Enwhitenment: utes, philosophy and the preconditions of civil society
The wing of the philosophy department that I occupied during my PhD studies is known as ‘Continental’ philosophy. You see, in Australia, in all but the most progressive institutions, colonial chauvinism so prevails that philosophy is by definition, Western.
A domestic dispute, however, means that most aspiring academic philosophers must choose between the Anglo-American tradition, or the Continental European one. I chose the latter because of what struck me as the suffocating rigidity of the former. Yet while Continental philosophy is slightly more forgiving, it generally demands that one pick a master and devote oneself to the study of the works of this (almost always dead, white, and usually male) person.
I chose for my master a white man of questionable whiteness. Born and raised on African soil, Jacques Derrida was someone who caused discomfort as a thinker in part because of his illegitimate origins. In response, Derrida worked so hard to be accepted that one of the emerging masters of the discipline wrote an approving book about him titled The Purest of Bastards. I, not wanting to undergo this baptism in bleach, ran away into the custody of a Black man, Frantz Fanon.
Born in Martinique, even further in the peripheries of empire than Derrida; a qualified medical practitioner and specialist psychiatrist rather than armchair thinker; and worst of all, someone who cast his lot with anti-colonial fighters – Fanon remains a most impure bastard. My move towards him was therefore a moment of the exercise of what Paul Beatty calls ‘Unmitigated Blackness’ – the refusal to ape and parrot white people despite the knowledge that such refusal, from the point of view of those invested in whiteness, ‘is a seeming unwillingness to succeed’.
It’s not that I didn’t want to succeed. Rather, I found Fanon’s words compelling. The Black, he laments, ought not be faced with the dilemma: ‘whiten yourself or disappear’. I didn’t want to have to put on whiteface each morning. I didn’t want to have to translate myself or my knowledge for the benefit of white comprehension, because that work of translation often disfigures both the work and the translator.
I couldn’t stomach the conflation of white cultural norms with professionalism; the false belief that familiarity with (white) canonical texts amounts to learning, or worse, intelligence; or the assessment of my worth on the basis of my learnt domesticity.
The mistake I made, though, was to assume that moving to the Faculty of Medicine would exempt me from the demand to whiten.
Do you know that sticker, the one you’ll sometimes see on the back of a ute, and often a ute bearing a faux-scrotum at the bottom of the tow bar: “Australia! Love It or Leave It!”? I don’t think that’s a bad summation of the dominant political philosophy in this country. It comes close. Were I to correct the authors of that sticker, I would suggest: “Australia: whiten, or disappear!” This, I think, is the overarching ethos of the country, emanating as much from faux-scrotum laden utes, to philosophy departments, medical institutions, and I suspect board rooms and even the halls of parliament.
What else does, for example, Closing the Gap mean? Doesn’t it boil down to ‘whiten or disappear’, with both reduction to sameness and annihilation constituting paths to statistical equivalence?
I marvel at the ways in which Indigenous organisations manoeuvre the policy, but I suppose First Nations peoples have been manoeuvring genocidal impulses cast in terms of beneficence – ‘bringing Christian enlightenment’, ‘comforting a dying race’, ‘absorption into the only viable community’ – since 1788.
Furthermore, speak privately to Australians from black and brown migrant backgrounds, and ask how many really think the White Australia Policy is a thing of the past. Or just read Helen Ngo’s article on Footscray Primary School’s decision to abolish its Vietnamese bilingual program in favour of an Italian one. As generous as she is, it’s difficult to read the school’s position as anything but the idea that Vietnamese is fine for those with Vietnamese heritage; but at a broader level, for the sake of academic outcomes, linguistic development and cultural enrichment, Italian is the self-evidently superior language.
The difference between the two? One is Asian, while the other is European, where Europe designates a repository into which the desire for superiority is poured, and from which assurance of such is drawn. Alexis Wright says it all far better than I can in The Swan Book.
There sadly prevails in this country the brutal conflation of the acceptance of others into whiteness; with tolerance, openness or even justice.
The Italian-speaking Vietnamese child supposedly attests to ‘our’ inclusivity. Similarly, so long as the visible Muslim woman isn’t (too) veiled, refrains from speaking anything but English in public, and is unflinching throughout the enactment of all things haram (forbidden) – provided that her performance of Islam remains within the bounds of whiteness, she is welcome.
