British philosopher Philippa Foot (1920–2010) was living in an attic flat in Central London when the Nazis began raining V1 missiles down on the city. At night, sirens and the sounds of nearby explosions would send her rushing into the bathtub for protection from breaking glass; on her way to work in the morning, she would walk by the ruins of still-smoldering buildings hit the night before. Then, as suddenly as they had started, the missiles stopped.
It was only after the war that Foot discovered British double agents had fed the Nazi war machine misleading information about their missile targeting, redirecting them to fall short of the core of the city into South London. The government claimed the ruse had saved thousands of lives. It also prompted one of the most famous thought experiments in ethics.
Foot wondered about the ethics of redirecting missiles that were certain to kill people no matter where they landed. And she recast the dilemma in a homely little riddle. As she originally framed it, a runaway tram will kill five track workers unless the engineer switches it to a siding where it will only kill one hapless victim. There will inevitably be a death, but whether it is one or five is up to the engineer. Should he flip the switch?
Studies show most people reluctantly say “yes.” Indeed, the consequentialist theory of ethics seems to demand it. After all, by flipping the switch the engineer would save five lives, even at the cost of one. The rub, as Foot pointed out, is that few people would make the same decision under situations with exactly the same cost-benefit ratio, say killing one person in order to harvest organs that could save five lives. Why do people react so differently to situations that, at least mathematically, seem so similar? Foot explained the difference by drawing moral distinctions between intended and unintended consequences, between doing and allowing.1
Ethicists ever since have had a field day designing situations with slightly different variations on the trolley riddle to unmask exactly what is going through people’s minds as they ponder their choices. In the process, they gave birth to a whole new field of applied ethics dubbed “Trolleyology.” Ironically, they might have lowered their aim a bit. What is going through people’s minds seems less important than what’s going on in their guts.
Jonathan Haidt
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has been studying people’s moral intuitions ever since he wrote his PhD thesis at the University of Pennsylvania—“Moral Judgment, Affect and Culture, Or Is It Wrong to Eat Your Dog?” (1992). Using an ingenious mix of experiments and online surveys in the United States, Europe, Brazil, and India, Haidt discovered we all share a fairly consistent set of moral values, the largely unconscious norms that cause us to think something is good or bad, right or wrong, worthwhile or worthless. Haidt (pronounced “height”) speculates evolution hardwired these moral intuitions into us starting about 10,000 years ago, before the invention of language, when the only thing standing between our ancestors and a dinner of mastodon was an inclination to selfishness. Hunters who were inclined to work in groups survived and had offspring who learned the same cooperative behavior. The loners and the free riders did not do so well.2
Of course, working in groups was not the only behavior that benefited from those gut feelings. Hunter-gatherers who bit into rotten meat did not live as long as those who were disgusted by it, a feeling passed down to future generations. In all, Haidt came up with at least six psychological mechanisms that “comprise the universal foundations of the world’s many moral matrices” (Haidt, 2012, p. 181). Briefly, expressed as opposite ends of a spectrum, they are care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authenticity/subversion, liberty/oppression, and sanctity/degradation. Haidt left plenty of room for the discovery of additional psychological mechanisms, but the point is less their number than their innate universality.
Haidt believes moral feelings are as much a part of our DNA as opposable thumbs. We use reason to explain and systematize our moral feelings or to convince others of our beliefs. Societies give different weights to these individual feelings. That is why moral standards vary so widely from culture to culture. But all people make their initial moral choices on a mix of these universal gut feelings. In fact, neuroscientists claim they can see it happening using functional magnetic resonance imaging scans.3
W. D. Ross
William David Ross (1877–1971) died before Haidt and others set forth their evolutionary-based theories of moral sentiments. But he would not have been terribly surprised by them. W. D. Ross, as he is known in ethical literature, was an intuitionist. That is, he believed that certain fundamental ethical rules—like keeping promises or telling the truth—are so obvious as to be self-evident, requiring no lengthy explanation or reasoning. “The moral order … is just as much part of the fundamental nature of the universe,” he wrote, “as is the spatial or numerical structure expressed in the axioms of geometry or arithmetic” (Ross, 1930/2002, pp. 29–30). In fact, Ross believed all human beings have at least seven axiomatic duties or obligations toward others:
