Sense and Sanity: March 2007

“Conventionality is not morality.” –Charlotte Bronte

Ethical decision-making is one of the most important topics in the Business world right now. Large scale accounting frauds, environmental damage, and exploitive labour practices in recent years have all raised much debate about corporate social responsibility. Business schools have dedicated entire classes to the subject. However, they treat ethics as an intellectual topic and use reason and rationality as the foundation for ethical decision making. Taught this way, ethical decisions only come to us from the contextual framework of culture. To me, ethics has become a spiritual issue rather than an intellectual one.

One needs only to look into the pages of history books to see the brutal effects that the intellectual rationalization of ethics has brought to the world. It was not so long ago that slavery was considered perfectly moral. A generation before that the Spanish conquistadors thought it was their moral duty to wipe out the entire indigenous population in South America. We read about such atrocities with a certain amount of smugness and the sense of the modern era’s moral superiority. Black and white films of thousands of upon thousands of Jews being pushed into boxcars as they headed to Auschwitz and Dachau; that happened in the Forties and it won’t happen again. We’ve deluded ourselves. Champagne corks pop and glasses tinkle as the movers and shakers of this world celebrate record profits; meanwhile, thousands of Iraqis are awaiting their release from Abu-Ghraib, hundreds of Afghan peasants are being tortured in Guantanamo Bay, and 74,000 acres of rainforest are destroyed daily to meet consumer demand in Western markets.

The global market economy has developed through the application of utilitarian ethics. From the birth of capitalism, up until the present day, corporations used utilitarianism as their basis for ethical decision making. To provide the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people seemed like the most fair and reasonable thing to do. As long as those people are Caucasian seems to be the parenthetical statement that is implied but never explicitly stated. Because it seems fine if thousands of Chinese workers work 130 hours a week earning only 16.5 cents an hour, in cruel and demeaning conditions, as long as North Americans can buy cheap goods at Wal-Mart (McCool, 2004). Certainly, this is nothing new, as Eduardo Galeano writes, “[…] it was with the Renaissance and the conquest of the Americas that racism became a system of moral absolution at the service of European gluttony. Since then racism has ruled, dismissing majorities among the colonized and excluding minorities among the colonizers. In the colonial era racism was as essential as gunpowder.” Recently, I’ve noticed posters around campus that say Stop Racism. Yet I wonder how many people are really committed to this cause. Would they give up their cellphones, Starbucks coffee, and fashions made in sweatshops in the Third World? The socioeconomic system we live in depends on racism. Modern day capitalism could not survive without racism. Most people have denied or avoided the deeper moral implications of living in the privileged First World. This became obvious to me in 2003 and a day after a British contractor was decapitated in Iraq, there was a minute of silence at the beginning of all football matches in England. Yet there has never been a moment of silence to remember over a million Iraqi children that starved to death during the decade between the two wars due to the UN economic sanctions on Iraq. It’s easier to forget and pretend the problem doesn’t exist rather than to face the uncomfortable reality.

Technology and global capitalism has grown faster than humanity’s moral framework. We live in an age where humanity not only has the ability to destroy the planet, but even the decisions of an average citizen in a First World country could affect the lives of many people in the Third World. I don’t think any ‘ism’ or ‘ology’ can provide the moral framework the 21st century needs. Nothing from religious moral absolutism or anything produced from philosophical debate can lead humanity in this century. Postmodernism has offered nothing to solve the dilemma of the increasing moral implications of a rapidly growing global interdependence.

The growth of pluralistic societies has created the idea of ethical relativism. With a diversity of cultures came a greater difficulty for us to discriminate between right and wrong. So how do we tell what is right and wrong in this postmodern era? Ethical relativism says, “It’s up for you to decide because no one should tell anyone else what is the right or wrong thing to do.” Moral evaluations then depend on our shifting values, wants and needs. Since there is no universal guiding principle constraining behaviour this kind of ethical relativism has led to the self-delusional narcissism that is dominant in modern society. Ethical relativism mixes what is morally right with personal fulfillment or gain. It’s essentially saying, “It must be right because it’s the best thing for me.” Yet this is a paradoxical statement because ethics is concerned with the greater good and not just the individual’s needs and concerns. Ethical relativism only further legitimizes the self-centered egocentric pursuit of individual fulfillment. Ironically, due to the paradox of hedonism, what we pursue can never offer us happiness, if we don’t have anything to be happy about to begin with.