This is why so many the medical students whom I now teach claim to be motivated by the hope of tending to Indigenous, ethnically diverse, differently-abled and poor people. Yet only a small fraction of those same students are genuinely willing to learn how to approach those patients on those patients’ terms, rather than those of a medical establishment steeped in whiteness. To them, the idea of the ‘radical reconfiguration of power’ that Chelsea Bond and David Singh have put forward – that there are life affirming approaches, terms of engagement, even ways of being beyond those conceivable from the horizon of whiteness – is anathema.
Here, we come to the crux of the matter: a radical reconfiguration is called for. Please allow me to be pedantic for a moment. In her Raw Law, Tanganekald and Meintangk Law Professor, Irene Watson, writes about the ‘groundwork’ to be done in order to bring about a more just state of affairs. This is unlike German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals, by my reading a demonstration of the boundlessness of white presumption and white power, disguised as the exercise of reason. Instead, like African philosopher Omedi Ochieng’s Groundwork for the Practice of a Good Life, but also unlike that text, Watson’s is a call to the labour of excavation, overturning, loosening.
As explained in Asian-Australian philosopher Helen Ngo’s The Habits of Racism, a necessary precondition and outcome of this groundwork – particularly among us settlers, long-standing and more recent, who would upturn others’ lands – is the ongoing labour of ethical, relational reorientation.
Only then, when investment in and satisfaction with whiteness are undermined, can all of us sit together honestly, and begin to work out terms.
This project is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
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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).
Ethics Explainer: Consent
In many areas of life, being able to say “yes”, to give consent, and mean it, is crucial to having good relationships.
Business relationships depend on it: we need to be able to give each other permission to make contracts or financial decisions and know that the other person means it when they do.
It’s crucial to our relationships with experts who we rely on for critical services, like doctors, or the people who manage our money for us: we need to be able to tell them our priorities and authorise the plans they devise in light of those priorities. And romantic relationships would be nothing if we couldn’t say “yes” to intimacy, sexuality, and the obligations we take on when we form a unit with another person.
Giving permissions with a “yes” is one of our most powerful tools in relationships.
Part of that power is because a “yes” changes the ethical score in a relationship. In all the examples we’ve just seen, the fact that we said “yes” makes it permissible for another person to do something to or with us – when without our “yes”, it would be seriously morally wrong for them to do that very same thing. This difference is the difference of consent.
Defining Consent
Without consent, taking someone’s money is theft: with consent, it’s an investment or a gift. Without consent, entering someone’s home is trespass. With consent, it’s hospitality. Without consent, performing a medical procedure on someone is a ghoulish type of battery. With it, it’s welcome assistance.
The same action looks very morally different depending on whether we have said “yes”. This has led some moral philosophers to remark that consent is a kind of “moral magic”.
Interestingly, there are times when this moral magic can be cast even when a person has not said “yes”. In the political arena, for instance, many philosophers think it doesn’t take very much for you to have consented to be governed. Simply by using roads, or not leaving the territory your government controls, you can be said to have consented to living under that government’s laws.
The bar for what counts as consent is set a lot higher in other areas, like sexual contact or medical intervention. These are cases when even saying “yes” out loud might not be enough to cast the “moral magic” of consent: we can say “yes”, but still not have made it okay for the other person to do what they were thinking of doing.
For instance, if a person says “yes” to sex or to get a tattoo because they are drunk, at gunpoint, ill-informed, mistaken, or simply underage, most ethicists agree it would be wrong for a person to do whatever they have said “yes” too. It would be wrong to give them the tattoo or try to have sex with them, because even though they’ve said “yes”, they haven’t really given consent.
This leads philosophers to a puzzle. If saying “yes” alone isn’t enough for the moral magic of consent, what is?
Do we need the person to have a certain mental state when they say “yes”? If so, is it the mental state, the combination, or just the “yes” that really matters? This is a long and wide-ranging debate in philosophical ethics with no clear answer.
Free and Informed
Recently ethicist Renee Bolinger has argued that the real question is not what consent is, but how best to avoid the “moral risk” of doing wrong. She argues that in this light, we can see that what matters is not what consent is, but what our rules around consent should be, and those rules should consider consent a ‘performance’, or an action, such as speaking or signing something.
Some policy efforts have tried to come up with “rules about consent” that codify when and why a “yes” works its moral magic. There is the standard of “free and informed” consent in medicine, or “fair offers” in contracts law. Ethicists, however, worry that these restrictions are under-described, and simply push the important questions further down the line. For instance, what counts as being informed? What information must a person have, for their “yes” to count as permission?
