true purpose, the university’s goal – better financial outcomes – becomes harder to achieve. It’s expensive to have staff experiencing burnout and mental health issues. Hannah is now on stress leave.
In 2018, KPMG estimated that every instance of mental illness in the workplace costs an organisation $3200. On its own, this may not seem like much in the context of an organisation. However, data from the Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing suggests almost 20% of the workforce experience mental health disorder. For a university of 3500 staff, that amounts to over $2 million a year in lost productivity. And that’s before we consider the more important costs – the pain and suffering of people like Hannah.
And the irony goes deeper. The competitive, ‘every person for themselves’ mentality caused Hannah to lose faith in the people around her. She no longer believed they were ethical people. Which is unfortunate, because our findings suggest people who are perceived as ethical can enjoy a bump to their wages. If you’re out for yourself, there’s a chance you’ll only be stepping on your own toes.
Of course, the reason for taking care of someone else’s mental health, treating them with respect and honouring your word isn’t because there’s something in it for you. If that’s all that’s motivating you, then something’s gone wrong. We should want to care for people at work because we care about them, period. People spend an inordinate amount of time at work – it’s a huge part of their lives – and they should be able to flourish there.
However, what this data helps us understand is just how easy it can be to turn things around for some people who aren’t living their best lives at work.
There are times when ethics can feel like an impossible burden. When the obligations thrust on us come at far too high a personal price. This isn’t one of those times. Hannah didn’t need to suffer. The university didn’t need to lose someone of her passion and talent. If only the people around her had tried a little harder to keep their word, acknowledge her work and do their jobs, she could have avoided a world of heartache. What’s more, there would have been no downside.
Hannah’s story is not unique. There’s a chance there are people like her in your workplace, your community, or even your family. So tomorrow, why not try being a little better? You don’t need to be a saint. Just 10% better.
That’s all it takes.
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BY Matthew Beard
Matt is a moral philosopher with a background in applied and military ethics. In 2016, Matt won the Australasian Association of Philosophy prize for media engagement. Formerly a fellow at The Ethics Centre, Matt is currently host on ABC’s Short & Curly podcast and the Vincent Fairfax Fellowship Program Director.
The truths COVID revealed about consumerism
What underlying driver created the great toilet paper gate panic of 2020?
At the onset of the pandemic, The Ethics Centre Fellow, Dr Matt Beard, University of Queensland philosopher and health researcher Bryan Mukandi, University of Queensland, and Australian philosopher and Princeton PhD candidate Eleanor Gordon-Smith joined in conversation. Together they discussed, dissected and explored a range of ethical issues rising during the early stages of the pandemic. In this extract, they discuss what COVID panic buying reflects about who we are, and what we value..
Matt Beard, TEC Fellow:
The kind of panic buying responsive that we saw from ordinary people at the beginning of this, what did that tell us about ourselves? For me that was a moment to really reckon and say what does it tell us that in the first sniff of a crisis, the first thing that we did was take care of us and ours. What does that say to us about the way in which we’ve set up this society?
Eleanor Gordon Smith, Philosopher:
The United States, the land that brought us Black Friday sales, did not hold back when it came to panic buying. What did it reveal about us? Less I think then it revealed about our circumstance.
Here’s what I think it revealed about us. We were afraid, and we didn’t feel secure, and we didn’t trust either us or the government around us to provide for us in the moment of crises where we would most need both those things.
More than anything particularly deep about our innate nature, which I know people argue about a lot, does this reveal that we’re fundamentally selfish? Well yes, but then people also drove themselves to food banks, and it revealed other things about kindness and solidarity, and all the nice things as well.
I think more than that it revealed something that we kind of already know, which is that the right configuration of circumstances can push ordinary people to behave in profoundly selfish and possibly evil ways.
We know that a lot of exercises of bad behaviour are perfectly ordinary, and what happens when people are frightened and insecure. More than what I think it told us about us, I think it told us something really disquieting about the faith that we had in our systems, which was that unless we did this unless we went out and kind of did this end of days, treading on each other’s necks for a can of beans we wouldn’t have enough.
I’ve been saying this for weeks, I don’t even like beans, I don’t know why I bought so many beans, everyone just transformed into people who really liked beans all of a sudden. But it told us that we were willing to do that.
In fact, we thought it is necessary that we do that because we were so unsure of the fact that other people, and or the government, and or the system would be able to provide for us if we didn’t do this kind of absurd others sacrificing thing. I think we were entirely wrong.
Byran Mukandi, Philosopher:
Here I disagree with Eleanor. Irene Watson, a legal scholar, in her book, “Raw Law”, she uses a Nunga word, Muldarbi for colonialism. There’s an image she paints of colonialism as this voracious monster, this voracious animal that just devours and consumes. And I just find that so incredibly apt.
I think it’s telling that for some groups in Australia, the relationship between ‘mainstream society’, and some communities is one that’s best classed as this voracious, consuming animal. This devouring thing.
As a sub-Saharan African, the quality of life I enjoy today as an Australian citizen, is inextricably linked to the poverty and deprivation, and the suffering that a lot continent sub-Saharan Africans, and a whole bunch of people around the world experience. Those two things are intimately intertwined.
There’s a lot of posturing in terms of our response to climate crisis around why China needs to do something first, but the fact is the Chinese industrial work, manufacturing work, goes into providing that which we, in the Western world, consume. There’s a sense in which we are ferocious, we devour.
The rush to buy toilet paper as though when the zombie apocalypse comes, the most needful thing is toilet paper… I mean, this isn’t a gastroenteric virus, it’s not like everybody’s going to be on the toilet, but little things, baking powder, toilet paper, tins of tomatoes and tomato paste, people were hoarding and panic buying non-essential goods.
