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Sleep-Test Ethics
W
HEN PEOPLE DISCUSS MORAL DILEMMAS,
they often
refer to ‘‘sleep tests’’ and ‘‘wake-up calls.’’ These have
somehow become important metaphors for thinking
about difficult ethical problems. For example, one young woman,
working as a loan officer at a major bank, faced relentless pressure
from her boss to approve a dubious loan for a pal of his. She
described her reaction by saying, ‘‘It was a real wake-up call. I
thought, Oh my God, this isn’t theory. This is life.’’ Wake-up calls,
it seems, can shake people out of a naive slumber and signal that
something fundamental is at stake in a situation.
The sleep test appears to work differently. It is supposed to tell
people whether or not they have made a morally sound decision.
In its literal version, a person who has made the right choice can
sleep soundly afterward; someone who has made the wrong choice
cannot. Lady Macbeth, for example, awoke in the dead of night,
tormented by guilt because she and her husband had murdered
several of his political rivals. In doing so, Shakespeare says, they
also ‘‘murder’d sleep.’’
Defined less literally and more broadly, sleep-test ethics rests
on a single, fundamental belief: that we should rely on our personal
41
42 D
EFINING
M
OMENTS
insights, feelings, and instincts when we face a difficult ethical
problem. Defined this way, sleep-test ethics is the ethics of intuition.
It advises us to follow our hearts, particularly when our minds are
confused. It says that, if something continues to gnaw at us, it
probably should. More than 100 years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
the American writer and popular philosopher, wrote his famous
essay ‘‘Self-Reliance’’ and told his readers, ‘‘Trust thyself: every heart
vibrates to that iron string.’’
1
For many people, ‘‘trust thyself’’ is a compelling way of resolving
difficult ethical issues. They believe strongly in following their
ethical instincts, because these instincts have been nurtured and
shaped by their families, their religious beliefs, or other experiences,
relationships, and commitments that are vital parts of their lives.
Hence, we must ask whether sleep-test ethics can help managers
who must resolve right-versus-right problems.
The answer to this question is complicated and very important,
because we must tease apart two competing versions of sleep-test
ethics. One is the foundation for a powerful, practical way of
thinking about right-versus-right problems. The other, especially
for managers, is a path to disaster. Unfortunately, the two versions
of sleep-test ethics look quite alike. Both rely heavily on instincts.
Both use physical and emotional distress as indicators that some-
thing is morally amiss. Both seem to say, ‘‘Trust yourself.’’ How,
then, do we distinguish the valid version of sleep-test ethics from
its counterfeit?
M
E-ISM
To answer these questions, we will turn to the Greek philosopher
Aristotle. He spent years thinking about the role that intuition,
emotion, and personal judgment should play in resolving practical
ethical problems. Imagine, for a moment, that Aristotle could spend
six months in the United States. Suppose that he watched television,
visited schools, shopped at the mall, and attended various religious
services—all with the aim of understanding how Americans live and
how they think about ethical issues. What might he conclude?
Sleep-Test Ethics 43
This question may seem to invite little more than speculation.
After all, Aristotle lived long ago, between 384 and 322
B.C.
Little
is known about his early life: some accounts describe a period of
‘‘riotous living’’; others, a more somber and inspiring boyhood.
2
Moreover, the classical culture Aristotle knew—that of Athens, a
small Greek city-state—differed greatly from the culture of modern
or postmodern America. But much of what Aristotle wrote has sur-
vived, both physically and intellectually. We have, for example, his
lecture notes on ethics, called The Nichomachean Ethics. And we have
his ideas, not as exhibits in museums of antiquity, but as sources of
continuing insight for philosophers, psychologists, theologians, and
others, who reflect on his ideas and use them to understand contem-
porary ethical issues.
Aristotle studied and lived in Plato’s Academy for many years.
There he learned and taught Plato’s philosophy and then modified
it profoundly. Plato believed that true reality consists of unchanging,
flawless entities—such as perfect justice, perfect truth, and perfect
beauty—which he called ‘‘the eternal forms.’’ (The search for univer-
sal grand principles is a Platonic endeavor.) The eternal forms can
be known only through our intellects. In contrast, in our everyday
lives, we muck about with imperfect versions of the eternal forms,
because we rely so heavily on the crude instruments of our senses.
Aristotle took a different approach: he refused to dismiss the
reports of our senses as mere shadows of reality. He had a scientist’s
instinctive regard for empirical detail. He loved to watch, examine,
investigate, and classify. Hence, the prospect of studying contempo-
rary Americans—a people unlike any he had ever encountered—
would surely have excited him.