We might think that knowing about the risks is important. Perhaps a person needs to know the statistical likelihood of bad outcomes. However, physicians know that people tend to over-prioritise relatively small risks, and in emotional moments can be dissuaded from a good treatment plan by hearing of “a three in a million” risk of disaster. So would knowledge of risk be sufficient for informed consent, or do we need to actually know the probability?
There is a final important question for our thinking about consent. Whatever consent is, are there actions you cannot consent to?
A famous court case called R v Brown established in 1993 that some levels of bodily harm are too great for a person to consent to, whether or not they would like to experience that harm. In any area of consent – medicine, financial, sexual, political – this is an important and open question.
Should people be able to use their powers of consent to do harm to themselves? The answer may depend on what we mean by harm.
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BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
We live in an opinion economy, and it’s exhausting
This is the moment when I’m finally going to get my Advanced Level Irony Badge. I’m going to write an opinion piece on why we shouldn’t have so many opinions.
I’ve spent the majority of this week digesting the findings from the IDGAF Afghanistan Inquiry Report. I’m still making sense of the scope and scale of what was done, the depth of the harm inflicted on the Afghan victims and their community at large and how Australian warfighters were able to commit and permit crimes of this nature to occur.
My academic expertise is in military ethics, so I’ve got an unfair advantage when it comes to getting a handle on this issue quickly, but still, I was late to the opinion party. Within an hour or so of the report’s publication, opinions abounded on social media about what had happened, why and who was to blame. This, despite the report being over five hundred pages long.
We spend a lot of time today fearing misinformation. We usually think about the kind that’s deliberate – ‘fake news’ – but the virality of opinions, often underinformed, is also damaging and unhelpful. It makes us confuse speed and certainty with clarity and understanding. And in complex cases, it isn’t helpful.
More than this, the proliferation of opinions creates pressure for us to do the same. When everyone else has a strong view on what’s happened, what does it say about us that we don’t?
We live in a time when it’s not enough to know what is happening in the world, we need to have a view on whether that thing is good or bad – and if we can’t have both, we’ll choose opinion over knowledge most times.
It’s bad for us. It makes us miserable and morally immature. It creates a culture in which we’re not encouraged to hold opinions for their value as ways of explaining the world. Instead, their job is to be exchanged – a way of identifying us as a particular kind of person: a thinker.
If you’re someone who spends a lot of time reading media, you’ve probably done this – and seen other people do this. In conversations about an issue of the day, people exchange views on the subject – but most of them aren’t their views. They are the views of someone else.
Some columnist, a Twitter account they follow, what they heard on Waleed Aly’s latest monologue on The Project. And they then trade these views like grown-up Pokémon cards, fighting battles they have no stake in, whose outcome doesn’t matter to them.
This is one of many things the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard had in mind when he wrote about the problems with the mass media almost two centuries ago. Kierkegaard, borrowing the phrase “renters of opinion” from fellow philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, wrote that journalism:
“makes people doubly ridiculous. First, by making them believe it is necessary to have an opinion – and this is perhaps the most ridiculous aspect of the matter: one of those unhappy, inoffensive citizens who could have such an easy life, and then the journalist makes him believe it is necessary to have an opinion. And then to rent them an opinion which, despite its inconsistent quality, is nevertheless put on and carried around as an article of necessity.”
What Kierkegaard spotted then is just as true today – the mass media wants us to have opinions. It wants us to be emotional, outraged, moved by what happens. Moreover, the uneasy relationship between social media platforms and media companies makes this worse.
Social media platforms also want us to have strong opinions. They want us to keep sharing content, returning to their site, following moment-by-moment for updates.
Part of the problem, of course, is that so many of these opinions are just bad. For every straight-to-camera monologue, must-read op-ed or ground-breaking 7:30 report, there is a myriad of stuff that doesn’t add anything to our understanding. Not only that, it gets in the way. It exhausts us, overwhelms us and obstructs real understanding, which takes time, information and (usually) expert analysis.
Again, Kierkegaard sees this problem unrolling in his own time. “Everyone today can write a fairly decent article about all and everything; but no one can or will bear the strenuous work of following through a single solitary thought into the most tenuous logical ramifications.”
We just don’t have the patience today to sit with an issue for long enough to resolve it. Before we’ve gotten a proper answer to one issue, the media, the public and everyone else chasing eyes, ears, hearts and minds has moved on to whatever’s next on the List of Things to Care About.