I don’t think it was because the idea was this non-essential good is going to run out and I’m not going to make brownies or cupcakes, or whatever, and my life is going to come to an end.
I think we have a voracious appetite, I think we have a voracious consuming, devouring appetite. I think we have a particular relationship to the environment and to others, and I think this pandemic has just shone a light on who we are, as opposed to who we like to pretend we are and the image of ourselves we like to project.
This is an extract from a live-streamed event. Watch the full conversation from FODI Digital event, Ethics of the Pandemic, below. Don’t miss our next live-stream events at www.festivalofdangerousideas.com.
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Mutuality of care in a pandemic
In the pandemic landscape, individual rights were challenged against a mutuality of care for our neighbours.
At the onset of the pandemic, The Ethics Centre Fellow, Dr Matt Beard, University of Queensland philosopher and health researcher Bryan Mukandi, University of Queensland, and Australian philosopher and Princeton PhD candidate Eleanor Gordon-Smith joined in conversation.
Together they discussed, dissected and explored a range of ethical issues rising during the early stages of the pandemic. This extract from the discussion considers Carol Gilligan’s theory around the ethics of care, and in particular her ideas around the mutuality of care and the idea that individual actions impact the whole.
Matt Beard, TEC Fellow:
One of the things that I keep coming back to, is this quote from the feminist philosopher, Carol Gilligan, who championed an approach, “the ethics of care”. She talks about this idea that we live on a trampoline, and whenever we move it kind of affects everybody else in the same way, it makes other people wobble, your activities cause discomfort to others.
And one of the things that this pandemic has crystallized for me is this sense that, this whole idea of this atomized individual with rights that cluster them off and divide us from other people, is kind of illusory. We are radically dependent on other people, we have this interdependence and these mutual obligations that inform our moral response.
And that got me thinking about how difficult it can be to muster that sense of mutual obligation. In a society that does just talk so heavily about ourselves as individuals, we’ve been conditioned to think about ourselves in almost exactly the opposite way to the way that this response requires us.
Have I set this up in the right way? Is it true we’ve been conditioned in this way? How do you think about this?
Bryan Mukandi, Philosopher:
It’s really complex, because on the one hand I think you’re absolutely right. I love that metaphor of the trampoline, and I completely agree, this idea of this autonomous free liberal individual, it just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. But at the same time, on the other hand, the fractiousness and fracturedness we’re witnessing in the US applies here too, in some really interesting ways, right.
So, yes, we’re all on this trampoline, but the real estate that you occupy on that trampoline makes the world of difference. And we have a kind of social structure, social organisation where there’s an investment in occupying good real estate [so] that when something happens – a natural disaster, a fire, floods, a pandemic – there’s an investment in being in a position of being able to enact something like that illusory autonomy.
I think about Martin Luther King’s idea of an inextricable “network of mutuality”. But he raises this in a sort of moment where African Americans are in a particular kind of relationship with white America. He acknowledges that there’s this mutuality, there’s this connection, but the nature of this connection is one that’s really detrimental to some groups of people as opposed to others.
And I also think about Frantz Fanon contribution to Hegel’s dialectic of recognition. This idea that our selfhood emerges in relationship with others, it’s like it falls apart in the colony because in the colony the white doesn’t want the colonized recognition, they want their labour.
So I think, while on the one hand, COVID has shown us that this ideal of autonomy – it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It’s in really interesting ways though, I think it may, at least for some groups of people, legitimate this project of striving towards that kind of autonomy of occupying the best possible real estate on that trampoline, as opposed to reconfiguring the trampoline itself.
Eleanor Gordon Smith, Philosopher:
It’s a really good question.
And like Bryan, I think it’s a very complex one and one that we’re not going to compress either now or in a pandemic writ large. One thing I think that is kind of a shame for me living in the states and seeing the way the states is covered internationally is the way that a lot of the pressure to reopen is construed in these kinds of individual autonomous terms.
I have a lot of family and a lot of friends who I think are really genuinely very concerned about my proximity to New York at the moment. They feel like crisis, real proper, ‘everyone’s dead’ crisis, like blood –in–the–streets–type crisis, is right around the corner.
And my suspicion about why they feel like that is that they’ve seen these videos of women hanging out of cars at intersections blowing the horn at medical workers or protesters walking into government buildings, people with the American flag painted on their face, holding banners about the right to return to work.
These people are both, they’re a very individualistic face of this movement and the movement that they claim to be espousing is very individualistic. They’re making claims about people’s individual rights to get back to work and they are doing so claiming to speak as individuals.
But one of the things that I think it’s a shame that [coverage] obscures is that the pressure to reopen America comes from the fact that it’s a non-accidental feature of the US American system and the US economic system that it wants people to be back at work more than it wants them to be safe and well.
We encounter that from the mouths of individuals who present themselves as autonomous in saying things like ‘the cure cannot be worse than the disease’, but the pressure isn’t just from rhetoric or from individuals, it’s from the way the system is set up.
You look at the kinds of costs and debts that Americans incur just for functioning. Like if you get sick, that costs money and that creates debt, if you have a higher education system, even one that is continuing on Zoom at the moment, that costs money and that causes debt.
Both of these things coupled with just the usual systems of credit means that most Americans are in eye–watering amounts of debt, and then debt has interest which means that you’re incentivized to get back to work as fast as possible and you put people in a position where it’s not only rational but critical to get back to earning money because it costs money to earn less.
The way the system functions is such that not only do you create all these pressures, it’s then coupled with this narrative of individualism, telling people that both the source of the problem and the nearest solution is to be conceived of in these individualistic autonomous senses.
It’s a real shame when we reinforce and circulate these images of Americans protesting in the way that they are right now, because we obscure the fact that even these apparently maniacally individual faces are in fact the product of the same system that crushes the rest of us.