What if Aristotle, while studying the United States, did something
a colleague and I did recently, and asked a group of thoughtful men
and women, mostly in their late twenties, to describe how they would
resolve difficult ethical dilemmas?
3
Many of the answers we heard were
versions of sleep-test ethics. Here are some typical comments:
Just do what’s right. Do what you believe is right.
This sounds hokey, but it’s how you feel. If something makes you feel
bad, that’s untenable.
44 D
EFINING
M
OMENTS
You need to draw upon your own experiences and values. You use these
as a compass. These should be the guiding light.
I guess my thought is, How does it make you feel? If you’re getting sick
all the time, that tells you something. The bottom line is what you’re
comfortable with.
Behind these four comments is a view of the world that the Canadian
author Douglas Coupland called, in his novel Generation X, ‘‘me-ism.’’
This is a ‘‘search by an individual, in the absence of training in
traditional religious tenets, to formulate a personally tailored religion
by himself.’’
4
Note that ‘‘me-ism’’ does not mean selfishness; it refers
to a customized, composite personal faith.
Me-ism even seems to be spreading across the globe. For example,
Kenichi Ohmai, a prominent Japanese business consultant and writer,
has described contemporary Japanese teenagers as a Nintendo gener-
ation. They are responding to a powerful subliminal message of
videogames: ‘‘one can take active control of one’s situation and
change one’s fate. No one need submit passively to authority. Every-
thing can be explored, rearranged, and reprogrammed. Nothing has
to be fixed or final.’’
5
Aristotle would probably find all this very troubling. For one
thing, the four students’ comments and the me-ism they represent
seem to sanctify individuals’ intuitions. Although Aristotle believed
that intuition was a valuable guide to ethical problems, he did not
think that a moral intuition, however clear and heartfelt, could certify
its own moral soundness.
Everyone knows people who sleep quite soundly even though
they have the ethics of bottom-dwelling slugs. They may be masters
of rationalization or denial, they may be sociopaths and lack a
conscience, but they can look themselves in the mirror and live
in peace with whatever perfidy they have committed. During the
Holocaust, a good number of doctors spent their days committing
atrocities in the concentration camps, and then sat down to quiet
family dinners.
In contrast, responsible people sometimes lie awake at night pre-
cisely because they have done the right thing. They understand that their
decisions have real consequences, that success is not guaranteed,
Sleep-Test Ethics 45
and that they will be held accountable for their decisions. They
also understand that acting honorably and decently can, in some
circumstances, complicate or damage a person’s career. In short, if
people like Hitler sometimes sleep well and if people like Mother
Teresa sometimes sleep badly, we can place little faith in simple
sleep-test ethics.
Aristotle would also be disturbed by the individualism—indeed,
the hyperindividualism—underlying me-ism. It reflects the crudely
egalitarian worldview, ‘‘You’re entitled to your views and I’m entitled
to mine.’’ He would no doubt be stunned by comments like the one
a student of mine made to his wife: ‘‘Look, just do what you think
is right. You’re 25. You don’t have to answer to anyone.’’
Notice the social and ethical restraints on individual behavior
that the four representative comments and me-ism do not include.
Aristotle believed that four great virtues—courage, justice, prudence,
and temperance—should govern human behavior. All are missing
and unaccounted for here. So, too, are the ethics of duties or the
ethics of consequences, the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule,
and other tenets of organized religion.
6
One other consideration would also trouble Aristotle: the society
and culture that have shaped me-ism. Aristotle trusted individual
judgment, as long as the individual had a sound moral character.
But sound character, in his mind, derived from growing up in a
community that respected his four virtues and trained young people
to think and act in accordance with them. Hence, Aristotle might
not place much confidence in the instinctive judgments of a 25-
year-old like Steve Lewis or a 35-year-old like Peter Adario—after
having observed the pervasive role of television in contemporary
life. The average American child, for example, sees 18,000 murders
on television by the age of 16, and 350,000 commercials by the age
of 18.
7
In a society in which many people can recite more
commercial jingles than prayers and poems, Aristotle might be
reluctant to give too much weight to spontaneous moral sentiments.
One young man explained the problem to me in these terms: he
feared that, when he faced a difficult problem and looked deep into
his soul, he would find mostly reruns of ‘‘Gilligan’s Island’’ and ‘‘The
Brady Bunch.’’
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