What’s the Right Thing to Do?
(Ethical Dilemma)
When’s the last time you made a choice that involved an ethical dilemma?
Maybe we should first agree on what makes an ethical dilemma. Which of the following is best viewed as an ethical dilemma?
Deciding whether or not to show up to your job.
Deciding whether or not to drive the speed limit.
Deciding whether or not to recycle a plastic bottle.
I had a teacher tell me once that an easy way to know you’re in the midst of an ethical dilemma is that you have to determine right from wrong when no one is looking. This has always made sense to me.
Showing up at your job is not an ethical dilemma, because if you don’t show up, you don’t get paid, and if you don’t show up often enough, you won’t have a job any longer.
The speed limit sometimes feels like an ethical dilemma, given that most of us tend to exceed the limits by at least a little bit, but the limit is ultimately enforceable by law.
On the other hand, provided you don’t actively litter, there is no such thing as the recycling police. We’re perfectly free to harm the earth by throwing a plastic bottle into the garbage to wind up in a landfill, where it will reside for the next ten thousand years (I’m guessing).
In this experience, I’m going to provide an ethical dilemma for you to solve in two different ways.
THE DILEMMA
Imagine your friend Sally works in the admissions office of an elite university. It’s her job to compile the data that will be used by a prominent magazine in its annual rankings of colleges and universities. The stats she compiled make it look like her school may decline in the rankings. While everyone agrees that the rankings are largely meaningless as a reflection of the quality of education a school provides, they are a popular topic in the media, and slipping in the ranks may cause a decrease in alumni donations or lead to fewer people applying, which may cause an additional decline in the rankings the following year.
Sally’s boss wants her to change the numbers in order to prevent the school from declining in the rankings.
Sally comes to you for advice regarding her dilemma.
Write answers to two different questions.
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After hearing Sally describe the situation, what do you tell her she should do? Why are you recommending she do this?
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What’s the ethically correct thing to do, and why is it the ethically correct thing to do?
AUDIENCE
The audience is someone who is interested in understanding more about how people navigate ethical dilemmas. Your purpose isn’t to portray yourself as ethical or honest or superknowledgeable about ethics. Your job is to describe, as best you can, what decision you would make and why, and then to describe the most ethical course, presuming these two answers are not the same. If they are the same, spend some time explaining why.
The audience is not interested in judging your decision or calibrating your ethical compass. This is a fact-finding mission about how and why people make decisions in the real world.
PROCESS
1. Decide what you’d recommend.
Often, it helps to just go with your gut. Most of us aren’t even fully aware when we’re confronted by an ethical dilemma, and rarely pause to reflect on the ethics of a decision, so whatever it is you first think you’re likely to recommend is probably what you would tell Sally.
In a piece of writing, describe that decision and the thinking that underpins that decision. Your audience is most interested in the “why” of your decision, so make sure you engage in a thorough discussion of how you wound up making your recommendation, even if it is based on your gut.
In other words, show your work.
2. Analyze the ethics.
You’ve described what you think you would recommend, now consider what other alternatives Sally could consider. What are the different actions she could take under this scenario? List as many different actions as you can think of.
Another way of breaking down the ethics of a situation is to identify the different stakeholders in a given situation. Who are all the interested parties to this dilemma?
Think of anyone who may be impacted by this scenario.
Looking at the different possible choices, and considering the different stakeholders, what is the most ethical choice in the above scenario?
3. Explain the ethics.
In another piece of writing, explain why what you’ve identified as the most ethical choice is indeed the most ethical choice. This may involve comparing and contrasting your recommendation to Sally with other possible choices and arguing why another path may be the most ethical. Or if you believe your recommendation to Sally is the most ethically correct decision, explain why you’re recommending this, as well as the possible consequences for Sally if she follows your recommendation.
4. Revise, edit, polish.
Make sure both pieces are as thoroughly and clearly expressed as you can manage. They will stand alone because you won’t be around to explain what you “really” meant. Revise and edit them with your audience and purpose in mind.
REFLECT
Like most ethical dilemmas, there’s a bit of a gray area here. On the one hand, the rankings themselves aren’t truly reflective of the quality of Sally’s institution, and for the institution to be harmed based on meaningless data seems bad. Plus, Sally is being asked—maybe even ordered—to do this by her boss. Imagine that Sally refuses but her boss changes the data anyway. Is Sally absolved of any responsibility?
On the other hand, they would be fudging the numbers, putting incorrect data into the world that would be publicly available. The real data is presumably accessible somewhere.