This is an extract from a live-streamed event. Watch the full conversation from FODI Digital event, Ethics of the Pandemic, below. Don’t miss our next live-stream events at www.festivalofdangerousideas.com.
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BY The Ethics Centre
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Living well or comfortably waiting to die?
It can be argued that life isn’t something we have, it’s something we do.
It is a set of activities that we can fuse with meaning. There doesn’t seem much value to living if all we do with it is exist. More is demanded of us.
One of my favourite quotes about living comes from French Philosopher, Jean Jacques Rousseau.
“To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life. Men have been buried at one hundred who have died at their birth.”
Rousseau’s quote isn’t just sage; it’s inspiring. It makes us want to live better – more fully. It captures an idea that moral philosophers have been exploring for thousands of years: what it means to ‘live well’ – to have a life worth living.
Unfortunately, it also illustrates a bigger problem. Because we tend to interpret Rousseau’s guide to ‘Really Good Living’ in a particularly narrow way – that it’s all about vitality, seizing the day and YOLO.
This is a reality that professionals working in the aged care sector should know all too well. They work directly with people who don’t have full use of their organs, their faculties or their senses.
Months ago, before the pandemic, I presented Rousseau’s thoughts to a room full of aged care professionals. They felt the same inspiration and agreement that I felt.
That’s a problem.
If the good life looks like a robust, activity-filled life, what does that tell us about the possibility for the elderly to live well? And if we don’t believe that the elderly can live well, what does that mean for aged care?
The findings from the recent Aged Care Royal Commission reveal galling evidence of misconduct, negligence and at times outright abuse. The most vulnerable members of our communities, and our families, have been subject to mistreatment due in part to a commercial drive to increase the profitability of aged care facilities at the expense of person-centred care.
More recently, we have seen aged care at the centre of the Covid-19 pandemic. Over 250 deaths have been recorded in facilities across Australia from the virus and our State and Federal governments are fighting out responsibility.
Elderly residents have been prevented from being treated in hospitals, their facilities have been drastically understaffed and public commentators have wondered whether we ought simply to allow more of them to die.
Absent from the discussion thus far has been the question of ‘the good life’. That’s understandable given the range of much more immediate and serious concerns facing the aged care sector, but it is one that cannot be ignored, despite the urgent matters before us.
Whilst leaders and decision-makers must be held accountable, there is a deeper sense of shared responsibility we should all carry when it comes to our attitudes toward ageing and aged care.
In 2015, celebrity chef and aged care advocate Maggie Beer told The Ethics Centre that she wanted “to create a sense of outrage about [elderly people] who are merely existing”. Since then she has gone on to provide evidence to the Royal Commission because she believes that food is about so much more than nutrition. It’s about memory, community, pleasure and taking care and pride in your work.
Consider the evidence given around food standards in aged care. There have been suggestions that uneaten food is being collected and reused in the kitchens for the next meal; that there is a “race to the bottom” to cut costs of meals at the expense of quality, and that the retailers selling to aged care facilities wildly inflate their prices. The result? Bad food for premium prices.
We should be disturbed by this. This food doesn’t even permit people to exist, let alone flourish. It leaves them wasting away, undernourished. It’s abhorrent. But what should be the appropriate standard for food within aged care? How should we determine what’s acceptable? Do we need food that is merely nutritious and of an acceptable standard, or does it need to do more than that?
Answering that question requires us to confront an underlying question: Do we believe aged care is simply about providing people’s basic needs until they eventually die?
Or is it much more than that? Is it about ensuring that every remaining moment of life provides the “sentiment of existence” that Rousseau was concerned with?
When you look at the testimony provided to the Aged Care Royal Commission, a clear answer begins to emerge. Alongside terms like ‘rights’, ‘harms’ and ‘fairness’ –which capture the bare minimum of ethical treatment for other people – appear words such as ‘empathy’, ‘love’ and ‘connection’.
These words capture more than basic respect for persons, they capture a higher standard of how we should relate to other people. They’re compassionate words. People are expressing a demand not just for the elderly to be cared for but to be cared about.
Counsel assisting the Royal Commission, Peter Gray QC, recently told the commission that “a philosophical shift is required, placing the people receiving care at the centre of quality and safety regulation. This means a new system, empowering them and respecting their rights.”
It’s clear that a philosophical shift is necessary. However, I would argue that what’s not clear is if ‘person-centred care’ is enough. There is an ageist belief embedded within our society that all of the things that make life worth living are unavailable to the elderly.
As long as we accept that to be true, we’ll be satisfied providing a level of care that simply avoids harm, rather than one that provides for a rich, meaningful and satisfying life.
Unless we are able to confront the underlying social belief that at a certain age, all that remains for you in life is to die, we won’t be able to provide the kind of empowerment you felt reading Rousseau at the start of this article.
What it will do is provide a better version of what we already believe – that once you are at a certain age and stage of life, ‘living’ is no longer a real option? You must settle for existing.
At this stage, we can pump you full of our care, love, empathy and respect – and most people accept that we should do that – but you are no longer living for yourself. You are waiting, as humanely as possible, to die.
Unless we confront this deeper belief, any positive movement in aged care will struggle to provide residents with what we all hope for – a life worth living.
*This is an edited version of an article first published on 10th September 2019
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BY Matthew Beard
Matt is a moral philosopher with a background in applied and military ethics. In 2016, Matt won the Australasian Association of Philosophy prize for media engagement. Formerly a fellow at The Ethics Centre, Matt is currently host on ABC’s Short & Curly podcast and the Vincent Fairfax Fellowship Program Director.
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 dilemma of ethical consumption: how much are your ethics worth to you?
Everyone, rich and poor alike, should be able to buy the cheapest product with a clean conscience.
This article was written for, and first published by The Guardian.