So, if you’re reading the news today and wondering what you should make of it, I release you. You don’t have to have the answers. You can be an excellent citizen and person without needing something interesting to say about everything.
If you find yourself in a conversation with your colleagues, mates or even your kids, you don’t need to have the answers. Sometimes, a good question will do more to help you both work out what you do and don’t know.
This is not an argument to stop caring about the world around us. Instead, it’s an argument to suggest that we need to rethink the way we’ve connected caring about something with having an opinion about something.
Caring about a person, or a community means entering into a relationship with them that enables them to flourish. When we look at the way our fast-paced media engages with people – reducing a woman, daughter, friend and victim of a crime to her profession, for instance – it’s not obvious this is making us care. It’s selling us a watered-down version of care that frees us of the responsibility to do anything other than feel.
Of course, this is possible. Journalistic interventions, powerful opinion-driven content and social media movements can – and have – made meaningful change in society. They have made people care.
I wonder if those moments are striking precisely because they are infrequent. By making opinions part of our social and economic capital, we’ve increased the frequency with which we’re told to have them, but alongside everything else, it might have diluted their power to do anything significant.
This article was first published on 21 August, 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.
There’s something Australia can do to add $45b to the economy. It involves ethics.
Australia faces a perfect storm. An economic deficit, a global pandemic, an uncertain future of work, and long-term social and environmental change around the climate crisis and reconciliation with Indigenous Australians to name but a few.
Adding to this magnitude of challenges are the low levels of trust Australians have in our leaders and our neighbours. In fact, research has found that only 54% of Australians generally trust people they interact with, and as a nation we score ‘somewhat ethical’ on the Governance Institute’s Ethics Index.
How do we navigate the road ahead? One thing is abundantly clear: we need better ethics. That’s why we commissioned Deloitte Access Economics to find out the economic benefits of improving ethics in Australia.
The outcome is The Ethical Advantage, a report that uses three new types of economic modelling and a review of extensive data sets and research sources to mount the case for pursuing higher levels of ethical behaviour across society.
For the first time, the report quantifies the benefits of ethics for individuals and for the nation. The ethical advantage is in, and the findings are compelling. They include:
A stronger economy: If Australia was to improve ethical behaviour, leading to an increase in trust, – average annual incomes would increase by approximately $1,800. This in turn would equate to a net increase in total incomes of approximately $45 billion.
More money in Australians pockets: Improved ethics leads to higher wages, consistent with an improvement in labour and business productivity. A 10% increase in ethical behaviour is associated with up to a 6.6% in individual wages.
Better returns for Australian businesses: Unethical behaviour leads to poorer financial outcomes for business. Increasing a firm’s performance based on ethical perceptions, can increase return on assets by approximately 7%.
Increased human flourishing: People would benefit from improved mental and physical health. There is evidence that a 10% improvement in awareness of others’ ethical behaviour is associated with a greater understanding one’s own mental health.
The report’s lead author and Deloitte Access Economics partner, Mr John O’Mahony, said:
“No one would seriously argue that pursuing higher levels of ethical behaviour and focus was a bad thing, but articulating the benefits of stronger ethics is more challenging.”
“Our report examines the case for improving ethics as a way of addressing these broader economic and social challenges – and the nature and extent of the benefits that would accrue to the nation if we got this right.”
The report also identifies five inter–linked areas for improvement for Australia and its approach to ethics, supported by 30 individual initiatives:
- Developing an Ethical Infrastructure Index
- Elevating public discussions about ethics
- Strengthening ethics in education
- Embedding ethics within institutions
- Supporting ethics in government and the regulatory framework
The findings and recommendations demonstrate the value of The Ethics Centre’s continued contribution to Australian life. For thirty years, The Ethics Centre has aimed to elevate ethics within public debate, organisations, education programs and public policy. Executive Director of The Ethics Centre, Dr Simon Longstaff said the findings validate the impact of those activities and reveals the potential that can be unlocked with greater support.
“The compelling moral argument that ethical behaviour binds a society and its institutions in a common good is now, thanks to Deloitte Access Economics’ research and modelling, also a compelling economic argument. Best of all, we need not be perfect – just better.”
A copy of The Ethical Advantage can be found at this link.
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BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Our economy needs Australians to trust more. How should we do it?
