Edging Up

As a school leader, you understand that tough decisions like these will face you from time to time. When such dilemmas hit—often without warning, on an otherwise normal day—you need to demonstrate moral authority and wise decision making. You probably also sense that this sort of ethical decision making, more than simply intuitive, grows out of a process that applies structure in the midst of pressure and promotes rational discourse in the face of emotional tensions.

That process, we’ve found, is most successful if it includes four attributes:

• It is rooted in core, shared values.

• It centers on right-versus-right dilemmas rather than on right-versus-wrong temptations.

• It provides clear, compelling resolution principles.

• It is infused with moral courage.

Shared Values

Sound ethical decision making starts with being in touch with your own, as well as the community’s, core ethical values. Indeed, many of these values are reflected in professional standards established for school administrators.

In its list of 10 commitments to the public, the AASA Statement of Ethics, adopted in 1981, identifies key values, including honesty, integrity, due process, responsibility, civil and human rights, and honor. According to the statement, an “administrator acknowledges that the schools belong to the public they serve for the purpose of providing educational opportunities to all …” This responsibility, it continues, “requires the administrator to maintain standards of exemplary professional conduct. It must be recognized that the administrator’s actions will be viewed and appraised by the community, professional associates, and students.”

Values such as these are not unique to educators nor even to Americans. They are consistent with research findings from around the world. The Institute for Global Ethics has been studying the question of shared values for a decade. In the early 1990s, individuals such as Nobel laureate Oscar Arias of Costa Rica and John Gardner, founder of Common Cause, joined us in a series of interviews with moral exemplars from 16 different countries.

This work identified eight key values—love, truth, fairness, freedom, unity, tolerance, responsibility and respect—that were widely seen as essential in the 21st century. And from a series of surveys conducted between 1996 and 2001, we found that, over and over, respondents gravitate toward five of these values: truth, respect, responsibility, fairness and compassion. In hundreds of workshops around the United States and overseas, we also have found empirically that people with different interests and backgrounds select these same five values as central to their sense of a moral future.

What is the importance of identifying such a list? First, they help us understand there is a bedrock of shared values that transcends our own time and place. While some in our communities fear our culture has lost moral footing in recent years, and while others fear further erosion in the future, there is a clear comfort in knowing these values have a timeless and lasting quality.

Second, these values provide a much-needed glue within a society of great racial and ethnic diversity. Our research suggests these five values are held in common by individuals who otherwise may be very different—giving us a baseline for building toward greater harmony and stronger programs in conflict resolution.

Third, these values are held in common despite deep religious differences. We find, for example, that individuals who claim to have no religion at all identify exactly the same core moral values as those who tell us they are deeply religious.

These findings make it clear that a question intended to stifle all discussions of values in schools—“Whose values will you teach?”—raises a false fear. The answer is “Our values—the ones we can discover by asking our community what values are most important.” The fact is that you don’t need to impose values on anyone because you can find the core values already in place.

Commenting on the importance of values, Barry Z. Posner and Warren H. Schmidt, in an article titled “An Updated Look at the Values and Expectations of Federal Government Executives” in the January/February 1994 issue of Public Administration Review, note that “because they are at the core of people’s personality, values influence the choices they make, the people they trust, the appeals they respond to, and the way they invest their time and energy. In turbulent times, values give a sense of direction amid conflicting views and demands.”

Because these values are held in common, they provide a solid starting point for making ethical decisions. They also are important to identifying goals, defining objectives, creating a plan of implementation and evaluating results along the way. We must ask, “Is this goal/plan/result consistent with our stated values?” Even when we may disagree as individuals—on, for example, the busing of minority children to other school districts—we probably can agree on the value of equal opportunity as a cornerstone to quality education.

Ethical Dilemmas

Once we understand and explore the positive values that drive our behavior, then we can more easily understand the two great drivers of ethical issues. One kind of ethical issue arises because of right versus wrong, where a core value (like honesty) is violated by dishonest behavior. The other kind arises because of right versus right, where two values on our core list come into conflict.

While right-versus-wrong issues are common—and very important within the school context—the really tough decisions typically arise because both sides of a dilemma are rooted in values and, in many respects, are right. These dilemmas are markedly different from choices of the right-versus-wrong sort. For example, if one option in a decision is identified as being “right” and another as being “wrong,” we find that most people would choose to do what is right.