In the lead-up to a recent buck’s party, the group chat turned to the age-old question: will there be strippers? After some back and forth (for the record, I was opposed), the groom-to-be stepped in with the veto. “No strippers!” he declared.
His reasoning demonstrated a remarkable level of self-knowledge. He explained that he was planning on the weekend being filled with inhibition-reducing substances and didn’t trust his addled self to make smart decisions.
In doing so, he gave voice to a basic moral principle: better to avoid temptation than to overcome it. From Mufasa to Gandalf – and the Lord’s Prayer – we’re told that while it’s good to be able to resist vice when it calls to us, there’s wisdom in arranging our lives in a way that minimises our exposure to vice altogether.
Unfortunately, that advice is nearly impossible to follow when it comes to participating in the market. Increasingly our decisions around what we buy come with a trade-off: the more sustainable, ethical, fair trade option or the cheaper, potentially dodgier one.
Take an easy example: eggs. Do you want to buy them from the farms that give the chooks the best quality of life (comparably speaking)? Free range, organic and more than twice the price of the quick-and-dirty caged eggs stashed at the bottom of the shelves. For many of us, this is a fairly straightforward choice – the price to put our money where our morals are is relatively low, though even here, the lower your budget, the harder the ethical choice becomes. What happens when we increase the costs?
If we stop thinking with our stomachs, the problems get even larger. I recently informed my financial planner that I wanted to move my superannuation to an ethical investment fund. He did his job and showed me the comparison. If fees and returns for each fund performed as they had been, in 30 years’ time my superannuation would be $300,000 worse off investing in an ethical fund. Lead us not into temptation indeed.
There are a few perversities here. The most galling to me is that pitting money against morality is a regressive dilemma. The people who can most afford to pay their ethical way are the uber rich; those battling against the poverty line don’t have the option but to become complicit in animal wellbeing issues and clothing made in questionable conditions. They certainly can’t justify moving to a higher-fee fund just because it doesn’t invest in coal or tobacco.
There seems to be something uniquely cruel about creating a system that determines ethical seriousness by purchasing behaviour, thereby stigmatising the poor and lightening the load on the wealthy.
This only becomes more egregious when you consider the various ways in which wealth is accumulated under capitalism – often on the backs of the same workers who can’t afford not to be complicit in the ethical missteps that often end up lining the pockets of the very same elites who can then afford a clean conscience.
However, the choice remains difficult even for those who ostensibly can afford to take the financial hit for their ethics. It’s easy to compare the immediate, measurable and tangible cost difference of two products. Making a judgement regarding the vague, unquantifiable moral value of not investing in unethical practices or investing in exemplary ones is ambiguous. There’s no obvious benefit and thanks to the anonymity of the global market, we usually don’t see the harms inherent in the products we’re being offered. That’s a recipe for rationalising the choice that’s better for us and ours, no matter what the costs are to anonymous people, animals and ecosystems.
There appears to be little out for those wanting to be ethical consumers on a budget. Compromises and trade-offs will need to be made. You’ll likely need to benefit from practices that don’t align with what you think is right. However, the lie at the heart of the ethical consumption movement is to tell you this is your fault. It’s not. It’s the fault of a much larger system offering you choices that, in many cases, you simply shouldn’t be permitted to make.
I don’t want to be given the choice between forfeiting hundreds of thousands of dollars and compromising on my values. I don’t want to be offered the opportunity to buy clothes that are cheaper for me because disempowered workers paid the price in underpayment and subjugation. It’s too easy to justify the worse option. It’s too easy to be tempted.
You can contact The Ethics Centre about any of the issues discussed in this article. We offer free counselling for individuals via Ethi-call; professional fee-for-service consulting, leadership and development services; and as a non-profit charity we rely heavily on donations to continue our work, which can be made via our website. Thank you.
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BY Matthew Beard
Matt is a moral philosopher with a background in applied and military ethics. In 2016, Matt won the Australasian Association of Philosophy prize for media engagement. Formerly a fellow at The Ethics Centre, Matt is currently host on ABC’s Short & Curly podcast and the Vincent Fairfax Fellowship Program Director.
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.
Philosophically thinking through COVID-19
In their recent article, ‘Who gets the ventilator in the coronavirus pandemic?’, bioethicists Julian Savulescu and Dominic Wilkinson note that we may soon be faced with a situation in which the demand for medical resources is greater than what is available.
At that point, decisions about who gets what medical resources ought to be just, they argue. The trouble with the article however, is that the two men seem to approach our present crisis as though it were just that, a present tense phenomenon. They view COVID-19 not as a something that has emerged over time as a result of our social configuration and political choices, but as something that appeared out of nowhere, an atemporal phenomenon.
Treating the pandemic as atemporal means that the two scholars only focus on the fact of this individual here and that one over there, suffering in this moment, from the same condition. They fail to ask how how this person came to be prone to the virus, or what resources that person has had at their disposal, let alone the socio-political and historical circumstances by which those resources were acquired. Karla Holloway, Professor of English and Professor of Law, makes the point that stripping away the textual details around our two patients simplifies the decision making process, but the price paid for that efficiency might be justice.
We know that there are systematic discrepancies in medical outcomes for marginalised groups at the best of times.We know that structural inequalities inform discrepancies around the degree to which people can practice social distancing and reduce the risk of infection. We know that those most likely to be most severely affected in the wake of the pandemic are those belonging to already marginalised communities. As public health medicine specialist, Papaarangi Reid, put it in a recent interview:
“We’ve got layers that we should be worried about. We should be worried about people who have difficulty accessing services … people who are stigmatised … While we are very worried about our elderly, we’re also worried about our precariat: those who are homeless; we’re worried about those who are impoverished; those who are the working poor; we’re worried about those who are in institutions, in prisons.”