Imagine for a moment that your neighbour is a sweet, polite elderly man.
His partner has died and he lives alone. He has no family to speak of, and one day, his lifelong habit of purchasing lottery tickets pays off. He wins $50 million.
Suddenly, your brain starts ticking over. Statistically speaking, your neighbour doesn’t have too many years left. And when he dies, he’s likely to leave behind an enormous inheritance. What if you were the person he trusted to bequeath some of his wealth to? What would you do to earn his trust with so much on the line? Would you lie? Manipulate?
It’s important for us to ponder this, because new research from The Ethics Centre suggests Australia finds itself in a similar situation. According to figures produced by Deloitte Access Economics, if Australia was able to elevate its national trust score from 54% – its current level – to 65%, it would unlock $45 billion in GDP.
With so much on the line, it would be understandable to see political leaders and businesses looking for the fastest, most effective way to build trust. We assume more trust is better than less trust. However, that’s an assumption we need to be cautious of. “I have an issue with the connection of trust with growth,’ says Rachel Botsman, Trust Fellow at Oxford University’s Said Business School and author of Who Can You Trust?
“Trust,” Botsman explains, “is not always the goal. It’s intelligently placed trust.”
Consider this from the perspective of the elderly man in our imaginary story. For him, growing more trusting of his neighbour is only a good thing if his neighbour deserves to be trusted. If he trusts a dishonest neighbour who just wants his inheritance, that growth in trust isn’t something to celebrate. In fact, this increased trust is dangerous to him.
When we take the thought experience and apply it to Australia’s economy, the point still stands. As individuals, we don’t want to be more trusting of governments, organisations or markets unless they deserve our trust. Even if higher trust levels are good for GDP, it’s only good for us if it’s earned in the right way – ethically.
“Trust is the social glue of society,” says Botsman. “To manipulate that – because it can so easily be manipulated and tracked in terms of growth – feels wrong.”
Botsman has spent years speaking to businesses and governments about trust and encouraging them to value it. Today, she’s worried lots of her audience have missed her message.
She says, “I start this conversation about trust in organisations, and then a year later it’s become a commercial strategy. They’re trying to assess the return on investment, and, it’s like ‘no, that’s not that’s not I meant! When I meant ‘value’ I didn’t mean economic growth.”
Botsman worries about the effects of framing discussions around trust in the language of business and capitalism. Trustworthy decisions “might result in some kind of short-term financial loss, so it’s problematic that loss is caught up in the language of finance and money.”
Katherine Hawley, Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, and author of How to Be Trustworthy, defines trustworthy people as those who avoid unfulfilled commitments and broken promises. Basically, Hawley sees trustworthiness as the absence of untrustworthiness. Untrustworthy people make promises they can’t keep and fail to meet their obligations. If you don’t do these things, you’re probably a trustworthy person.
However, Hawley is quick to add that being trustworthy doesn’t necessarily guarantee that people will actually trust you. “There can be a significant gap between whether you are trustworthy and whether people can see you to be trustworthy,” she says.
Botsman agrees, “one of the hardest things to get your head around with trust is that even if you behave in a way that you think is the most trustworthy, you are still not in control of whether that person gives you their trust.”
This is one reason why Botsman has begun to advise organisations to stop thinking about building trust, and start thinking about acting with integrity, “because the language of intentions, motives, honesty and whether they best serve the interests of customers is much harder for companies to hide behind than questions of trust.”
A focus on integrity also helps prevent us from seeking trust in an undifferentiated way – not caring whether it’s intelligent trust or not. It shifts our focus away from what other people are thinking and toward our own activities.
“You would hope that people would want to be ethical, not just seem to be ethical,” says Hawley. However, in case that principle doesn’t persuade some people, Hawley offers a word of caution. She describes a phenomenon called ‘betrayal aversion’, “People get more angry in situations in which they first trusted and then found out that was a mistake than when they just didn’t trust in the first place.”
This idea, which comes from the work of behavioural economist Cass Sunstein, is a sober warning to those who see trust as a tool – something to be collected because it’s useful for growth, profit or advantage. “The risk for these businesses is that if people come to find out this was going on, or even find out that was their motive, then that could be worse for them.”
There is a strong moral argument – especially during a recession – for pursuing economic growth. For some, the importance of growth is likely to be enough to justify pursuing trust by any means possible. However, Hawley gives us a good reason to pause.