1. Fidelity. To keep promises and to be honest and truthful.
2. Reparation. To make amends when we have wronged someone else.
3. Gratitude. To be grateful to others when they perform actions that benefit us and to try to return the favor.
4. Harm-prevention (or non-maleficence). To prevent harm to others either physically or psychologically.
5. Beneficence. To do good to others, to foster their health, wisdom, security, happiness, and well-being.
6. Self-improvement. To improve our own health, wisdom, security, happiness, and well-being.
7. Justice. To be fair, distributing benefits and burdens equitably and evenly.
Ross was open to the idea of adding duties, but critics have usually found a way to squeeze them into the canonical list.4 For example, some suggested “respect for freedom: to avoid coercing people in any way,” only to conclude it is included in beneficence. Others, suggested “non-parasitism: to abide by the rules of an institution from which we derive benefits,” but that seemed to be included in the duty of justice. There was a groundswell for the duty of “care: to attend to the needs of those with whom we have a special relationship, such as within families or among close friends,” but it already seems part of beneficence. (Nevertheless, a whole ethical theory has been built around the concept of care and we will devote some attention to it in Chapter 10.)
Whatever their number, Ross termed these duties prima facie. That is Latin for “at first sight,” but he did not mean they were simply apparent duties; he considered them very real. Unlike Kant, he believed human beings had multiple ethical duties rather than a single categorical imperative. And he realized that in real life, these obligations would often conflict, with one duty having greater urgency than the others, depending on the circumstances.
Ross did not prioritize these duties in the abstract; he believed every situation must be evaluated separately. However, he did offer some “rules of thumb.” For example, he suggested duties of non-malfeasance, fidelity, reparation, justice, and gratitude are usually weightier than the duty of beneficence (1930/2002, pp. 75–77). And he would probably agree that, unless a great deal is at stake, it is wrong to harm others in order to keep a promise, correct a previous wrong, or express gratitude.
Ross (1930/2002, p. 27) was also quick to point out that in actual experience these various duties are “compounded together in highly complex ways.” For example, our duty to obey our country’s laws arises partly from gratitude for the benefits of living there, partly from an implicit promise to obey them, and partly because they prevent harm and do good.
Ross was a very practical philosopher, and the two things he disliked most about Kant’s approach to ethics were its level of abstraction and its absolutism. To Ross’s mind, ethics is a nonexact, practical science that deals in probabilities not certainties. Its fundamental precepts may be self-evident, requiring no further proof, but their application is messy, and people frequently disagree about what is right and wrong in a given case. That does not make right and wrong relative; it simply recognizes that, in practical terms, it is often difficult to get everyone on the same page (Ross, 1930/2002, p. 31).
Right and Good
That is why Ross distinguished between the right and the good. The “good” refers to an objective standard that is sometimes difficult to determine with certainty. It is there, but we do not always see it. The “right,” on the other hand, refers to actions. And Ross agreed with Kant’s conception of “good will,” that for an act to be ethical, we must do it because we believe it is the right thing to do. A right action is one motivated by good will. Not all right actions, however, produce results that are “good” in a moral sense. Rather, Ross said, even the most careful, reflective actions necessarily involve, moral risk. That is what makes dilemmas such as the trolley problem so stressful (Ross, 1930/2002, p. 30).
Interestingly, many of Ross’s prima facie duties seem to be consequentialist. Beneficence, non-malfeasance, self-improvement, reparation, and justice all address the consequences of our actions in one way or another. Because of that, some ethicists consider Ross a bridge between Kant and Mill (i.e., between deontologists and utilitarians). But Ross himself cautioned that we should never make moral judgments solely on the basis of their consequences, but rather on the relative weight our intuition tells us to give our conflicting duties in a given situation (pp. 21–27). And he did not claim our moral intuitions are infallible. On the contrary, he said they required deep reflection and consideration, especially in the context of our human relationships.
Ross believed the particular roles we play in the lives of others give rise to specific ethical obligations that might not be so obvious. For example, in the everyday practice of public relations, we have specific duties to at least six categories of people: ourselves, our employer, our clients, client stakeholders, our fellow practitioners, and society in general. For example,
• Duties to ourselves. To preserve our personal integrity, to avoid violating our own values and beliefs, to maintain our professional competence.
• Duties to our employer. To follow the employment practices and policies of whoever is paying our salary, to be loyal and protect their confidences.
• Duties to our clients. To give our clients competent service and to respect their confidences.
• Duties to our clients’ stakeholders. To communicate openly and truthfully, respecting their rights, including the right to reason.
• Duties to fellow practitioners. To adhere to professional standards and to do nothing that casts the practice of public relations into disrepute.
