THERE ARE MANY ACTIVITIES that can be outsourced successfully by individuals, companies and governments. For example, individuals may choose to outsource the preparation of their tax returns to an accountant; many companies benefit from outsourcing the design and administration of their IT systems to a consultant; and governments are increasingly finding it more efficient to outsource the delivery of public services to voluntary organisations. Equally, there are some activities that cannot legitimately be outsourced. By definition, ethical responsibility for our own actions cannot be delegated, shared or outsourced. Moral accountability must attach to the author of the action.
Regulation has the perverse effect of encouraging those being regulated to outsource their conscience to the regulatory authority. For example, bankers have argued quite legitimately: “If something is not explicitly forbidden by the regulator, then it cannot be deemed irresponsible if we choose to adopt it or to practise it.” By “socialising” moral responsibility and breaking the link between action and accountability, regulation reduces virtue to a tradable commodity. Replacing the personal fear and shame of bankruptcy with the institutional inconvenience of being fined or admonished by the regulator has taken the sting out of failure.
A morally mature society is one in which individuals are not just happy to take responsibility for their actions, but also recognise their obligation to be accountable to others for what they do. They want to be members of a society in which personal and corporate transgressions have personal and corporate consequences.
Taking responsibility for our actions includes learning conscientiously from our mistakes. One of the tragedies of the global economic downturn has been that the lessons of the debacle have not been learned. If no individuals see themselves as even partially responsible for the crisis, then no one has any reason to interrogate their own beliefs and values or make strenuous efforts to change their behaviour. Indeed, empirical studies of bankers in the City since the financial meltdown have shown that individual behaviour does not seem to have been affected at all by what happened.
We can learn from the health system. Recently, the European Working Time Directive (EWTD) has been widely blamed for encouraging junior doctors to desert the National Health Service, as well as having a malign influence on medical training, and for putting patients at risk. This is what David Nunn, a consultant surgeon at Guy’s Hospital, had to say in a letter to the Times:
Who is to blame for the nonsense that is now surgical training? Who accepted the changes introduced by Calman? Who agreed to allow nurses to take over the role of junior doctors to the detriment of both doctor and patient? Who acquiesced to the farrago of the Modernising Medical Careers programme? Who was persuaded to accept the “challenge” of redesigning training to meet the requirements of the EWTD? I am afraid it was me, and all of my senior surgical colleagues, who should have resisted all of the above. Not only have we failed the generation below us, but we have allowed politicians and managers to undermine our profession and our own status.
In the aftermath of the global economic downturn, who else has had Nunn’s disarming humility to take any responsibility for what happened?
The economic costs of the banking crisis, however great, will always be trivial in comparison with the social costs of the regulatory methods designed to forestall them. It is better for a society to bear the costs of financial exuberance every 50 years or so, however painful, than suffer the decline in ethical standards, the abdication of personal responsibility and the depletion of social capital brought about by ever more intrusive, government-inspired regulation, however gradual. Sometimes in life, the therapy is more toxic than the disease it purports to cure.