Chasing trust in the wrong way is something untrustworthy people do. And that makes the trust you accrue a bad investment – it’s fragile. The slower, more carefully accumulated relational trust might not offer the same returns in the short term, but it’s based on something more stable: ethics.
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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.
Businesses can’t afford not to be good
A famous New Yorker cartoon depicts a businessman sitting by a campfire, still in his suit, speaking to two young children.
“Yes, the planet got destroyed,” he concedes. “But for a beautiful moment in time we created value for shareholders.”
The logic seems perverse, but more the worrying reality is that in reality, it’s quite pervasive. We’ve seen Royal Commissions into aged care and financial services, growing pressure on tech companies to address social issues and the overwhelming pressure for businesses to address climate change. Despite this, we have seen very few organisations making meaningful investments into ethics.
We should worry that we’re living in the campfire CEO’s beautiful moment in time.
At The Ethics Centre, we’ve spent over thirty years getting into what makes organisations tick. How they’re motivated, what they care about and what goals they serve. Time and again, we’ve seen how the real desire to act with integrity, uphold customer interests and attend to vulnerable people is pitted against business imperatives.
No matter how many scandals we see, the message still seems to be the same: while you’re successful, you can be ethical. But if you’re not successful, you’ll need to park your ethics till you are.
This is the campfire CEO’s logic. By focussing on the (often illusory) short–term value captured that ethical shortcuts can at times promise, businesses lose out in the long run. And thanks to new research commissioned by The Ethics Centre, we now know exactly how much businesses are losing out on by giving away the Ethical Advantage. We also know how much courageous businesses gain by making ethics a priority.
Research by Deloitte Access Economics has revealed that businesses who are seen as ethical – fair in business, transparent and open – enjoy a higher returns on assets. They are also less likely to have staff experiencing mental health issues, because when we believe the people around us are ethical, we experience less mental health challenges.
What’s more, if we are able to improve the ethical standing of enough people and businesses, we’ll not only boost business returns, we’ll improve wages and GDP. Nice guys are the tortoises of the business world. They finish first in the long run.
Cris Parker, head of the Ethics Alliance, a community of businesses committed to a more ethical way of working, says “when organisations make a concerted effort to invest in ethics, they create an environment where good intentions are just the beginning.”
She believes it is when ethics shifts from being a leader’s obligation to being a shared responsibility that real change happens. “It’s the cumulation of every employee serving that purpose, doing the right thing that really makes the difference. “
Realising these benefits requires us to recognise the source of the campfire CEO’s error: economic narrow-mindedness. The willingness to destroy the planet in favour of business returns (which is, in fairness, a caricature of most of today’s business leaders) demonstrates a failure to recognise how dependent our economy is on the wellbeing of the planet.
Similarly, pursuing economic returns without considering the means by which they’re achieved ignores the crucial role that trust, integrity and character plays in preserving our economy.
We don’t trade with people we think are going to betray us. We don’t invest when we can’t trust others to be careful with our investments.
Michelle Bloom leads The Ethics Centre’s consulting and leadership team. She believes ethical improvement requires us to embrace complexity rather than looking for simple solutions.
“Today, business leaders are dealing with very complex operating environments where action and bottom–line results are rewarded over reflection, perspective seeking and co-ordination. This haste to decide without deliberation limits leaders to mechanistic solutions where systemic, novel and context–specific approaches are required.”
Unfortunately, realising these benefits is harder than it seems.
Much like an optical illusion you can only properly see by looking away from it, the economic benefits of ethics are only likely to be realised by those who seek it with integrity rather than a hunger for profit.
Hypocrites and cynics need not apply for the ethical advantage. But for the sincere and the patient, results will come in time. However, it will require businesses to campaigning not just for their industries to be better as a whole, but for the large-scale Ethical Infrastructure investments Australia needs to ensure we have trustworthy markets, institutions and systems.
For Michelle Bloom, alongside large-scale change, organisations need to get their own house in order. “Embedding an Ethics Framework into the organisational system and its processes is the first step,” she says. Next is developing your leaders’ systemic and ethical thinking to make good decisions in complexity as well as ensuring the culture of the organisation aligns to your Ethics Framework.”
Each of these steps, alongside developing the capacity for good decision-making and embedding ethics into the design of all products and services, are markers of the kind of integrity that grants the Ethical Advantage.
In our line of work, we often hear from so-called pragmatist who see ethics as a nice idea that doesn’t work in the real world. The numbers are in, and it turns out the most pragmatic thing to do is make ethics a top priority. Anything else would be bad business.