Every time Reid says that we ought to worry about this group or that, I am confronted by Arendt’s take on just how difficult it is to think in that manner. I’m currently teaching a Clinical Ethics course for second year medical students, one of whose central pillars is Hannah Arendt’s understanding of thought. Standing on the other side of the catastrophe that was the second world war, she warned that thinking is incredibly difficult; so much so it demands that one stop, and it can be paralysing.
Arendt pointed out those algorithmic processes on the basis of which we usually navigate day-to-day life: clichés, conventional wisdom, the norms or ‘facts’ that seem so self-evident, we take them for granted. She argued that those are merely aids, prostheses if you like, which stand in the place of thinking – that labour of conceptually wading through a situation, or painstakingly kneading a problem. The trouble is, in times of emergency, where there is panic and a need for quick action, we are more likely to revert to our algorithms, and so reap the results of our un-interrogated and unresolved lapses and failures.
Australia today is a case in point. “The thing that I’m counting on, more than anything else,” noted Prime Minister Scott Morrison recently, “Is that Australians be Australian.” He went on to reiterate at the same press conference, “So long as Australians keep being Australians, we’ll get through this together.”
I’m almost sympathetic to this position. A looming disaster threatens the status quo, so the head of that status quo attempts to reassure the public of the durability of the prevailing order. What goes unexamined in that reflex, however, is the nature of the order. The prime minister did not stop to think what ‘Australia’ and ‘Australianness’ mean in more ordinary times.
Nor did he stop to consider recent protests by First Nations peoples, environmental activists, refugee and asylum seeker advocates and a raft of groups concerned about those harmed in the course of ‘Australians being Australian’. Instead, with the imperative to act decisively as his alibi, he propagated the assumption that whatever ‘Australia’ means, it ought to be maintained and protected. But what if that is merely the result of a failure to think adequately in this moment?
In his excellent article, calling on the nation to learn from past epidemics, Yuggera/Warangu ophthalmologist Kris Rallah-Baker, writes: ‘This is just the beginning of the crisis and we need to get through this together; Covid-19 has no regard for colour or creed’. In one sense, he seems to arrive at a position that is as atemporal as that of Savulescu and Wilkinson, with a similar stripping away of particularity (colour and creed). It’s an interesting position to come to given the continuity between post-invasion smallpox and COVID-19 that his previous paragraphs illustrate.
Read another way, I wonder if Rallah-Baker is provoking us; challenging us to think. What if this crisis is not the beginning, but the result of a longstanding socioeconomic, political and cultural disposition towards First Nations peoples, marginalised groups more broadly, and the prevailing approach to social organisation?
Could it then also be the case that the effect of the presence of novel coronavirus in the community is in fact predicated, to some degree, on social categories such as race and creed? Might a just approach to addressing the crisis, even in the hospital, therefore need to grapple with temporal and social questions?
There will be many for whom the days and weeks ahead will rightly be preoccupied with the practical tasks before them: driving trucks; stacking supermarket shelves; manufacturing protective gear; mopping and disinfecting surfaces; tending to the sick; ensuring the continuity of government services; and so forth. For the rest of us, there is an imperative to think. We ought to think deeply about how we got here and where we might go after this.
Perhaps then, as health humanities researchers Chelsea Bond and David Singh recently noted in the Medical Journal of Australia:
“we might also come to realise the limitations of drawing too heavily upon a medical response to what is effectively a political problem, enabling us to extend our strategies beyond affordable prescriptions for remedying individual illnesses to include remedying the power imbalances that cause the health inequalities we are so intent on describing.”
You can contact The Ethics Centre about any of the issues discussed in this article. We offer free counselling for individuals via Ethi-call; professional fee-for-service consulting, leadership and development services; and as a non-profit charity we rely heavily on donations to continue our work, which can be made via our website. Thank you.
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BY Bryan Mukandi
is an academic philosopher with a medical background. He is currently an ARC DECRA Research Fellow working on Seeing the Black Child (DE210101089).
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.
Moving on from the pandemic means letting go
Emerging from the turbulence of COVID-19, we have the opportunity to escape the hold of our past and use moral imagination to explore a better future.
After months of living through disruption, old work habits and perceptions may no longer fit the ‘new normal’, says Michael Baur, Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at Fordham University and an Adjunct Professor at Fordham Law School.
“There’s a very positive side to this, because it makes us realise that the seemingly obvious, natural way of operating is not so obvious anymore.” says Baur.
“It does afford us the ability to think a little bit more carefully about what we’re doing.”
A simple example may be that, after mastering virtual meetings, we realise that the regular face-to-face interstate meetings we thought to be essential are not, in fact, a necessary part of doing business. Instead of asking ‘can we do this online?’ we might now ask, ‘should we do this online, is there a good reason to do it in person?’
“It’s liberating, potentially, to be able to be thrown back and see that the seemingly natural is really not so natural and obvious after all,” says Baur.
Aspects of life previously unquestioned, such as our choices of where to live, send our kids to school or even the jobs we do, may be cast in a different light.
Speaking with Bob McCarthy, an Irish colleague, he spoke of the experience of the ‘Celtic Tigers’ during ten-year-plus period of economic growth prior to 2008. “Ireland had never experienced anything like it and our economy became the envy of the world. Of course, we lived in accordance with our new wealth and fame – two houses each, BMWs, ski holidays and buying chalets in Morzine”, says McCarthy.
Many rationalised their good fortune – ‘we’ve had it tough for so long we deserve a little luxury.’ So, when the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) crash came, it came hard. There was a 60% average fall in property prices, high unemployment, many family tragedies, house repossessions and years of debt to repay.
Bob said that the experience of crisis changed attitudes and behaviours, “Now, those of us who have been through this look at life, business, money, relationships, values, ethics through a different filter than before”.
He describes the experience of having benefitted from the pain. What had once seemed important during the times of excess are no longer important. What didn’t matter then, matters to him now. “Don’t get me wrong – not everything has changed. But for most the filter we use has changed”.
