Moral Literacy - Rock Ethics Institute (original) (raw)

Does a situation involve ethics?

The first component of ethical sensitivity, the ability to “ethics spot,” is an often overlooked ability. We often assume that what constitutes an ethical issue will be obvious. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Some issues are so complex that it is difficult to determine whether or not they involve ethical issues.

As just one example, consider the case of individual contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. We know that the aggregated overall increases in greenhouse gases are resulting in anthropocentric climate change, which is already having harmful impacts on a number of regions and is expected to have exponentially larger negative impacts in the future if emissions continue at the present rates. However, the impact of the amount of greenhouse gases one individual emits, even if aggregated over her or his lifetime, has an imperceptibly small impact on climate change. Given this, does the fact that some of my actions result in greenhouse gas emissions constitute an ethical issue given how small an impact each of my actions will have on global warming? For example, is it an ethical issue to buy nonlocal foods or foods out of season? Is it an ethical issue to drive rather than to take public transportation to work? Is it an ethical issue to keep my home temperature at 70°F rather than 60°F?

Another reason that the ability to ethics spot is important is that what counts as an ethical issue will sometimes be unclear due to ethical insensitivity. Ethical insensitivity occurs when an individual’s, or community’s, ability to recognize that an action or situation involves an ethical issue has been hampered by other factors. This can happen when, for example, self-deception obscures the true nature of one’s action. An interesting discussion of self-deception is the subject of a Ted Talk on Honest Liars: The Psychology of Self Deception.

There are a variety of additional factors that result in ethical insensitivity. Consider three of these:

Community Shared Prejudices

Community shared prejudices can make it difficult to see that our actions have ethical significance. The classic case of community-shared prejudices is the history of slavery, where many people believed that it was morally acceptable to enslave a group of people because they believed that these individuals were not “fully human.” At certain historical periods there was little opposition to certain forms of slavery due to the prevalence of the view that there was nothing morally problematic about the practice. Being able to ethics spot in such a context is very difficult and can require the ability to question the very values and worldview in which one has been raised.

In a similar way, community shared prejudices occur in many contexts and can be difficult to identify, particularly for those who are raised in or trained to be a member of that community. Examples of current prejudices might be the following: counting monetary gains or losses in an economic cost/benefit analysis as a way to make decisions about vehicle safety in car manufacturing; the moral standing of nonhuman animals and the practice of farming animals; the assumption and insistence that there are two and only two sexes.

Moral Blind Spots

Moral blind spots result from a system of beliefs or habits that desensitize individuals to the ethical wrongness of actions. Here the problem is not simply the choices that individuals are making, but a conceptualization system in which only certain aspects of the situation are seen and others are systematically ignored. Moral blind spots have, for example, been identified by some theorists as explaining the high incidence of corporate scandals in the early 21st century in which neither the individuals, nor the business community in which they worked, grasped the ethical wrongness of the actions. Moral blind spots come from habituated ways of seeing and associations that block individuals and groups from seeing aspects of the situation that they would, if they were attentive to them, see as unethical.

Moral blind spots, while in some sense similar to community shared prejudices, are significantly different. Community shared prejudices result in people seeing an action as either not within the domain of ethics or as ethically justifiable: e. g., slavery is acceptable because some races are not fully human; women are naturally subservient to men because they are incapable of self-governance and thus must be controlled; farming and eating animals is not an ethical issue because animals have no moral standing. Moral blindness is, rather, a way of seeing the world that obscures one to the fact that an action that one would agree is unethical is occurring.

As just one example, there is reason to believe, for example, that the startlingly high rates of incest coupled with the low reportage rates, is, in at least some cases, due to moral blind spots caused by false interpretive frames, namely, that incest is a rare occurrence that only happens in severely dysfunctional families and that, were it happening, it would be easy for a non-molesting relative to know that it was. Moral blind spots can also result from something being too painful to acknowledge and, thus, we unconsciously suppress or turn away from it; again not an uncommon reaction with incest or other forms of child sexual abuse where there can be denial even in the face of evidence of the abuse (cf. Gladwell, 2012).

Philosopher, Kwame Anthony Appiah, in a Washington Post article entitled “What will future generations condemn us for?” discusses historical examples of moral blind spots to foreground the question of the essay. He discusses four arenas in which he predicts future generations will condemn us for, namely:

What do you think? Did he miss any moral blind spots?

Habituated Wrongdoing

In addition to the complexity of issues, self-deception, community shared prejudices, and moral blindness, habitual wrong-doing can blunt an individual’s ethical sensitivities. Repeated small thefts from one’s business setting, “little white lies” on one’s tax statements, “pirating” music by illegally down-loading it from the internet, can become so “normalized” that individuals stop seeing those actions as unethical.

Habituating a behavior can make the ethical significance of the behavior fade into the background. Downloading becomes so “normalized” that the same person, who would not hesitate to illegally download a song or an album from the Internet, would refuse to walk into a music store and take a CD by slipping it into their pocket or bag because they would see that as stealing. Similarly, a worker who would not even think about taking $100 out of the till might nonetheless take office supplies home from work for personal use without even seeing that doing so is unethical.

For a discussion of other phenomena such as the Normalcy Bias and the Bystander Effect see Let’s All Feel Superior.