Serious (but not sanctimonious) orientation and reinforcement programs should be designed to produce the following: knowledge of applicable laws and internal rules and policies; understanding of the underlying values and ethical principles; the ability to apply rules, standards, guidelines, and values to specific decision making situations, and positive ethical attitudes, including a sense of personal accountability and individual moral autonomy. In addition, programs should seek to develop issue spotting, reasoning and other decision making skills.
Educational programs designed to affect attitudes and conduct need to be considerably more sophisticated than those intended to convey information. The process must be more intimate, personal and interactive.
The traditional lecture approach ought to be scrapped in favor of large and small group discussions of practical cases and common issues. Although some changes can result from inspirational speeches, generally sermonizing or moralizing about ethics is not very effective in changing attitudes and behavior. In fact, it may be counterproductive if the lecturer is sanctimonious or unduly pious—as Paul Gorman and Ram Dass said in their book, How Can I Help?, “No one likes to be should upon.”
Ethical Consciousness
Anticipating Unintended Consequences. A critical dimension of ethics education should focus on the ability to perceive latent ethical issues. Much inappropriate conduct is caused by insensitivity to the ethical implications of actions, and people are often “blind sided” by consequences they neither intended nor anticipated.
Ethical conscious training strategies should be employed to enhance the ability to anticipate and evaluate the practical and moral issues arising from decisions. One important method encourages the decision maker to analyze systematically decision making options in terms of the previously listed ethical principles: honesty, integrity, promise keeping, loyalty, fairness, caring and respect for others, law abidingness, pursuit of excellence, and accountability. Another dimension of analysis can be taught by systematic consideration of how the decision will affect all the various stakeholder groups—persons affected by the decision.
Recognizing the Causes of Unethical Conduct. Another level of ethical consciousness involves sensitizing decision makers to the four factors that tend to overcome ethical instincts: self-interest, self-protection, self-deception and self-righteousness.
Employees can be encouraged to anticipate these reactions and to understand that their rationalizations are not essentially different from those of any other person who feels put upon by an unjust law. Obeying so called ethics laws is simply part of the job.
Self-interest tends to dull one’s ethical sensitivities. When personal interests are at stake, objectivity is almost impossible. In such cases, there is a tendency to greatly overweigh the importance and miscalculate the justification for the questionable conduct. In such cases, the ethical decision maker should look for an outside objective voice.
Ethical Competencies
Seeing the ethical issues (ethical consciousness) and wanting to do the right thing (ethical commitment) is not enough to insure ethical conduct. There is still the matter of doing ethics and ethics is easier said than done. To assure that persons follow through on ethical decisions, an effective training program ought to develop and enhance proficiencies of reasoning and problem solving essential to ethical conduct.
Reasoning and Judgment Skills. An ethics program ought to seek to enhance the ability to evaluate facts and make reasonably reliable predictions about the likely consequences of decisions. Many people overestimate the costs of being ethical and underestimate the costs of compromising ethical values. For example, decisions which involve deceit or secrecy often create collateral risks that are not seen or properly evaluated.
Problem-Solving and Implementation. A program ought to seek to improve proficiency in creative, realistic problem-solving by teaching methods of developing alternative solutions and methods of implementing them. Many public sector professionals fail to choose the “high road” because they believe that the consequences of the ethical decision are too costly. Programs should provide structures and approaches that will help an ethically committed person handle a matter so as to minimize or eliminate undesired results.
