Can Ethics Be Taught?

I ended the last blog with the $64,000 question: How can we form professionals to be truly moral and not just rule-followers and compliers?  It's easy to conclude - based on recent press and publications - that trying to make business leaders and other professionals more ethical is an exercise in futility.  In their book Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do About It Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel argue that most of us have a higher opinion of ourselves as moral agents than might be warranted.  In fact, their evidence shows that many people fail to recognize a situation as being morally problematic and therefore fail to respond in an ethical manner.  Furthermore,  a recent NPR piece, "Psychology of Fraud: Why Good People Do Bad Things" tells the story of a good person, Toby Graves, who ended up committing fraud after promising his father he would never be unethical in his business practices.  This suggests that even people who have their ethical radar up can still overlook their own unethical behavior.

So how should we who teach ethics respond to this?  Is teaching ethics an exercise in futility?  Is there no hope?

I do no accept that there is no hope.  Even if things aren't perfect it is essential to press on in our efforts to nurture moral sensibility in the young and even the not-so-young.  The question is how?  If the intellectual approach doesn't work, we have to try other approaches.  This is precisely where Padgett weighs in.  As we saw in the previous post, he focuses on the problem of self-fragmentation - that we are divided within ourselves by the various roles that we take on and the different demands these roles make upon us.  This problem of fragmentation is also noted in a recent document emerging from the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace "Vocation of the Business Leader" (more on that at another time). 

Padgett's antidote to the problem of self-fragmentation is to seek a unification of the self.  In the next blog I'll address how Padgett treats unification of the self - especially his appeal to Merton's understanding that the self can be unified and integrated only by being in union with others.

Barry Padgett and the Moral Professional

The thesis I've been working on in these blogs has been how contemplative prayer nurtures moral integrity.  I started by considering Augustine's understanding of how the lover is changed as she or he gazes upon the beloved.  Now I'd like to consider some of the ideas in Barry Padgett's Professional Morality and Guilty Bystanding: Merton's Conjectures and the Value of Work.  Padgett draws on Merton to critique standard understandings of professional morality as "compliance," showing how compliance can be inauthentic game playing rather than true morality.  He uses Merton's categories of the false self and the true self to talk about the need for professionals to move through contemplation from the one to the other to be authentically moral.

Padgett sees the primary problem of professional morality (or lack thereof) as the conflict between our sense of personal morality and the demands made upon us by our professions.  This results in what he calls "a fragmentation of self."  On the one hand, we know intuitively what is right because we learned it at a very early age.  On the other hand, there may be duties we have as professionals that ask us to do things that - if we reflected for a moment - we would recognize as morally questionable if not outright wrong.  The antidote to this fragmentation is to find a unity of self in union with others.  Simple enough - but how to do this?  I'll look at unity of self in union with others in the next post.