Three Ways to Strengthen Our Ethical Muscles
As an ethics teacher for almost a decade at the University of Texas at Austin and an executive coach to municipal and corporate leaders throughout the state, I’m often brought into confidence when people are wrestling with ethical issues. In my experience, three techniques most effectively build our ethical muscles and, even under pressure, help us arrive at sound moral decisions.
1. Distinguish between ethical choices and ethical dilemmas. When I taught ethics to freshmen at the University of Texas, students occasionally asked for my opinion on their ethical struggles. One such student told me of a promise she’d made to visit her elderly grandmother once a month at a nursing home about an hour from Austin. Her grandmother was expecting her for dinner that evening, but the student was having second thoughts about going because she had been invited to a concert that evening by a student she’d had a crush on all semester.
The student didn’t have an ethical dilemma, she had an ethical choice. In an ethical choice, there’s a right answer…you just might not want to choose it. In an ethical
dilemma, there’s an ethical downside to whatever you decide, because values are in tension or in outright conflict. This is what makes distinguishing an ethical choice from an ethical dilemma so important. When we know we’re dealing with an ethical choice, there is a right answer; we just have to find it. When it’s an ethical dilemma, we can stop the fruitless search for a right answer, identify the values in tension, and choose the value we want to lean toward to resolve the conflict.
As an executive coach to city leaders, it’s my privilege to collaboratively think through some of the ethical choices and dilemmas that many of you face. When doing this, I often face my own ethical choice: Should I tell you what you want to hear, which will preserve and possibly strengthen our relationship, or should I tell you what you need to hear, which might cause (and has caused) you to find an advisor more “aligned” to your point of view. It’s ethics when you feel it. If there’s no consequence—if there’s no skin in the game—it’s ethical talk, not ethical action. The most effective way to tell if you are dealing with an
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SOUTH DAKOTA MUNICIPALITIES
