The seeds of this book were sown when, one warm summer afternoon at her home in Cos Cob, Connecticut, in 1986, I had a quiet, long, and thoughtful conversation with Barbara Tuchman.
A historian of what she called “the small facts, not the big Explanation,” she had twice won the Pulitzer Prize—and earned high praise for such books as A Distant Mirror, which used the fourteenth century and its Black Plague as a “mirror” for the twentieth century’s confusions and violence. As a columnist and staff writer for the Christian Science Monitor, I was interviewing her for a series of articles based on the ideas of twenty-two leading thinkers around the world. Ultimately published as An Agenda for the 21st Century (MIT Press, 1987), this series sought to discover the major, first-intensity, high-leverage issues that humanity would have to address in order to negotiate the coming century successfully.
As we talked, I asked her how, if she were a twenty-first-century historian looking backward, she would characterize our century.
“I would call it an Age of Disruption,” she said. She warned of the nuclear threat. She called attention to environmental problems. But her central concern, she said, lay in “the real disruption in public morality.”
“There have always been times when people have acted immorally,” she continued. But what was new, she felt, was “the extent of public immorality making itself so obvious to the average citizen.”
The more I went forward with these interviews—with former president Jimmy Carter, industrialist David Packard, author and editor Norman Cousins, West German president Richard von Weizsäcker, former Nigerian head of state Olusegun Obasanjo, philosophers Mortimer Adler and Sissela Bok, Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, and the rest—the more I kept hearing about the centrality of morality for the twenty-first century. Finally, when the interviews had each appeared in the paper and it came time to write the concluding, what does-it-all-mean piece, six issues stood out as central to our future agenda. Five were not surprising:
The sixth, surfacing in interview after interview, caught me by surprise: the breakdown of morality. It was as though these interviewees were saying, “Look, if we don’t get a handle on the ethical collapses going on around us, we will be as surely doomed as we would be by a nuclear disaster or an environmental catastrophe.” Ethics, they were saying, was no mere luxury: It was central to our survival.
That conclusion caused my colleagues and me at the Monitor to sit up and take notice. Like any top-ranked newspaper, we had writers who had specialized for years in the first five of these issues. But an “ethics beat”? What would that look like?
As a columnist, I had the freedom to choose my subjects each week. So I began writing frequently about ethical issues, working out as I went the language of public discourse that lets one talk about moral values without sounding preachy, naive, or old-fashioned. In the end, the subject proved too large and commanding for even a fine newspaper. So in 1990, in concert with my wife and with the Monitor’s former editor, Katherine Fanning, and with support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, I founded the Institute for Global Ethics in Camden, Maine. As a think tank involved in publishing, education, and research, the Institute is designed to carry this work forward, extend it to a global reach, and provide time and resources to develop this language and these ideas still further.
This book is the result of these years of search and experimentation. It reflects, too, the Institute’s recent work in providing executive ethics seminars for corporate, nonprofit, academic, and governmental clients. Rather than using fictional, canned case studies in our seminars, we ask the participants to bring to the table examples of authentic dilemmas they have encountered. They may change names or local details if necessary to protect confidences. But they are urged to set out their tales in full complexity. As a result, our files are well supplied with examples of up-to-the-minute, tough dilemmas from some of the nation’s most ethical organizations.
This book makes ample use of those dilemmas—stripped of all reference to identifiable individuals, of course, but rich with challenge. It sets them forth in the context of a number of ideas and constructs that we’ve found especially helpful, including the emphasis on “right versus right,” the concept of the dilemma paradigms, and the “ethical fitness” analogy. Since busy people may have little time to read more than one book on ethics, this book brings together some of the best current thinking on this subject. In the end, it has one goal: to help change the way we think about the world and to provide, through that change, a practical set of mental tools by means of which good people can make tough choices.
Making moral choices, of course, is nothing new. Through the centuries, people facing ethical decisions have been aided by the twin traditions of religion and philosophy. This book owes a great deal to both traditions. Given the scope of the former and the exacting nature of the latter, however, it cannot hope to represent either with the depth that an audience of theologians or philosophers might expect. The audience for this book, by contrast, comprises the thoughtful nonspecial-ist, and while I have sought to bring the highest sense of scholarly and journalistic integrity to my use of sources, I have tried above all to be clear, direct, and relevant. There are some wonderful books to be written on the relations of religion and philosophy to the contemporary practice of ethics—topics on which this book only touches.
This book has benefited from the work of many hands. Those too numerous to name include the hundreds of seminar participants who reached into their own personal histories and supplied our sessions with real-life ethical dilemmas that were sometimes dazzling, often profound, and unfailingly engaging. Special thanks go to the staff of the Institute for Global Ethics for helping me think through the ramifications of this process: to Patricia Brousseau, who has been instrumental in transforming these ideas into highly effective workshops for secondary-school students; to Carol Shaw, who has done masterful work in research and manuscript preparation; to Betcie Byrd, who has organized our offices so well that I’ve had time to write; to Kaley Noonan, for patient footnoting; and to Karin Anderson, Kenneth Car-dillo, Barton W. Emanuel, Carl Hausman, Beth Schuman, Melody Smith, and Jo Spiller for their interest and encouragement.
No nonprofit executive could ask for a more supportive board—and no author for a more intelligent and penetrating set of advisors—than the directors of the Institute: James K. Baker, James D. Ewing, Katherine Fanning, Theodore J. Gordon, Willard Hanzlik, Michael K. Hooker, Elizabeth Kidder, Robert Pratt, and Randa Slim. Financial support for the project has come from many sources, including the Arvin Foundation, the Charles Stewart Harding Foundation, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the Florence and John Schumann Foundation, the Walker Group/Walker Family Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Rainwater, Mrs. William M. Correll, Mr. and Mrs. William F. Carl, and Mr. and Mrs. James K. Baker. Two corporate leaders who played a central role in this book, Timothy P. Smucker of The J. M. Smucker Company and Dr. Earl Hess of Lancaster Laboratories were among the first to invite us to hold seminars for their executives and employees: They provided, as it were, the workbench upon which the model was tested and refined. Raphael Sagalyn provided invaluable editorial advice that helped define the tone and scope of this book in its early stages.
Finally, I owe boundless gratitude to the ethical exemplars who have helped shape my own life in ways that made this book possible. Chief among them I count my wife, Elizabeth, whose hand on the ethical tiller is the steadiest I’ve ever seen, and my parents, Ruth and George Kidder, who have proved that an abiding affection is at the very heart of the moral universe, and to whom this book is dedicated.