Baur says that, with the experience of COVID-19, we now have a similar opportunity to reset our aspirations, “When we were riding easy, just several weeks ago, we were in a state of deception.” He recognises that the pandemic has caused major economic shocks – perhaps even more severe than those caused by the GFC, “And now we can regroup. That seems to me a more positive, healthy way of thinking of it – that all of this wealth and expectation was not really ours to have to begin with.”
Bigger is not always better
The aftermath of the pandemic presents a good time to reassess our attitude to growth. The fact that almost all sectors of business have suffered means that there is a collective opportunity to slow down and reassess whether the purpose of business is to make more money for money’s sake, or to provide for human need.
Business is now attending to issues that were always there to be addressed – but remained largely ‘unseen’. By presenting itself as a ‘common enemy’, COVID-19 has caused us all to look up at the same time and respond to a suite of collective problems.
In many cases, our response has been an expression of human goodness, compassion and altruism. ‘Them’ has become ‘us’.
For example, Accor hotels, is opening up unused accommodation to support vulnerable people. Simon McGrath, Accor’s CEO, says, “Our doors are open,” said Accor’s McGrath “We have accommodation assets that can help people in times of need, and while the industry’s been devastated commercially, it doesn’t mean we can’t help.”
In a similar vein, UBER has partnered with the Women’s Services Network to provide 3,000 free rides to support those needing safe travel to or from shelters and domestic violence support services.
Australia was relatively unscathed by the GFC of 2008 and did not experience the large economic downturn felt elsewhere on the globe. Australia has also managed to flatten the curve and “none have been more successful than Australia and New Zealand at containing the coronavirus,” said Jonathan Rothwell, Gallup’s principal economist.
This is thanks to our strong public health system and our comprehensive testing regime, to the tracing of carriers and our strict self-isolation and physical distancing laws. We were also lucky that our geographic isolation bought us an extra 10 precious days to prepare.
However, Australia has not and will not escape the economic consequences of the pandemic – and our response to the threat it poses. So, how will we shape up when the challenge is an economic recession as opposed to a medical emergency? Will the good will and sense of common endeavour persist during the next phase of struggle? More interestingly still, will the sense of mutual obligation survive a return to posterity? Or will we resume our ‘old ways’?
Baur says an argument could be made that business and society in general did not make the most of the lessons to be learned from the GFC, more than a decade ago. Ireland’s Bob McCarthy, is of the same opinion, “We may be having an opportunity that would have been a lost opportunity from that time,” he says.
“What might be seen as a loss of opportunity, a loss of growth, in one limited respect, is really a darn good thing for everybody,” Baur says.
Echoing the same sentiment, Mike Bennetts CEO of Z Energy in New Zealand told audiences at the Trans – Tasman Business Circle that this virus has accelerated us into the future by 5 years, so “let’s make the most of it”. Our instinct is to seek comfort and confidence in the known which will mean going back to the way it was.
The challenge, now, is not only to create a new future but a better future. For that to happen we need to unleash a better version of ourselves.
You can contact The Ethics Centre about any of the issues discussed in this article. We offer free counselling for individuals via Ethi-call; professional fee-for-service consulting, leadership and development services; and as a non-profit charity we rely heavily on donations to continue our work, which can be made via our website. Thank you.
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BY Cris Parker
Cris Parker is Head of The Ethics Alliance and a Director of the Banking and Finance Oath.
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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.
How to put a price on a life - explaining Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALY)
In all the time I’ve spent teaching ethics – from trolley problems to discussions of civilian casualties at war to the ethics of firefighting – there have been a few consistent trends in what matters to people.
One of the most common is that in life-and-death situations, details matter. People want to know exactly who might die or be rescued: how old are they? Are they healthy? Do they have children? What have they done with their life?
What they’re doing, whether they know it or not, is exploring what factors could help decide which life it would be most reasonable, or most ethical to save, relative to the other lives on the table.
Moreover, it’s not only in times of war or random thought experiments that these questions arise. Every decision about where to allocate health resources is likely to have life-or-death consequences. Allocate more funding to women’s shelters to address domestic violence and you’ll save lives. However, how many lives would you save if that same money were used to fund more hospital beds, or was invested into mental health support in rural communities?
One widely-used method for ensuring health resources are allocated as efficiently as possible is to use QALY’s – quality-adjusted life years. QALY is an approach that was developed in the 1970’s to more precisely, consistently and objectively determine the effectiveness and efficiency of different health measures.
Here’s how it works: imagine a year of life enjoyed at full health. It gets assigned a score of 1. Every year of life lived at less than full health gets assigned a lower score. The worse off the person’s health, the lower the score.
For example, take someone who has to undergo chemotherapy for five years. They have full mobility, but have some difficulty with usual activities, severe pain and mild mental health challenges. They might be given a QALY score of 0.55.
Once we’ve gotten a QALY score, we then need to work out how much the healthcare costs. Then, it’s simple maths: multiply the cost by the QALY score and you get an idea of how much each QALY is costing you. Then you can compare the cost effectiveness of different health programs.
QALY’s are usually seen as a utilitarian method of allocating health resources – it’s about maximising the utility of the healthcare system as a whole. However, like most utilitarian approaches, what works best overall doesn’t work best in individual cases. And that’s where criticisms of QALY arise.
Let’s say two patients come in with the same condition – COVID-19. One of them is young, non-disabled and has no other health conditions affecting their quality of life. The other person is elderly, has a range of other health conditions and is in the early stages of dementia. Both patients have the same condition. However, according to the QALY approach, they are not necessarily entitled to the same level of care – for example, a ventilator if resources are scarce. The cost per QALY for the younger patient is far lower than for the elderly patient.