• Duties to society. To serve the common good.
Note that these duties are interrelated. For example, providing competent service is something we owe our employer and our clients as well as ourselves. It includes ensuring we have the skills to handle the assignments we take on, recognizing our own limitations, and never overpromising. How we relate to our clients and to our clients’ stakeholders will reflect on fellow practitioners and should be in keeping with best practice. Similarly, our duty to serve the common good arises not only from our own prima facie duty of beneficence, but also from our duty to serve our client faithfully. As we have seen, our clients themselves have a duty to serve the common good, and helping them do so is part of our role as public relations practitioners.
Complicating matters, as previously noted, the duty of beneficence, which Ross considered the basis for serving the common good, has traditionally taken a back seat to all the other prima facie duties. Benevolence is what Ross and Kant termed an “imperfect duty,” something we are only obliged to do when we can. As business ethicist William Shaw (2005, p. 61) points out, “Most non-utilitarian philosophers, like Ross, believe we have some obligation to promote the general welfare, but they typically view this obligation as less stringent than, for example, the obligation not to injure people.” Under that theory, in a world of practical constraints, it would be perfectly ethical for a factory owner to spend money reducing pollution (non-malfeasance) rather than opening an on-site day care center (beneficence).
But Shaw suggests there is another way to look at these dilemmas. In some ways, it is the flipside of Ross’s theory of duties—the concept of rights. Duties are obligations we have to others; rights are legitimate claims others can place on us. The legitimacy of some rights comes from the law, as in the right to vote. But people are also entitled to many rights simply because they are human beings. These human rights are natural; they do not depend on social institutions as legal rights do. They apply to everyone equally and cannot be given up or sold to someone else.
Universal Human Rights
Following World War II, the newly established United Nations made one of its first orders of business the declaration of inalienable human rights recognized by all members of the international community. It includes civil and political rights such as life, liberty, free speech, and privacy, as well as social and economic rights such as security, health, and education. The interpretation and implementation of these rights has been uneven across the international community. But some believe the concept of moral rights changes the ethical playing field. As Shaw (2005, p. 63) points out, “Once moral rights are asserted, the locus of moral judgment becomes the individual, not society.” The goal is no longer the greatest good for the greatest number, but respecting the rights of the people directly affected. So even though Facebook could run a more reliable experiment by not telling nearly a million users it was manipulating their news feeds, most ethicists—and the company itself—concluded it was ethically wrong.5
From an organizational perspective, Ross’s theory of prima facie duties recognizes the existence of multiple, sometimes conflicting obligations that can pull an organization in different directions as it pursues its legitimate interests. But the concept of human rights puts those obligations within a bounded context, by demanding that an ethically responsible organization carefully consider how its actions will impinge on the legitimate claims of those to whom it owes prima facie duties, including its investors, customers, employees, and the communities in which it operates. As Shaw (2013, p. 64) noted, under Ross’s ethical theory, “moral rights place distinct and firm constraints on what sorts of things an organization can do to fulfill its own ends.”
Occasionally—and perhaps more frequently than we might expect—corporations fail in the exercise of those duties. In late 2014, the New York Times revealed that General Motors had compiled a list of 13 people killed as a result of faulty ignitions. Yet, apparently the company had not notified any of the surviving families directly, even though they were entitled to compensation and the deadline for applying was less than two months away. One family did not know until called by a reporter.6 After the Times reported on the issue, GM remembered its prima facie duty of reparation and extended the deadline by one month.
In such cases and under certain circumstances, public relations people have an ethical duty to themselves, to their colleagues, and to society at large to intervene. Assuming you are operating on more than suspicions and have concrete evidence of unethical behavior, your responsibility to report it increases depending on the severity of the problem you have observed, the certainty of the harm it will cause, your own degree of involvement, the cost of acting, and the certainty of solving the problem. The closer you are to the problem—for example, if it is in your own organization—the greater your responsibility.
In many cases, your company code of conduct will demand that you report your suspicions and it will provide a confidential channel for doing so. If that avenue does not work, and you are certain that you have uncovered genuine wrongdoing that could lead to serious harm or is against the law, you have an obligation to bring it to the attention of outside authorities. Some people will not like it, and you could be wrong. But research shows bad behavior spreads when good people look the other way.
