Ethical Choices - Three Ways to be Wrong

Each individual wrong begins with someone's decision to do something other right. Corporations spend millions of dollars in an effort to keep from losing more millions in fraud and employee theft. A significant portion of a government's budget is dedicated to discovering, policing, judging, incarcerating, and rehabilitating wrongdoers. Much of private charity is given to recifying such wrongs as street crime, family violence and drug abuse. As each of these problems comprises a collection of individual acts, right versus wrong constitutes considerable ethical considerations.

Right-versus-wrong choices are commonplace and widely understood to be wrong. We typically think of them in three ways: Violation of the Law; Departure from the Truth; and Deviation from Moral Rectitude.

Violation of the law wrongdoings involve failure to comply with specific laws. Lack of compliance can arise ignorantly, because we don't know the law and its applications; or intentionally, because we willfully choose to violate the law. Increasingly corporations are designating "compliance officers." Their task is to keep managers informed about the law and urging respect for it. As promoters of the respect for the law, they tend to become the corporate ethics officers.They serve as sources of information, helping to warn managers away from preventable regulatory and legal problems.

Departure from the truth describes the wrong that does not align with the facts as generally known. These sorts of "wrongs," where a great deal of energy is spent trying to determine the relation between what is said to have happen and what actually happened, lie at the core of the legal process. However, these departures from the truth go well beyond the law. At their simplest, they concern the honest misreading of data. Incorrectly calculating your bank balance and bouncing a check. At their most complex, such departures shade into complicated issues of misinterpretation. The assertion that a statement may in fact be "wrong" in that it does not depict what actually happened - may not be able to determine "what actually happened" and in these cases , we may never know.

Deviation from Moral Rectitude (morally correct behavior or thinking) are wrong not because they violate the law or fail to comport with fact, but because they go against the moral grain. In other words, they don't square with our present day code of widely spread and broadly understood fundamental inner values that defines the difference between right and wrong. The "present day" reservation is important. As the history of the Western civilization easily demonstrates, what's right and wrong can change. Such changes arise not only from passing cultural frights or faddish cultural movements. They sometimes come from deep-seated shifts in the moral structure of the age. However much individual attitudes may change, one fact is clear, there remains a fixed measure within all of us, a kind of inner core that helps us separate right from wrong. It may be shaped largely by those around us. It may be based on deep religious conviction or clearly reseasoned views; or conversely on unexamined instincts and hazy notions. It may be almost out of sight, but it's there.


Taken from Rushmore M. Kidder's How Good People Make Tough Choices.