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BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
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.
Ethics Explainer: Ethical Infrastructure
When we think about the kinds of things a society needs for its survival and flourishing, we tend to begin with the basic necessities.
A society needs enough food to feed everyone, road and transport infrastructure, housing. It needs laws to manage how people treat one another, systems of government to make decisions. In a modern society, complex communications and other forms of technical infrastructure are required.
Each of these this is a component of a society’s infrastructure. Each is essential to the common good, survival and wellbeing of a society. However, just as essential for the wellbeing of a society is ethical infrastructure – the formal and informal means by which society regulates the use of power by both public and private institutions to ensure it serves the common good.
The term ethical infrastructure has been used in a number of countries around the world, including The United States of America. However, it has typically been used to refer to systems of control, compliance and risk management. There is an opportunity to expand the idea of ethical infrastructure so it does not simply refer to the basic rules of public service.
A society can have a clear set of rules and principles about appropriate spending, disclosure of interests and so on, and still not have systems and institutions that serve the common good. We need only look at the United States for proof of this.
This is why it is better to consider ethical infrastructure to be a collection of institutions, systems, norms and processes that we use to ensure not only that society is operating effectively, but that it is operating ethically.
To understand why this is necessary, consider the fact that there is a person or group who is responsible for, and in control of, each piece of social, physical or digital infrastructure we have and need. This control confers power. The power to give or deny essential resources to some groups, to favour some people over others or to mismanage those resources due to incompetence, laziness or selfishness.
Handing this kind of power over to somebody without some assurance they will use it well would be reckless and foolish. Indeed, some of the most influential voices in Western political philosophy – Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Rawls – have argued that it’s only when the powerful are willing to act in the interests of those they are meant to serve that they should have any power at all. Ethical infrastructure refers to the means by which a society can ensure power is exercised in the common interest, and take meaningful action when it is not.
A clear example of a piece of ethical infrastructure would be laws, policies and systems protecting the actions of whistleblowers, who draw attention to unethical behaviour – often by the powerful. Many organisations lack appropriate systems and processes for employees to flag ethical issues, and even if they have these processes, there are often cultural factors that mean those processes don’t have the results they should. This can drive some whistleblowers to look for other avenues outside their organisation, but often do not feel supported – practically or legally – in doing so.
Thinking about an issue like this as a challenge of ethical infrastructure helps us see it as a systemic issue. It is not simply a matter of new laws. We also need to normalise new ways of thinking about dissenting, concerned or outspoken staff within our organisations.
We need to ensure individuals have the training and support they need to identify and draw attention to ethical issues and we must have appropriate accountability in cases where it appears important information has been covered up or kept secret. This complex and powerful network of norms, policies, institutions, processes and people is a society’s ethical infrastructure.
Each aspect of a society’s infrastructure is designed to allow its citizens to flourish: provided with the means to live prosperously, confidently, safely and well. Ethical infrastructure serves this goal in two ways. First, it ensures the other aspects of our infrastructure are serving everyone’s needs, and second, it gives people the confidence to take risks, act creatively and magnanimously, trust in their neighbours, leaders and institutions and feel confident in theirs and their loved ones futures.
Because without this, no amount of sophisticated infrastructure will secure what we’re all searching for: a life worth living.
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BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
The Ethical Advantage
The ethical advantage: the economic and social benefits of ethics to Australia
We know what ethical failure costs – look at the billions of dollars paid by financial institutions in penalties and customer remediation since Hayne. But what are the economic benefits of ethical best practice? What can we gain economically by being more ethical as a nation?
Turning around the loss of trust in government, corporations and institutions could deliver Australians significant economic and social dividends. The Ethical Advantage’s exclusive new economic modelling by Deloitte Access Economics shows that if our leaders, businesses, institutions and everyday Australians made more ethical decisions, our GDP, wages, corporate returns and mental health would improve.
For the first time, the report quantifies the benefits of ethics for individuals and for the nation. An increase in ethical behaviour could raise Australians’ average income by $1,800 a year, lifting GDP by $45 billion. An increase in a company’s performance based on ethical perceptions can increase return on assets by about 7%. The modelling also reveals a host of individual and collective benefits for Australians across wages, trust and mental health.
The report also identifies five interlinked areas for improvement for Australia and its approach to ethics, supported by 30 individual initiatives. Download a copy to learn more.