To be sure, there often is a moral temptation to do the wrong thing—“No one will know if I do not pay taxes on this under-the-table income, so I can save myself quite a bit.” The decision to select an option that one clearly knows is wrong reflects not on one’s ability to make decisions, but on one’s lack of ethical clarity and moral courage.

Right-versus-right dilemmas, on the other hand, involve situations where there is a clear moral backing for each option but where the two are mutually exclusive. At the Institute for Global Ethics, we have identified four types, or paradigms, of right-versus-right dilemmas:

• truth vs. loyalty, where issues of personal honesty or integrity come in conflict with responsibility, allegiance and promise-keeping;

• individual vs. community, in which the interests of the individual are lined up against those of a larger entity;

• short-term vs. long-term, where the real and important concerns of the present are pitted against foresight and investment for the future;

• justice vs. mercy, in which fairness and an equal application of the rules appear to be at odds with the demands of empathy and compassion.

Applying our analytical process to these common situations, we can see how these four paradigms help us understand the nature of these dilemmas. We also can see more clearly how the moral arguments will line up on each side. Finally, we can distinguish the really tough right-versus-right dilemmas from the right-versus-wrong issues of compliance: If only one side of the dilemma lends itself to a powerful moral argument, while the other has little ethical merit, we’re dealing with right-versus-wrong and should act accordingly.

Moral Courage

What exactly is moral courage? Our research suggests the following preliminary observations:

• Moral courage differs from physical courage. Physical courage is the willingness to face serious risk to life or limb instead of fleeing from difficult encounters. “Courage,” says our 1926 Webster’s, is “that quality of mind which enables one to encounter danger and difficulties with firmness, or without fear, or fainting of heart.” Or, as John Wayne put it with characteristic bluntness: “Courage is being scared to death—and saddling up anyway.”

• Physical courage is less in demand than it once was. Where once the frontier loomed mysterious and uncharted, global positioning satellites now take us right to our mark. And where once beasts, bugs, underbrush, storms and topographical obstacles made travel dangerous, there is less now to fear—and less need for physical courage. Even war, which Aristotle thought was the only place to find true courage, has become less dependent on the physical courage of the individual warrior and more dependent on technology, information and weaponry launched from a safe distance.

• The lessons of courage are still needed. This is especially so among youth seeking tests of adulthood and rites of passage into maturity. At its best, this need may explain the popularity of the contrived risk-taking of extreme sports and some high-risk financial ventures—and, at its worst, the prevalence of risky sexual behavior, drug use and gang activity. It’s as though the successor generations are saying, “If nature, war and survival are not going to test my courage, I’ll find other ways, for I need to prove to myself and others that I really am courageous!”

• Moral courage is not about facing physical challenges that could harm the body. It’s about facing mental challenges that could harm one’s reputation, emotional well-being, self-esteem or other characteristics. These challenges, as the term implies, are deeply connected with our moral sense—our core moral values. Pass the white light of moral courage through the prism of our understanding of values, and it breaks out into a five-banded spectrum: the courage to be honest, to be fair, to be respectful, to be responsible and to be compassionate. If “values” is in some way synonymous with “convictions,” then moral courage is (as it’s often characterized) “the courage of your convictions” in these five key areas.

But must every evidence of courage be thought of as true moral courage? Here Aristotle’s conceptions help. He defined moral virtue as an “intermediate” between a defect and an excess. Courage, he said, lies balanced between the defect of cowardice and the excess of rashness. Put another way, one can think of courage as flanked by two alternatives: its opposite, the cowering timidity that dares not act, and its counterfeit, the bravura and foolhardiness that looks a bit like courage but isn’t.

Courage is built by practice and repetition. Think of it as a habit, or a muscle, that gets strengthened by use. “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face,” wrote Eleanor Roosevelt. “You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ The danger lies in refusing to face the fear, in not daring to come to grips with it. If you fail anywhere along the line it will take away your confidence. You must make yourself succeed every time. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

Piece by Piece

The belief that moral courage can be promoted, encouraged and taught through precept, example and practice explains the actions of the educators at St. Paul’s. They already had a precept—“the hard right against the easy wrong”—to use as a reference point for testing the actions of the team. They must have known the value of examples, known that a Hollywood movie can poison budding moral sensibilities and that in the absence of a strong ethical antidote the poison can do permanent damage.

