From the Director

Dr. Daniel E. Wueste

Welcome to the latest issue of RIE’s Issues and Perspectives.  I invite you to explore and enjoy the articles and links below and I ask your indulgence, as I do something rather different in this space than I have done in the past.

Ethics is about acting rightly.  That’s the answer I got from a student recently when I asked, “What is ethics?”  It’s a pretty good answer.  There is more to say, of course, but with this answer as a prompt much of what needs to be said emerges easily in discussion.   While exploring the things that came up in discussion with this student and her classmates is worthwhile, what I propose to do instead is share some thoughts prompted by her answer to my question.

Recently the Egyptian people sent a message to their president, Hosni Mubarak, and the world.  Things have to change, they said, and the critical move in the direction of change was for Mubarak to leave office.  To be sure, what was happening in Egypt was political, but it had an ethical dimension as well.  It was, after all, about acting rightly: it was, for example, about Mubarak’s failures to act rightly, which, in addition to the sorry state of economic affairs in Egypt, were a major reason that people were in the street; it was about acting rightly in response to the protests, which, it appears, Mubarak took to be a matter of choosing effective means to the end of staying in power rather than, as a leader, being committed to doing no harm to those one leads and acting responsibly; it was about the responsibilities of allies—to whom is support owed in such a situation and what form should it take?—if, as seems clear, the primary stakeholders were the Egyptian people rather than the leaders with whom a nation’s business had been conducted. 

Now, it might be thought that while the situation in Egypt raised questions about what ought to be done (i.e., acting rightly), this is so only in a political or strategic sense, much as it might be said that a hard decision made by a business leader is simply a business decision.  The idea here seems to be that decisions/actions can be right (or wrong, I suppose) solely in a political or business sense; as if, contrary to fact, the ethical dimension of the situation in which the decision is made (e.g., the impact on human well being) does not exist or may simply be ignored.  Trouble is, the impact on human well-being remains and it brings with it questions of responsibility. 

Thinking about this idea, that a decision/action can be solely a political or business decision, I can’t help being reminded of former President Clinton’s (in)famous line, in testimony to a grand jury:  "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is.”  He said this in explaining how it could be that “he wasn't lying when he said to his top aides that with respect to Monica Lewinsky, "there's nothing going on between us." (<< http://www.slate.com/id/1000162/ >>).  You see, when the question was asked and answered—at that particular time—there was nothing going on between them, though at another time, as we know, something had been going on between them.  Rhetorically Mr. Clinton had found a way around the reality of the relationship, a way to push it and its unwelcome implications off to the side.  Saying that a decision is solely a political or business decision seems to do the same thing; it pushes off to the side the impacts of one’s decision on human well being with the aim of defusing their implications so far as responsibility is concerned. 

So, what does this have to do with the student’s answer to my question?  Well, I think that one of the salutary things about that answer, “Ethics is about acting rightly,” is that because it suggests that the scope of ethics is broad, it does not invite rhetorical evasions of responsibility.  It also directs attention to the complexities of ethical decision making, complexities that come with the territory, if it is understood that, however attractive it may be to think that our lives are compartmentalized, in fact they aren’t.

There’s more to be said about these matters, of course.  Perhaps you will accept my invitation to begin a conversation by sharing with me your thoughts about what I’ve said here.  I look forward to hearing from you.