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Ethics for the Real World: Creating a Personal Code to Guide Decisions in Work and Life ReviewThis is essentially a self-help book for clarifying ethical thought and improving ethical behavior. It's different from other such books in applying to ethics what the authors call "decision analysis," an approach to decision making the authors have previously applied in business and other practical fields. The focus is personal everyday ethics concerning things like white lies and cheating rather than "big" but less common issues like abortion and capital punishment. (If you're looking for a book to help with big issues like that, this isn't the book for you.)
The authors are experienced and well credentialed in business and higher education. The material is of the kind you might hear at a business workshop, not academic but pitched for astute readers, with particular attention to how the principles apply in business. At 154 pages plus some appendices, there's enough material for a series of workshops, though many of the basic ideas are repeated several times in somewhat different ways and contexts.
The basic plan of the book is to make us more aware of common ethical challenges and useful distinctions, to teach skills for dealing with them, and to apply the skills. There are step-by-step instructions for constructing a personal ethical code, examples of personal codes written by ordinary people, and suggestions for practical use.
A common problem with self-help books is that they overreach, often by trying to fit every person and problem into a simple solution or system. That's an issue here. The authors make some effort not to impose their view of ethics. They seek to help the reader discover and improve her own ethical views, in accord with her own "inner voice." But the system and advice they prescribe for doing this is still basically the same for all, and it's much better suited to some views than others. I'll explain more below.
Another limitation on the usefulness of the book is that, despite the emphasis on clear thinking, some of the basic ideas and supporting points don't seem clear or well reasoned.
It also seems to me that ease of decision making is sometimes favored over facing difficult ethical problems.
Here are some more details about the issues I mentioned, so you can better draw your own conclusions.
The ethical stance
The authors' preference is for something akin to Kantian morality (so-called after 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant). This includes what they call action-based ethics, according to which an act is right or wrong depending the nature of the act, not its expected consequences. That lends itself to a strict rules-based approach, which they also favor. Among their key tests for rules is a version of Kant's famous Categorical Imperative, simplified by the authors to "Would I want everyone to follow this rule?"
Most of us tend to mix (not always consistently) action-based thinking and consequence-based thinking. Some, such as utilitarians, believe only the consequences matter. The authors clearly disagree with consequence-based ethics, but they try to accommodate it, maybe because so many people's inner voices insist consequences matter. The authors frequently appeal to the consequences to imply the acts in examples are right or wrong (seemingly without noticing that this is a consequence-based approach). However, the difference in how action- and consequence-based ethics determine right and wrong is so fundamental that the authors sometimes can't give the same advice for both. Though book is written mainly with the authors' quasi-Kantian views in mind, occasionally some further or altogether different (and sometimes seemingly grudging) advice is given in regard to consequence-based ethics.
Unfortunately, the authors give a number of mistaken or confused arguments relating to consequence-based ethics, such as that it implies that self-interest can justify ethical compromise (108). They seem unaware of the ways a common type of consequence-based ethics called "rule utilitarianism" addresses many of their concerns. Their main objection to consequence-based ethics appears to be that it's messy and makes it easier to make excuses, but even if that's true (and some would dispute it) that wouldn't imply it's the wrong approach unless we assume the reality of ethics isn't messy. (More on that below.)
Some other ways of looking at ethics also get attention, in some way or other. Religion is treated as an important source for moral beliefs that can be sifted and refined by use of the tools in the book. Relationships are treated as one of the most important points of ethics.
There are other approaches to ethics that the authors don't consider so much. If you think of ethics mainly in terms of virtues, paradigms of good behavior, objective self-realization, or other less common views, you'll find little of that acknowledged.
Easy decisions vs messy reality?
This book seems to place a higher value on drawing clean, bright lines and being practical than on reflecting actual ethical complexity and difficulty. Maybe this is natural for authors who focus on efficient decision making. They object to consequence-based ethics in part because, as they see it, it doesn't lend itself to definite rules and can thus hinder their favored decision process.
They take a similar position in regard to deciding what counts as ethical. There is a distinction commonly made between what the authors call positive and negative ethics, or between "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots." Negative requirements like "don't steal" are often easier to pin down and live by than positive ones like "help those in need." Because positive ethical rules can be so difficult to work with, the authors suggest we simply reclassify difficult ones as nonethical "concerns" or "aspirations," to get them out of the way, as it were.
For example, they write, "Instead of thinking we have a positive ethic to feed the hungry, we might think, 'I have a positive concern for feeding the hungry'. We reclassify an ethic as a concern and can then calibrate our charity to match our energy and resources--without jeopardizing our commitment to skillful ethical thinking." (40, cp 56, 79-80) As they see it, there is nothing unethical about failing to achieve concerns or aspirations. (Others, including Kant, have tried to distinguish strict duties from what might be called virtuous behavior, but such a division remains problematic and controversial, and doesn't imply that virtuous behavior isn't part of ethics.)
We get to choose which positive requirements are to be regarded as ethical. "These positive ethics can be thought of as a set of behaviors filling a periodic table of ethical elements. Our job is to decide which elements to call our own." (54)
For the authors this is ultimately a matter for our "inner voice" to determine. That opens yet another issue, which the authors don't discuss, about whether ethics should be treated as ultimately subjective in the sense that what you think is right is right for you. They define "ethics" in terms of what we *believe* is right or wrong (8), and sometimes write as though the point is to avoid future remorse from the inner voice rather than to achieve something more objective (e.g. 73). A subjective approach makes it easier to prune our ethics to a size we're comfortable with.
Now, it might not be a bad thing, practically speaking, to look for ways to make ethics easier. As the authors see it, "Committing to a code we can keep is far better than committing to one that stretches us too far, forcing us to break our own rules." (80) But the most difficult and messy ethical obligations may also be among the most important. The fact that they're hard to spell out or live by doesn't imply they aren't ethical or are less than central to our ethical lives. The book invites us in various ways to put them to the side, in favor of neater duties.
A couple other things
There are numerous other points where I thought the logic was less than clear. Here are a couple examples.
The authors limit (without argument) the ethical to what affects others, but they seem to decide arbitrarily what does affect others and what counts as ethical. They don't count environmental issues or historical preservation (8-9), both of which seem to me to affect others. Whether we should work less so we can be at home with the kids they consider merely a prudential matter (that is, a matter of self-interest) and not a matter of ethics "because we are trading off pluses and minuses, not separating right from wrong." (36) I was unable to see how weighing pluses and minuses implies a focus on self-interest rather than right and wrong. Much of their talk about prudence vs. ethics didn't make sense to me.
The examples used to illustrate points are of variable aptness. They often don't definitely exemplify the point but require the authors to speculate. In some cases the authors seem to abuse examples, as with Kurt Gerstein, an enigmatic figure in the history of resistance to the Nazi Holocaust whom the authors return to several times. They suppose things about his story that are unknown, and treat him as guilty of ethical mistakes without sufficient evidence or argument. I felt their treatment was careless and unfair. Guilt is merely assumed in some other cases too.
Worth trying?
All in all, despite the issues outlined above, this book may still be helpful to some. As a book about clear ethical thinking, I can't give it a passing grade. But even with the risk of some fuzzy thinking and potential wrong turns, it still might improve at least some aspects of your ethical life to try some of the methods the authors suggest. The book will be more appealing and less frustrating if you happen to share the basic moral views of the authors.
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