Turns out that a person riding a bicycle in China is only responsible for creating a twelve-inch bubble of safety around them. In the US, the bubble of trust is larger, because we expect the rider to make eye contact with others, signal their intentions, and navigate in a way that maximizes safety for riders, pedestrians, and drivers.
While many believe that safety standards are intuitive and universal, Veronique Greenwood discovered when she moved to China that safety standards are definitely cultural. Within a few months, she began adjusting from the communal safety standards of the US to the individual safety standards of China: clean your own air, check food supplies for purity, and ignore everyone and everything outside of your twelve-inch bubble when riding a bicycle.
As I go around the country speaking to students, faculty, and corporate leaders about ethics, a common refrain is that people should “just do the right thing.” But what Greenwood’s article clearly demonstrates is that “the right thing” is culturally determined. Shared understandings of who is responsible for safety must be continuously articulated and reinforced. Those shared understandings and congruent behaviors create trust.
During the past several months, the American community has had robust conversations about the social contract and expectations of trust. Can women and minorities expect to be free from harassment in the workplace? Can citizens expect that companies will not put toxic chemicals into the water? Who is responsible for research into product safety? What are the limits of political speech? What is our responsibility to work toward civil discourse? What should be the acceptable economic spread between those on the top of the economic ladder and those on the bottom?
The way that individuals, key stakeholders, organizations, and the various government bodies answer these questions over the next months will determine whether our bubble of trust expands, contracts, or implodes so we operate in a culture of no trust. Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue talks about the importance of conversation to establish expectations of trust. In addition, Karen Adkins in Gossip, Epistemology, and Power talks about how those without power have informal networks of information that also work to give people the information they need to determine the size of the trust bubble.
The shape and size of the trust bubble are determined by the ethical norms of people in the community and the legal and regulatory structure of the community. Legislation about harassment, food safety, pollution, and a myriad of other social behaviors let each of us know what behaviors can be expected. And, as shown by recent testimony about the responsibility of social media giants to monitor ads that impact elections, Congress can’t legislate an algorithm. We depend on industries and individuals having enough integrity to live into those expectations.
Our ethics are judged by how well we—individuals and organizations—adhere to the stated rules, how vigorously we monitor our behavior, and, in the absence of regulation, how we exercise our discretion as we build social capital, the currency of trust. The revelations of sexual misconduct in the entertainment industry demonstrate that everyone knew that men with power were behaving badly but the companies chose to ignore the behavior to bolster the bottom line. Women knew which power players were the predators and who were the accomplices, but individuals didn’t believe they had enough power to speak up and so depended on an informal network of gossip—that often excluded men—to warn others of the danger. And, those who were supposed to protect those being harassed, the human resources and legal departments, became allies with the harasser through silencing and confidentiality agreements, further reinforcing the culture that no one was taking the sexual harassment laws very seriously.
During the first ten months of his tenure, President Trump has signed forty-nine executive orders. Many of the orders loosen existing regulations, giving companies more leeway in issues ranging from obligations for clean water and air to requirements for equal pay. The question now is whether companies will live into their posted core values, which often hold them to higher standards than the law, or will follow the relaxed letter of the law.
The choice will determine the size of our shared bubble of trust. As Brené Brown states in Braving the Wilderness, “Standing alone in a hypercritical environment or standing together in the midst of difference requires one tool above all others: trust .” Will we have the courage to have those difficult conversations with each other, exploring and establishing shared expectations of trust? Will we be honest with each other about when we expect individuals to care for themselves or when the community will rally together for support?
Developing the skills to engage the conversation can happen in a classroom or seminar. But living into the commitments rather than vacillating based on what is politically and economically beneficial requires integrity and courage. Living into our shared ethical values is an individual choice: a choice made over and over again as we each choose whether to expand or contract the bubble of trust around us, our organization, or our community.