For this reason, QALY’s are sometimes seen as inherently unjust. They fail to provide all people with equal access to healthcare treatment. Moreover, as philosopher and medical doctor Bryan Mukandi argues, if two patients with the same condition are expected to have different health outcomes, there’s a chance that’s the result of historical injustices. Say, a person with type-2 diabetes receives a lower QALY score as a result, but type-2 diabetes is correlated with lower income, the scoring system might serve to entrench existing advantage and disadvantage.
Like any algorithmic approach to decision-making, QALYs present as neutral, mathematic and scientific. That’s why it’s important to remember, as Cathy O’Neil says in Weapons of Math Destruction, that algorithms are “opinions written in code.”
Embedded within QALY’s method are a range of assumption about what ‘full health’ is and what it is not. For instance, a variation on the QALY methodology call DALY – disability-adjusted life years – “explicitly presupposes that the lives of disabled people have less value than those of people without disabilities.”
An alternative to the QALY approach is to adopt what is known simply as a ‘needs-based’ approach. It’s sometimes described as a ‘first come, first served’ approach. It prioritises the ideal of healthcare justice above health efficiency – everyone deserves equal access to healthcare, so if you need treatment, you get treatment.
This means, to go back to our elderly and young patients with COVID-19, that whoever arrives at the hospital first and has a clinical need of a ventilator will get one. QALY advocates will argue that in times of scarcity, this is an inefficient approach that may border on immoral. After all, shouldn’t the younger person be given the same chance at life as the elderly person?
However, there is something radical underneath the needs-based approach. QALY’s starting point is that there are limited health resources, and therefore some people will have to miss out. A needs-based approach allows us to do something more radical: to demand that our healthcare is equipped, as much as possible, to respond to the demand. Rather than doing the best with what we have, we make sure we have what is necessary to do the best job.
You can contact The Ethics Centre about any of the issues discussed in this article. We offer free counselling for individuals via Ethi-call; professional fee-for-service consulting, leadership and development services; and as a non-profit charity we rely heavily on donations to continue our work, which can be made via our website. Thank you.
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BY Matthew Beard
Matt is a moral philosopher with a background in applied and military ethics. In 2016, Matt won the Australasian Association of Philosophy prize for media engagement. Formerly a fellow at The Ethics Centre, Matt is currently host on ABC’s Short & Curly podcast and the Vincent Fairfax Fellowship Program Director.
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 value of a human life
One of the most enduring points of tension during the COVID-19 pandemic has concerned whether the national ‘lockdown’ has done more harm than good.
This issue was squarely on the agenda during a recent edition of ABC TV’s Q+A. The most significant point of contention arose out of comments made by UNSW economist, Associate Professor Gigi Foster. Much of the public response was critical of Dr. Foster’s position – in part because people mistakenly concluded she was arguing that ‘economics’ should trump ‘compassion’.
That is not what Gigi Foster was arguing. Instead, she was trying to draw attention to the fact that the ‘lockdown’ was at risk of causing as much harm to people (including being a threat to their lives) as was the disease, COVID-19, itself.
In making her case, Dr. Foster invoked the idea of Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs). As she pointed out, this concept has been employed by health economists for many decades – most often in trying to decide what is the most efficient and effective allocation of limited funds for healthcare. In essence, the perceived benefit of a QALY is that it allows options to be assessed on a comparable basis – as all human life is made measurable against a common scale.
In essence, the perceived benefit of a QALY is that it allows options to be assessed on a comparable basis – as all human life is made measurable against a common scale.
So, Gigi Foster was not lacking in compassion. Rather, I think she wanted to promote a debate based on the rational assessment of options based on calculation, rather than evaluation. In doing so, she drew attention to the costs (including significant mental health burdens) being borne by sections of the community who are less visible than the aged or infirm (those at highest risk of dying if infected by this coronavirus).
I would argue that there are two major problems with Gigi Foster’s argument. First, I think it is based on an understandable – but questionable – assumption that her way of thinking about such problems is either the only or the best approach. Second, I think that she has failed to spot a basic asymmetry in the two options she was wanting to weigh in the balance. I will outline both objections below.
In invoking the idea of QALYs, Foster’s argument begins with the proposition that, for the purpose of making policy decisions, human lives can be stripped of their individuality and instead, be defined in terms of standard units. In turn, this allows those units to be the objects of calculation. Although Gigi Foster did not explicitly say so, I am fairly certain that she starts from a position that ethical questions should be decided according to outcomes and that the best (most ethical) outcome is that which produces the greatest good (QALYs) for the greatest number.
Many people will agree with this approach – which is a limited example of the kind of Utilitarianism promoted by Bentham, the Mills, Peter Singer, etc. However, there will have been large sections of the Q+A audience who think this approach to be deeply unethical – on a number of levels. First, they would reject the idea that their aged or frail mother, father, etc. be treated as an expression of an undifferentiated unit of life. Second, they would have been unnerved by the idea that any human being should be reduced to a unit of calculation.
…they would have been unnerved by the idea that any human being should be reduced to a unit of calculation.
To do so, they might think, is to violate the ethical precept that every human being possesses an intrinsic dignity. Gigi Foster’s argument sits squarely in a tradition of thinking (calculative rationality) that stems from developments in philosophy in the late 16th and 17th Centuries. It is a form of thinking that is firmly attached to Enlightenment attempts to make sense of existence through the lens of reason – and which sought to end uncertainty through the understanding and control of all variables. It is this tendency that can be found echoing in terms like ‘human resources’.
Although few might express a concern about this in explicit terms, there is a growing rejection of the core idea – especially as its underlying logic is so closely linked to the development of machines (and other systems) that people fear will subordinate rather than serve humanity. This is an issue that Dr Matthew Beard and I have addressed in the broader arena of technological design in our publication, Ethical By Design: Principles for Good Technology.