How you decide the ethics of this situation depends on how you view the different issues and the different stakeholders (Sally, her boss, the school, current students, potential students, administration, the magazine) in the equation.
One could argue that the most ethical act is to not only refuse the boss’s order, but also to blow the whistle if the wrong numbers are put forward publicly. What might the consequences for Sally be if she took this route?
It’s tricky.
Is there a gap between what you would tell Sally to do and what you believe is the ethical thing to do? Why? What are the barriers preventing people in this particular case from acting ethically? Are there different gradations of ethical behavior?
Finally, consider the same scenario, only look at it through the lens of a long view rather than the immediate consequences. Let’s say Sally changes the numbers, and something similar happens the next year and she’s confronted with the same dilemma, only this time the reported numbers bear even less resemblance to reality?
Some of this may boil down to individual character, but my experience is many “good” people would still have a hard time doing the ethical thing in this kind of scenario. Doing the right thing often seems to carry risks that doing the wrong thing doesn’t.
Why?
REMIX
Write your own ethical dilemma. Make it a hard one, both for people to feel like they’d do the ethical thing, as well as being complicated in terms of examining the ethics.
TITLES
Thus far, I’ve been ignoring titles, but that’s not because they’re unimportant.
Sometimes a title may be purely utilitarian, like titling a memo or the minutes to a meeting. In this case, the titles merely need to communicate some very straightforward facts about what the audience will find underneath the title.
But other times the title has to do a lot of work.
Titles are the writer’s first foot forward, the introduction to the audience, akin to a handshake when you meet someone new. A handshake can’t be so great that it will override other character flaws, but a bad handshake can be difficult to overcome.
A bad or even so-so title could be worse than a bad handshake; if the title doesn’t sufficiently intrigue, the audience may not read further. Writing in school, where a teacher is required to read whatever we turn in, distorts the reality that in the real world audiences are under no such obligation.
I learned this lesson the first time I had a short story accepted for publication, a very exciting time following a zero-for-two-hundred start to my career when it came to submitting my work to literary journals.
The only thing was the editor who accepted the story told me I needed to change the title. I had submitted the story under the title “Stillness,” and he politely told me that no one is going to rush to read a short story titled “Stillness.” (Perhaps my bad titling explains some of that bad start to my publishing career.)
He gave me the weekend to come up with a better title. Nothing was coming from the story itself, but that weekend my wife and I had an appointment to take our two young nieces to the circus, and that’s where I found my title.
You know the circus, right? Like Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey, now defunct, but back then a three-ring spectacle taking place in a ten-thousand-seat arena, with lions and tigers and acrobats and guys driving motorcycles around the inside of a large metal ball.
This was not that kind of circus. This was a traveling circus of the kind that puts in for a couple of days at the county fairground and your grocery store offers free tickets with a ten-dollar purchase. It was a one-ring circus, with a ringmaster in a filthy-looking coat and tails who did a snake charming routine with an albino python that was either made out of rubber or dead.
The children loved it, of course, because children are easily fooled, but I found the whole thing pretty grim, until the finale, the parade of elephants, when it went past grim to existentially depressing.
The parade was only two elephants long, the one behind holding the tail of the one in front with its trunk. I noticed the one in front had two dark streaks running from its eyes, as though it had been crying. I’m sure it was something bad, like conjunctivitis, or an infection, but in a bolt a title popped into my head, “The Circus Elephants Look Sad Because They Are.”
Did it have anything to do with the story—an odd tale of a man who goes to an interview with a career counselor who is a former UFC fighter (from the days when hair pulling was allowed) and who threatens to steal the man’s wife from him? Not really, by which I mean not at all.
But it was odd and would draw attention, the only purpose of a title for a short story by a writer who had never previously been published and desperately wanted attention. If anyone ever asked, I could make up some rationale for it reflecting the spirit of despair with which my protagonist lives. (No one ever asked.)
It worked. When the journal it appeared in was reviewed in a couple of places, my story was specifically mentioned. When I put the title in cover letters accompanying subsequent submissions of stories to other journals, editors would recognize it, and maybe I looked a little like a somebody.
I’ve paid a lot of attention to titles since then. The proper title for this book has been a subject of discussion, with a good dozen people weighing in. I hope we picked the right one.
A good title gets attention, but it also must be appropriate to the audience and occasion. Think about how disappointing Internet clickbait titles are when they lure you in with promises of amazing things and you find nothing special.
Titles will be part of every experience going forward. Be mindful, consider how examples of the types of thing you’re writing do it, and don’t just slap something on at the last moment.
You don’t want the equivalent of one of those “here’s a dead fish for you” handshakes as a title.