During the 40 years I’ve been teaching ethics, we moved from a shareholder analysis (where the owners of the companies got all the attention) to a stakeholder analysis (where we focused on the various stakeholders that were impacted by our decisions). However, the stakeholder approach turns out to have a major flaw because we haven’t given our students the critical thinking skills or the ethical will to transcend the interests of the stakeholder groups to move to a holistic, systems approach to both ethical analysis and thoughtful, coordinated action.
Dr. Deb Bennett-Woods, a colleague from Regis University, made a presentation to my neighborhood group entitled “Health Care 101.” In that presentation, she asserted that none of the health care bills currently floating through Congress address the fundamental issue: all of us want Lexus coverage but we only want to pay the Ford Focus sticker price. Deb went on to say that for health care to be truly reformed every stakeholder will have to give something up. She proceeded to discuss a systems approach to health care ethics where we focus on the goal of affordable appropriate health care and consider measured, long term initiatives to deal with the inevitable disruption to the system.
The same problem exists as we consider the “America First” conundrum. As explored in my recent blog, “Which Hat: Employer, Employee or Consumer?”, when we make decisions, we put ourselves in the position of one stakeholder without considering that in fact at one time or another we are all the stakeholders. And, for justice to be done and ethical action to flow, every stakeholder must be willing to give something up for the good of the whole.
A systems approach to ethics education begins with students being able to clearly articulate the values in tension in a particular situation. We are fond of saying that to be ethical people must be willing to live into their values, to choose actions that match their core commitments. But what do we do when those values are in tension?
I was leading a workshop for a group of executives. I began by having them identify their core values as a leader. Honesty and transparency won. And then, because I’m mischievous, I asked whether they would share with an employee organizational salary information in order to either confirm or refute a perception that women were being persistently paid less than men. To a person the answer was no: the values of confidentiality and loyalty to the company won the day over the stated value of honesty.
I then asked how they would describe to one of their managers when honesty trumped confidentiality and vice versa. They had never thought about it. Rather than thinking of the values of the company as being a set of complementary ethical commitments that could provide guidance when values were in tension, they thought of each of the values as stand-alone commitments that helped them be “right.”
For educators, a systems approach to ethics means that we have to abandon one of our favorite pedagogical techniques—playing devil’s advocate. We have all had the adrenaline rush of reducing a class to total confusion as we challenge them (in the name of teaching critical thinking) on their preferred position by presenting carefully-reasoned arguments for the other side. And then the time for class is up and our students are no closer to being able to make a thoughtful choice than they were before the class began.
Rather, we need to consider how to harmonize the competing values so that the system as a whole can flourish. How can we move beyond the default position of analysis from the stakeholder whose interests take priority in that particular class to a systems approach? For that approach to succeed, neither the individual nor the community—the classic value tension between autonomy and equality—should have more than their fair share of power and perks. People also need to learn self-discipline, both in their intellectual search for truth and in the management of their emotions and passions—the classic value tension between the head and the heart.
Most importantly, students need to learn to identify the values in tension from a systems point of view and then be given strategies for resolution and action that contribute to the good of the whole without unduly impacting the free will or autonomy of individuals. Shifting our pedagogy to a systems approach means completely rethinking how ethics education is delivered.
We’ll be looking at some very concrete strategies for facilitating that transformation over the next months. Stay tuned!