As for practice, that was essential. They were building, over time, a tradition of moral education just as they were building a reputation for lacrosse. Yes, they sacrificed the short-term glory of a sterling athletic season and the enthusiastic support it could bring. But the long-term risk of educational hypocrisy—talking up values without walking down the road to integrity—would have been far more damaging.

In the annals of moral courage, this is a small story. It’s not about a whistleblower, an investigative journalist, or a researcher finding an unpopular truth. But its very smallness is telling. Moral courage plays itself out daily, hourly, in the interstices of our lives. Without it, our brightest virtues rust from lack of use. With it, we build piece by piece a more ethical world.

To read the full article, click on the following link: https://www.aasa.org/schooladministratorarticle.aspx?id=4148 

Education leaders make difficult ethical decisions each day. They must navigate rationally through challenging and complex circumstances while under considerable emotional stress. One approach to work through ethical dilemmas is to make decisions is through the combined use of multiple ethical paradigms.

Various types of ethical questions will be considered from different perspectives based on the approach leaders take.

Situational Ethics

This theory is based on research conducted by Joseph Fletcher, an Episcopal priest who supported both euthanasia and abortion. It posits decisions should be predicated on the immediate circumstances rather than upon fixed law and love is the sole motivation behind every decision.

• Appropriate behavior in one situation may be inappropriate in another situation.

• Example: Consider the following questions: “Why was I turned down for the promotion to assistant principal?” versus “How do you like the squid salad I brought for the school’s potluck dinner?” The first merits an honest, forthright answer; the second, perhaps not.

Cultural Relativism

This theory is sometimes referred to as “moral relativism” and is often mistakenly considered synonymous with situational ethics. It suggests what is ethical behavior in one culture may be considered unethical in another. The theory requires when making a moral judgment about a person, the attitudes of the community the person is a member of must be considered.

What is correct in one culture may be incorrect in another culture.

Professional Ethics

Most professions have established a code of conduct or other ethical standards applying to all members of the profession. Examples include the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct, the American Medical Association’s Code of Medical Ethics and the Association of American Educators’ Code of Ethics for Educators.

• A profession’s code of ethics determines what is and what isn’t ethical behavior.

• Example: The Hippocratic Oath and the AMA code of ethics define ethical behavior for medical doctors. They dictate appropriate responses and decision-making when doctors are faced with specific medical situations the public isn’t likely to encounter.

Value-Based Ethics

This theory is adopted frequently by organizations to ensure managers and employees act in ways  consistent with the company’s core values. Employee actions are determined by their own internal value system with guidance from the organization’s standards for ethical conduct. However, value-based codes of conduct typically require more self-regulation than codes designed to ensure compliance with government regulations.

Individuals judge their actions by listening to their conscience or inner voice. For example, teachers’ interests in their students’ well-being may cause them to spend some of their time outside the classroom participating in activities that improve their students’ educational experience.

Rule-Based Ethics

This theory applies specific rules to ethical conduct. It’s often contrasted with principle-based ethics, which relies on individuals’ principles to ensure ethical behavior. The concept is also referred to as deontological ethics or Kantian duty-based ethics after the philosopher Immanuel Kant.

The rules that govern an organization or group determine what is ethical behavior. For example, a school’s code of conduct states the rules employees must follow when interacting with students, parents, co-workers and others. The code applies universally, regardless of the specifics of the situation or the characteristics and beliefs of the people involved.

Fairness-Based Ethics

This theory emphasizes the fair and equitable distribution of good and harm. In making ethical decisions, the social benefits and costs must be considered across a broad spectrum of the community. It’s based on the belief that “all equals should be treated equally,” but those whose differences make them unequal should be treated in a way that is fair considering their differences.

Consider the following: All those who do the same job and who possesses equal knowledge and experience should be paid at the same rate. However, workers with more valuable skills or experience may deserve to earn a higher rate.

Ethics Based on General Principles

The principle-based theory of ethics is the basis for the International Federation of Accountants’ Code of Ethics and was pioneered by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. Perceived as more flexible than rule-based approaches, this theory is more reliant on an individual’s sense of professionalism and social responsibility. One downside is enforcement of the code becomes more subjective.

The appropriate action for a given situation is based on generally accepted principles of magnanimity and self-sacrifice. An example would be someone sacrificing personal gain for the good of others or to prevent their harm. Motivation to act ethically lives in the individual’s personal sense of fairness and the equitable treatment of others.