While we strive to maintain a pluralistic egalitarianism in our own society, other societies are subject to exploitation, destruction and annihilation in this era of globalization. Yet sooner or later us privileged few in the First World will be forced to face the frightening consequences of our excess. A new ethical perspective must replace this ethical relativism that is dominant in today’s society. For myself, I think humanity as a whole must evolve into a new consciousness that includes all people and things. I personally know the right thing to do because it is my heart telling me that it’s the right thing to do and not my mind. One of the 20th century’s greatest spiritual thinkers, Albert Einstein had a solution:

A human being is part of a whole that we call the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. The illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires, and to affection for only the few people nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living things and all of nature.

Indeed, it will take a radical transformation of human consciousness to generate a new ethical perspective. But as the French author Andre Malraux wrote many years ago, “The 21st century will be spiritual or the 21st century will not be.” It is time to expand our consciousness to beyond our own egos. But first we must think of ourselves as more than merely ‘skin-encapsulated egos.’

Writing this, I realize that this is a radical perspective and very few will take this approach. Yet without coming to a full understanding of ourselves, how can it be possible to formulate any notion of what is moral or immoral? Is it possible to comprehend our relationship to other people or to the world, if we cannot face looking at relationships with ourselves? As many wise teachers have pointed out to us, including Krishnamurti and Carl Jung (both on this blog), the violence we see in the world is the result of the violence in our own psyches.
Yet it is so much easier to intellectualize and pontificate on different theories of morality. We can absolve all responsibility and let the 'trusted' authority figures in the halls of academia debate and come up with a consensus solution for the rest of us. That is so much easier than seriously and critically examining the contents of one's own psyche.

History tells us of the catastrophic consequences of our not following the Oracle at Delphi's instructions to "Know Thyself." Trusting the institutions, governments or authorities to make the important moral decisions for us has only led to more and more injustice, oppression and atrocities. We, the "useless eaters" as Bertrand Russell referred to the common folk, have had all of our opinions fed to us, all of our beliefs, including our beliefs about morality. The result is the fractured and schizoid world we live in. Yet there are few people who will stand up and question the rationale of the rapid spread of global capitalism. While Wall Street firms celebrate record Earnings per Share the consequences of their day to day operations has led to cultural ethnicide, deforestation, environmental degradation and violent oppression of the few upon the many. The results of endless debates in academia on the topic of "Corporate Social Responsibility" only manages to further harden the hearts of the next generation of business leaders. They see only the results on the balance sheet and income statement and do not have to live with the frightening consequences of their decisions, as they affect other people's lives in far away lands. Yet it is not only the Corporate Executives who have hardened their heart, since the consumerist culture depends heavily on neglecting our compassion towards our fellow humans beings.

As Erich Fromm, mentions in his lecture (also posted on this blog), that if we do not feel compassion towards the starving children in India while we gorge ourselves into gluttonous excess, we are psychologically speaking, distancing ourselves from the rest of humanity. It is not our responsibility, we say to ourselves. Yet whose is it then? That is not to say, that starving ourselves will save one dying child in Africa but it is merely the recognition that the selfish drive blocks compassion and empathy. Self-inquiry brings us to the realization that all right action is the response that comes from our compassionate heart, not our rationalizing mind.
Narcissistic self-interest, justified by any number of theories of ethics is in itself deeply unethical.

It is absurd to think that a capitalist system which relies on slavery, and exploitation can produce any new answers to the ethical dilemmas. It's responses tend to be divisive and based upon fear. So, in a geopolitical, socioeconomic system that is fundamentally corrupt, and immoral where do we turn to in order to solve the moral problems? The answer will be found when we are willing to throw away our comfort and security and dive into the dark and uncertain abyss of our own souls. At the other end, when we can really say we know ourselves, will we be able to generate an entirely new kind of ethics, which can change the world.