Ethics are about the power to choose what’s right

Maj Gen RN Tikku (Retd)
Educationist

Ethics are a moral philosophy of life and how to live it right. Good-evil, right-wrong, virtue-vice, justice and injustice are some ethical concepts that always land you at the crossroads. The road to hell is paved with gold! And you have the power to choose. When you give teenagers the space to explore ethical dilemmas, this can be very powerful for the students.

The little choices that you make in your daily life are probably quite different than ethical decisions that entail analysing options and choosing the best ethical alternative. But that begs the question — what are ethics? And if you also bring in values and morality, the discussion really takes off!

The short answer is, ‘Values motivate, morals and ethics constrain’. In other words, values describe what is important in a person’s life, while ethics and morals prescribe what is considered appropriate behaviour in living one’s life. Morals are codes of conduct, while ethics dictate what humans ‘ought to do’. When individuals have values, such as integrity and honesty, but work in organisations emphasising a value of ruthless profitability, they may experience significant personal conflict or an ethical dilemma between two possible moral imperatives, where obeying one would result in transgressing another. For instance, a defence attorney’s personal morals may say that murder is reprehensible and the offender should be punished, but professional ethics requires him to defend his client to the best of his abilities, even if the client is guilty.

There are some very competent chief executive officers, who play a double role. On the one hand, they display ethically questionable behaviour for personal gain, and on the other, the emerging virtuous leader who advocates looking beyond profit maximisation to serve the greater good through sustainability and responsible business practices. This does not exonerate them from wilful unethical conduct, which brings a bad name to the company.

Today, companies cannot afford negative publicity. Once the media gets hold of the story, your customers will avoid you like the plague! In such situations, the board and promoters should set the tone and be intolerant of any deviation that will harm the image and culture of the organisation. In the final analysis, until individual leaders discover an authentic virtuous core, they will for-ever be vulnerable to the slings and arrows of corruption and unethical conduct that have toppled many of our most prominent executives.

Ethical leadership is being aware of your core values and possessing the courage to live them throughout your life in service of the common good, and not to compromise or rationalise under pressure. Lack of ethical leadership in Enron caused harm to thousands of employees, invoked greater government regulations, and crippled consumer confidence in the financial industry. If we do not find a way to instill ethics in people, we will keep following in the footsteps of Lehman Brothers, Satyam and Enron.

Bhagavad Gita, the most revered Indian scripture worldwide, enjoys popular esteem for its practical ethical purport. As enunciated in the Gita, the Pandavas and Kauravas from the same dynasty are pitched against each other in the battlefield of Kurukshetra. Arjuna, the Pandava warrior prince, expresses his inability to kill his own kith and kin on the opposing side. An ethical dilemma between righteousness (dharma) and lawful duty (kartavya) — two moral imperatives — ensues. Lord Krishna, his charioteer, intervenes and raises Arjuna’s level of awareness, and explains to him that his moral duty to fight the battle in the larger interest of the state takes precedence. The transformed Arjuna opts for higher morality and charges into action. In contrast, Bhishma, the head and most respected figure of the dynasty, always hid behind the veil of an oath to serve and protect Hastinapur’s throne, even when it was his moral duty to stop the course of events that threatened the good of the community.

Sadly, he was a silent witness to the barbarous disrobing of Draupadi in the dice hall of Hastinapur; and yet again, due to his misplaced loyalty to the throne, he took up arms against the Pandavas, who had a righteous and just cause. Bhishma failed to rise from the conventional morality of the egotistic kind to higher morality. The world suffers not because some people do wrong, but because people who are capable of doing good do nothing.

How do we socialise the students to an ethical culture and an environment of academic integrity? The approach to education, besides the ‘job seeking’ economic dimension, must address the ‘life fulfilling’ aspects of a student’s journey toward responsible selfhood.

Ethics cannot be circumscribed to an ethics course, but should form part of a conversation in every single course in schools and colleges. All educators must be trained to impart education in ethics. Whether it is a prescribed novel in the syllabus or history classes, the students should be given an opportunity to discuss the character of the characters, the ethical and moral dimensions of their choices and dilemmas, and what the students would have done in their shoes.

In science and research, they should explore the ethical issues of genetic testing or the use of animals in research. When teachers bring to the fore the character dimension of the curriculum, they enhance the relevance of the subject matter to students’ natural interests and in the process, increase students’ engagement and achievement. Ample evidence suggests that lack of academic integrity during school and college is directly linked to unethical behaviour in the post-academic workplace.

Great people do not fall for great reasons; they usually fall for small reasons. Integrity is a rather small but indispensable attribute that a professional should always have, a choice of what is right over what is convenient.