A de-ethics pill?

Dear Bob:

I know that there were many letters and viewpoints on ethics in the past, but I have a (hopefully) simple question. No more debate about good and evil or right and wrong. But first a little background. I’ve been involved in several different projects with several different organizations with publicly funded budgets of more than $10 million. Every one has failed to live up to even the most modest expectations in terms of the benefits received by the targeted constituencies. I’ve been on the technical side of these projects, high enough up the food chain to observe the cause and effect that predicated doom, but not high enough to avert it. We’ve successfully pushed the technical envelope on all of these projects but the unethical self-serving and egotistical actions of some of the people in positions of authority have snatched defeat from the mouth of victory. The result is that, to the detriment of my family, I’ve walked away from jobs that pay significantly more than I now make through my inability to work for “unethical” employers.

Now for the question:

Is there a matrix or formula or pill that can help me draw a line between what is unacceptably unethical and what is in my family’s best interest and should be swallowed even though it leaves a bad taste.

I saw a bumper sticker that read “I used to care, but now I take a pill for that”. I don’t want to stop caring, but I’m a little gaunt from jousting at windmills.

Sign me,

Euthanized by Ethics

Dear Euthanized …

There’s no magic pill. There isn’t even a magic formula. One perspective that might help is to remember who your customer is.

Not your company’s customer, department’s customer, or what have you. In a very real sense, you’re a service provider who has your employer as a client. So far as ethics are concerned, I look at it from the perspective of landscape architecture. If I was in that business and a client told me she wanted her lawn cut one-half-inch long and dyed purple, I’d have an ethical, or at least a professional obligation to say, “You need to know that doing this will, in a week or so, kill your entire lawn – I don’t think it’s a good idea.” If my client still wants to do it for some reason, what the heck – it’s her lawn, not mine, and I’ve warned her of the consequences.

If, on the other hand, my client asked that I dump a half-ton of arsenic on her lawn for some reason or other, I’d have an ethical (and legal) obligation to do nothing of the kind, since the result would be arsenic in the groundwater, a large risk of poisoning the neighbors’ children and pets, and so on.

How that fits is this: If your employer has decided on a course of action (and your employer’s decisions are simply the aggregate of the decisions made by everyone with the authority and inclination to do so) you’re violating no ethical rule I know of by following that course of action. Failing to do so is the more questionable course of action.

Which is to say, there’s a big difference, ethically, between a course of action likely to fail and one likely to do harm. The former is simply pointless – it’s the latter that’s unethical. (As for the shareholders, who are usually mentioned in this context – hey, they’re the owners. They’re supposed to make sure the right people are managing the company and making its decisions, not you. If they do a bad job of it, it isn’t your problem beyond the usual reasons that a shrinking company is a difficult employer.)

So the ethical test is whether the end-result of the action does no harm outside the company – to customers, bystanders, and fellow employees (who these days are clearly outside the company in most cases). If the course of action is illegal or immoral in your eyes, you should walk away.

There is, of course, a different test than the ethical one: The short-term benefit of gainful salary contrasted with the long-term cost of associating yourself with a train wreck. For reasons of enlightened self-interest, avoiding the wreck is usually a very good idea.

It isn’t a pill, but it may take some of the stress out of such things.

– Bob

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