ECONOMIC ADVANTAGE
$45,000,000,000
Lifting Australia's trust levels to that of global leaders would increase the GDP by $45 Billion
BUSINESS ADVANTAGE
7%
Improving a businesses ethical reputation can lead to a 7% increase in return on assets (ROA)
INDIVIDUAL ADVANTAGE
2.7%
A 10% increase in ethical behaviour is associated with a 2.7% increase in individual wages ($23 bil accumulative)
AUTHORS
Authors
John O'Mahony
John O’Mahony is a Partner at Deloitte Access Economics in Sydney and lead author of The Ethical Advantage report. John’s econometric research has been widely published and he has served as a Senior Economic Adviser for two Prime Ministers of Australia.
Ben?
John O’Mahony is a Partner at Deloitte Access Economics in Sydney and lead author of The Ethical Advantage report. John’s econometric research has been widely published and he has served as a Senior Economic Adviser for two Prime Ministers of Australia.
Download The Ethical Advantage Report
Berejiklian Conflict
The next phase in the political life of NSW Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, depends on answers to three questions.
First, was her former relationship with Daryl Maguire not just ‘close’ but, in fact, an “intimate personal relationship”? Second, did the Premier make or participate in any decisions that could reasonably be expected to confer a private benefit on Mr Maguire? Finally, if the answer is ‘yes’ to each of these questions, then did Ms Berejiklian declare her interest in the Ministerial Register of Interests and seek the permission of Cabinet to continue to act?
Nothing else matters – not the Premier’s choice of friends, not her judgement … only the answer to those three questions.
The reason for this can be found in the NSW Ministerial Code of Conduct (the Ministerial Code) which has the force of Law. As might be expected, the Ministerial Code imposes obligations that are in addition to and are more onerous than, those applying to Members of Parliament.
The Preamble to the Ministerial Code of Conduct says, amongst other things, that, “In particular, Ministers have a responsibility to avoid or otherwise manage appropriately conflicts of interest to ensure the maintenance of both the actuality and appearance of Ministerial integrity.” With that end in mind, the Code not only takes account of the personal interests of individual Ministers – but also those of members of their families. It is here that the precise nature of the Premier’s relationship with Mr Maguire risks becoming a matter of public, rather than personal, interest. This is because the Ministerial Code of Conduct defines a “family member”, in relation to a Minister, as including, “any other person with whom the Minister is in an intimate personal relationship”.
‘Intimate’ is not a word used in the ICAC hearing to describe the Premier’s relationship with Mr Maguire.
Instead, it was agreed that theirs had been a “close personal relationship” – the precise nature of which was never explained. However, the evidence suggested that the words ‘close’ and ‘intimate’ may have been synonymous. If so, then Mr Maguire will have fallen within the definition of ‘family member’ during the period of his relationship with the Premier.
However, this (in itself) is neither here nor there. The nature of Ms Berejiklian’s relationship with Mr Maguire was (and should have remained) an entirely private matter up until the point where the Premier became involved in any Ministerial decision that “could reasonably be expected to confer a private benefit” on Mr Maguire. Only then did the public interest become engaged.
So, did any such decisions come before the Premier (acting alone or in Cabinet) during the period of her relationship with Mr Maguire? And if so, did she declare her interest as she is required to do under the Ministerial Code? The matter would then have been in the hands of her Cabinet colleagues as the final provision of the Code states that, “a ruling in respect of the Premier may be given if approved by the Cabinet”.
The Premier obviously knew something of Mr Maguire’s hopes and plans – even if she thought them to be fanciful. She knew of his financial exposure and the material impact that NSW Government decisions might have on his personal wealth. We also know that, for a time, Mr Maguire was at the centre of the Premier’s private affections. The issue is not that the Premier would have acted against the public interest for the benefit of Mr Maguire. I sincerely doubt that she would ever do so. It is most importantly a question of what was done to ensure the maintenance of both the actuality and appearance of Ministerial integrity.
The Premier had a formal obligation to declare her relationship with Mr. Maguire if, a) it was intimate, b) she was involved in deciding any matter that could reasonably be expected to confer a private benefit on him. It was then up to her Cabinet colleagues to rule on how she should proceed from there. Beyond settling these questions, the public has no legitimate interest in the private life of Gladys Berejiklian – except, perhaps, to extend to her our sympathy if she has been drawn inadvertently into a web of grief spun by a former friend.
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