Being Your Best Self

A desire to please authority or to fit in with the group may cause people to act inconsistently with their own moral values

Behavioral ethics can give us guidance as to how to act more ethically and induce others to do so too

4 KEY STEPS TO ACTING ETHICALLY

1. People must perceive the ethical dimensions of an issue that they face (moral awareness)

2. People must have the ability to decide upon a course of action that is ethical (moral decision-making)

3. People must have the desire to act on that ethical decision (moral intent)

4. People must have the motivation and courage to act upon that desire (moral action)

Part 1: Moral Awareness

Being aware of an issue that presents a moral dimension

There is always an ethical dimension to any decision that we make

Absent moral awareness, people might accidentally make the right choice, but they might also accidentally make an unethical choice because they are focusing on other aspects of decision calculus and inadvertently omitting any ethical considerations

studies on selective attention prove that people generally see what they expect to see

The phenomenon that professors Bazerman and Tenbrunsel call “ethical fading,” and Drumwright Murply call “moral myopia,” can blind all of us to ethical miscues if we’re not careful

It is our responsibility, as people who wish to live ethical lives, to keep ethics in our frame of reference

We must constantly strive to act ethically just as we must constantly strive to gain more knowledge and skill regarding the technical aspects of our jobs

Looking out for ethical minefields is part of our personal and professional responsibility every day.

Behavioral ethics teaches that we must practice listening to our moral intuition, “to our gut,” rather than turning all ethical discussions into legalistic exercises

When faced with a moral decision, take a few seconds to pause and listen to your inner voices. Is there a hint of guilt, a hint of shame, a gut feeling of unease? if so don’t ignore it. This is your moral awakening

Part 2: Moral Decision Making

Moral decision-making is having the ability to decide which is the right course of action once we have spotted the ethical issue,

can be difficult as multiple options may seem morally defensible, or perhaps, no options seem morally acceptable.

Our ethical decision-making is often automatic and instinctive. it involves emotions, not reasoning.

When we think that we are reasoning to an ethical conclusion, the evidence shows that we typically are simply rationalizing a decision already made by the emotional parts of our brain.

Our brains’ intuitive system often gets it right, but not universally. We should never ignore our gut feelings when they tell us that we are about to do something wrong. But our intuition does not always choose the ethical path

An important reason that the intuitive/emotional part of our brain errs is the self-serving bias, which often leads to unconsciously making choices that seem unjustifiable to objective third-party observers.

The self-serving bias influences our ethical decisions

How to Combat Self-Serving Bias

We must focus not just on being objective, but on doing what it takes to ensure that others see us as objective.

We will naturally judge our own decisions with a sympathetic eye, but we know that others will not necessarily do so. So if we do what it takes to cause objective third parties to trust our judgments, we should go a long way toward overcoming the impact of the self-serving bias.

We should also pay especially close attention to our profession's code of conduct and our employer's code of ethics because such standards are normally aimed primarily at minimizing conflicts of interest and their unconscious impact on our decision-making.

Part 3: Moral Intent

We tend to lie and cheat, but only up to the level that allows us to retain our self-image as reasonably honest individuals.

The human ability to rationalize is perhaps the single most important factor that enables good people to give themselves license to do bad things. Therefore, one of the best things we can do to preserve our moral intent is to monitor our own rationalizations.

Common Rationalizations

1. Denial of Responsibility

For we are consciously doing something unethical, but choosing to do it anyway because we can shift the responsibility to someone else, which substantially mitigates our feelings of guilt.

2. Denial of Injury

where we consciously do something wrong because the supposedly slight harm involved makes it not seem so bad.

3. Denial of Victim

where we choose to do something because some fault we attribute to the victim makes it seem to us that the victim deserves the harm

4. Social Weighting

where we consciously choose to do something wrong, but by weighing our bad actions against those of people who do even worse things, we can make ourselves appear almost heroic at least in our own eyes.

5. Appeal to Higher Loyalties

where we consciously do something wrong, but justify doing it just this one time by elevating loyalty to our firm or a family to a preeminent position.

6. Metaphor of the Ledger

we do something that we know is wrong but conclude that it is justified in this case perhaps because of our perceived mistreatment at the hands of our victim

If you practice monitoring your own rationalizations and talk out your difficult decisions with a trusted confidant who can call on them, you can increase your chances of leading an honorable life by preserving your moral intent.

Part 4: Moral Action

Even if you are aware of an ethical issue, correctly select a defensible ethical choice, and have the desire to do the right things, you may still be unable to translate all that into moral action

3 things to take Moral Intent to Moral Action:

1. Moral Ownership

we take moral ownership when we feel a sense of psychological responsibility over the ethical nature of our own actions and those around us.

To create moral ownership, we must battle the forces that cause ethical blindness and moral myopia.

How we can avoid ethical fading, make ethical choices, and ratchet up our moral intent should assist us in increasing our moral ownership

2. Moral Efficacy

is a belief in our ability to act ethically and to induce others to do so in the face of moral adversity.

Often people have an abstract desire to do the right thing, but just don’t feel empowered to resist all the forces of authority, conformity and the like that can make it difficult to do so.

We must remember what has been called the “power of one”, often a single, ordinary person CAN make a difference

3. Moral Courage

“a commitment to moral principles, and awareness of the danger involved in supporting those principles, and a willing endurance of that danger.”

Moral courage is necessary to translate moral decisions into moral action

How can we muster Moral Courage?

We should all be thrifty and set aside “go to hell funds”

We should visualize and accept the fact that part of our professional journey will likely involve facing ethical dilemmas that will require us to make sacrifices, in order to have the type of career, and consequently, the type of life, of which we can be proud.

By anticipating or normalizing the idea that we may have to take career-threatening risks in order to preserve our integrity, we expand our vision of what we are capable of. We can do what is necessary to be our best selves.