Duties and Loyalties
An additional complicating factor for public relations practitioners is that our duties quickly translate into loyalties. In fact, ethicist Patricia Parsons (2008, p.25) defines loyalty this way—someone to whom we owe a duty and who in return places trust in us. It is not surprising then that when we have conflicting duties—or loyalties—we gravitate to the party who has placed the most obvious trust in us, often manifest in the form of our paycheck. Furthermore, in practice, public relations people tend to identify with their clients. In many cases, they have bonded in the course of their work, especially if they have weathered a difficult crisis together. But public relations people have to balance their duty to their clients with their duty to operate in the public interest. And that brings us to one of life’s challenges—balancing basic values. Recent studies show that considerations of loyalty and fairness influence whether or not people report unethical behavior (Waytz et al., 2013). People who value fairness more than loyalty are more willing to blow the whistle, while people who value loyalty over fairness are more hesitant.
The whole point of ethical reasoning is finding the right balance between values. But our natural inclinations can skew us in one direction or another. Like all of us, you probably give more weight to some ethical values than to others. Try to understand which. Then ask yourself if it is appropriate in the circumstances at hand. If you find that question difficult, consider taking the moral foundations survey at www.yourmorals.org. It will give you some insight into the foundation of your personal ethics.
Summary
Many evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists believe we are all hardwired with moral instincts, gut feelings that make certain behaviors—like harming others, cheating, or acting disloyally—physically uncomfortable. That may be why the Trolley thought experiment dumbfounds so many people. In one case, they will sacrifice one life to save five, justifying it as serving the greater good. But in a similar situation, with the prospect of getting identical results, they will refuse to act. The difference seems to have something to do with one’s direct involvement in sacrificing one person for five. When it is only a matter of flipping a switch, we can calculate the greater good; but when we actually have to shove someone in the path of the trolley … oh my.
Although he was less concerned with people’s guts than their minds, W. D. Ross believed everyone is instinctually aware of certain fundamental duties—to keep promises, treat people fairly, avoid harming others, make amends when we wrong someone, improve ourselves, express gratitude for favors, and do good for others. He thought these duties were obvious (prima facie), but he also realized they would sometimes conflict. What if keeping a promise harms someone? Life is full of such conflicts, especially because we all play multiple roles—employee, parent, child, friend, and so forth—and each role comes with a separate set of duties. As public relations practitioners, we have duties to at least six categories of people: ourselves, our employer, our clients, client stakeholders, our fellow practitioners, and society in general.
Furthermore, other people have rights, legitimate claims they can place on us. Some rights are granted by law; many are rights people possess simply because they are human beings. These natural human rights are universal, nontransferable, and define the boundaries within which a company can legitimately pursue its economic, legal, and ethical interests.
Public relations people operate within the free fire zone of these conflicting loyalties and interests. Finding the right balance between them is messy and not without moral risk. In the next chapter, we will examine an attempt to reconstruct traditional ethical theory along the lines of contemporary feminist values and experiences, with particular emphasis on two of Ross’s prima facie duties, justice and care (non-malfeasance and beneficence).
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1 The full ethical implications of Foot’s thought experiments are vividly described in David Edmond’s Would You Kill The Fat Man, Princeton University Press, 2013.
2 Don Stacks put forth a similar proposition in his notion of preverbal areas of the brain set at birth as compared with others that are only partially set and culturally adaptive. See Stacks (1983) and Stacks and Anderson (1989).
3 Haidt takes special note of studies by philosopher and neuroscientist Joshua Greene, especially a paper he co-wrote with R. B. Sommerville, L. E. Nystrom, J.M. Darley, and J.D. Cohen. (2001). An fMRI Study of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment. Science, Vol. 293, pp, 2105–2108.
4 There is also some controversy about the precise number of duties Ross prescribed. His initial list counted five—fidelity, gratitude, reparation, beneficence, and non-maleficence. But he later added justice and self-improvement, even while arguing that they could also be included in beneficence. In the end, he thought people might want to add to the list, but he was confident the seven he enumerated represented a person’s core duties.
5 Facebook’s chief technical officer, Mike Schroepfer (2014, October 2), apologized for manipulating newsfeeds to see how people reacted to friends’ positive and negative postings. The results published in June 2014 generated such a strong backlash, Schroepfer issued an apology and outlined steps the company had taken to improve its research. The company’s guidelines are available at http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/10/research-at-facebook/.
6 Abrams, R. (2014, November 10). 11 years later, woman’s death is tied to G.M. ignition defect. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/business/11-years-later-death-is-tied-to-gm-defect.html?ref=business. Accessed July 22, 2015.