The second problem with Dr. Foster’s position is that it failed to recognise a fundamental asymmetry between the risks, to life, posed by COVID-19 and the risks posed by the ‘lockdown’. In the case of the former: there is no cure, there is no vaccine, we do not even know if there is lasting immunity for those who survive infection.
We do not yet know why the disease kills more men than women, we do not know its rate of mutation – or its capacity to jump species, etc. In other words, there is only one way to preserve life and to prevent the health system from being overwhelmed by cases of infection leading to otherwise avoidable deaths – and that is to ‘lockdown’.
…there is only one way to preserve life and to prevent the health system from being overwhelmed by cases of infection leading to otherwise avoidable deaths – and that is to ‘lockdown’.
On the other hand, we have available to us a significant number of options for preventing or minimising the harms caused by the lockdown. For example, in advance of implementing the ‘lockdown’, governments could have anticipated the increased risks to mental health leading to a massive investment in its prevention and treatment.
Governments have the policy tools to ensure that there is intergenerational equity and that the burdens of the ‘lockdown’ do not fall disproportionately on the young while the benefits were enjoyed disproportionately by the elderly.
Governments could have ensured that every person in Australia received basic income support – if only in recognition of the fact that every person in Australia has had to play a role in bringing the disease under control. Is it just that all should bear the burden and only some receive relief – even when their needs are as great as others?
Whether or not governments will take up the options that address these issues is, of course, a different question. The point here is that the options are available – in a way that other options for controlling COVID-19 are not. That is the fundamental asymmetry mentioned above.
I think that Gigi Foster was correct to draw attention to the potential harm to life, etc. caused by the ‘lockdown’. However, she was mistaken not to explore the many options that could be taken up to prevent the harm she and many others foresee. Instead, she went straight to her argument about QALYs and allowed the impression to form that the old and the frail might be ‘sacrificed’ for the greater good.
You can contact The Ethics Centre about any of the issues discussed in this article. We offer free counselling for individuals via Ethi-call; professional fee-for-service consulting, leadership and development services; and as a non-profit charity we rely heavily on donations to continue our work, which can be made via our website. Thank you.
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BY Simon Longstaff
After studying law in Sydney and teaching in Tasmania, Simon pursued postgraduate studies in philosophy as a Member of Magdalene College, Cambridge. In 1991, Simon commenced his work as the first Executive Director of The Ethics Centre. In 2013, he was made an officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for “distinguished service to the community through the promotion of ethical standards in governance and business, to improving corporate responsibility, and to philosophy.”
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.
Moral fatigue and decision-making
A senior executive starts making out-of-character decisions that reflect his personal fears. Teams are frozen in indecision as the ground continually shifts beneath them. Days become punctuated with emotional meltdowns from people you have always relied upon in a crisis.
At home, you might be disagreeing with loved ones about the right response to COVID -19. Is the situation as serious as officials claim? Or are people exaggerating the risks? What is the right amount of physical distancing? Why should the whole of a society bear the costs for the sake of the few? Is this even a fair way to frame the questions?
These are some of the signs that the prolonged impact of COVID-19 is causing moral fatigue in the people around you.
Moral fatigue can occur when the “right thing to do” is unclear. Who should bear the cost of protecting a business? What if personally caring for elderly parents risks exposing them to deadly infection? It can be exhausting to make decisions in this kind of ambiguity, day after day.
Michael Baur, Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at Fordham University and an Adjunct Professor at Fordham Law School, says moral fatigue comes from situations where attempts to do good also result in “destroying a good”.
“People have often referred to the idea of moral fatigue as compassion fatigue or moral distress,” he told me on a zoom call from the US. “What we have in the current context is a situation that makes it increasingly difficult to understand if I’m doing the right thing. It’s no longer possible to assume that the good that I’m doing is unambiguously good,” he says.
It could be dangerous to keep running a business, for instance, if it means employees are in danger. “There’s a real conflict there. And there are no rules.”
Why people panic
Usually, as people go about their normal lives many actions are performed on “autopilot”. Typing on a keyboard, for instance, is done out of habit; the decision of which keys to hit doesn’t exercise mental exertion; one’s finger ‘do the work’. Baur says a crisis such as COVID-19 “jumbles” the keys on the keyboard. It changes the rules and worse still, you don’t know what those new rules are as they can change, minute-by-minute.
“It’s really disorienting,” says Baur. “People go back to what they know is safe, and they become more infantile, more self-protective and defensive.”
This is the kind of response that decreases our capacity to make good decisions. It leads to the hoarding behaviours we have seen in supermarkets, anxiety about money and a focus on individual survival.
Slow down and be more forgiving
Thinking about ‘just getting beyond this’ assumes a future state where the problem no longer exists and everything is the same as before. It’s too simplistic to suggest we will all be ok – many of us won’t be, unless we adapt.
A common result of moral fatigue can be impatience. When we try to think through frameworks that no longer serve us well we can become increasingly impatient, the more we do so, the more mistakes we make – leading to even more frustration.
Baur likens our situation to building the raft at the same time that you are using it to survive. He says, it’s okay to make mistakes because we’re all trying to refashion this raft, even as we’re stepping on top of each other trying to stay afloat. Mistakes will be made.
“You’re not alone. Everybody feels the same way. We have to be more forgiving of others and I think individuals have to be more forgiving of themselves in the sense that it’s okay to be freaked out. Everybody is.”
You can contact The Ethics Centre about any of the issues discussed in this article. We offer free counselling for individuals via Ethi-call; professional fee-for-service consulting, leadership and development services; and as a non-profit charity we rely heavily on donations to continue our work, which can be made via our website. Thank you.
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BY Cris Parker
Cris Parker is Head of The Ethics Alliance and a Director of the Banking and Finance Oath.