What to do Until the Ethics Advisor Comes

If you don't know now, you never will.

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Last week, we talked about the limitations of RightSpeak as a way of solving society’s problems. I argued that any system based on confrontational individualism eventually winds up settling nothing, and just strengthening the position of the already powerful. If we take a step back for a moment, and look at why and how and why other codes of behaviour emerged, we can see the shattered remains of a better system, that may also turn out to be a modest hope for the future.

I don’t follow British politics with the obsessive attention that I did when I worked in government, and so I plead guilty to not knowing until recently that the British Prime Minister had an Ethics Advisor. Now I had two immediate thoughts on learning this. The first was that any organisation that has to appoint an Ethics Advisor is in deep, and possibly terminal, trouble. And indeed, that appears to be the case. The second was to ask who this paragon of wisdom might be: a Professor of Philosophy, perhaps, a specialist in Aristotle, Kant or Spinoza?

Well, not exactly. Lord Geidt (for it is he) turns out to be a former diplomat and UN official, and a former Private Secretary to the Queen. Which is fine, and I’m sure he’s both a very honest and a very able man, but what possible qualifications does he have for advising the crew of a pirate ship on Ethics, and why should they listen to him?

As we peel away the layers of the issue, we discover that his precise title was Independent Advisor on Minister’s Interests. Now, that may confuse the unwary, because of course Ministers have interests. Herbert Asquith, when Prime Minister, used to like to go trout fishing. No, it’s not that. “Interests” here means “ways of potentially making money in addition to your government salary.” So, should a Minister arrange for a non-competitive contract to be awarded to a company in which his wife owns shares and which is run by an old University friend? Um, difficult one that. Aristotle would sit up nights worrying over the fine detail of whether it was ethically acceptable or not. Or not, because if you need an Ethics Advisor to tell you not to do such things, you’re lost even before you start.

How do such situations arise? Well, RightSpeak is based, as we have seen, on conflicting demands for What I Want, and in practice Liberals recognise that not all desires can be accommodated at the same time, and some method has to be found of adjudicating between them. The first Liberals were lawyers, and so their imaginations naturally turned to a variant of contract law as a solution. What is required, then, is a large and elaborate body of rules, to prevent individual selfishness getting so far out of control that the good order of society is threatened, and wealth and property put in jeopardy. If there is a fundamental requirement of the corpus of Liberal ideas of which RightSpeak is part, it is that precise and carefully worded rules must replace customs and understandings, and if there is a single overriding assumption, it is that such a process is in fact possible, and even more successful than traditional unwritten rules.

In reality, this is no more than a bedtime story that Contract Lawyers tell to their children. It has obvious major weaknesses. In particular, it implies that a system can completely describe itself. So, if everybody’s rights are set out in excruciating detail, then the answer to any social or political question must be found by analysing the written texts and the surrounding jurisprudence.  In reality, we all know this is not true. No system of rules, however complex, can cover every eventuality, nor predict every interaction. (If you are interested, check out Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, which proves much the same about rules involving numbers, and has a lot of wider philosophical applications.) In reality, more rules and more jurisprudence create more complexity and less certainty. Paradoxically, an elaborate and complex code of Rights provides less protection than a simple norms-based one does: a point to which I return.

Consider, for example, how a society might treat the problem of obesity. (This example occurred to me after seeing a number of obese women in a provincial French city at lunchtime today. Let nobody fool you that “French women don’t get fat.”) You could approach the problem of obesity through RightSpeak. Do people have the Right to be obese? Do people have the Right to eat whatever they want? Do people have the Right to be protected from misleading advertising? Can the military be forced to accept obese recruits? Should schools be obliged to install larger chairs and tables to cater for obese pupils?

Some people might find it interesting to debate such questions, accepting that there can be no agreement about the answers. But most of us instinctively feel that that’s the wrong place to start from. The real issue is: obesity is a social, medical, and even economic problem. What are we going to do about it? There are a variety of answers, but what they will all have in common is that they do not attempt to adjudicate competing Rights claims, but to solve a real-world problem, which is massively affecting health systems in many countries. The resulting solution might mean that, on one hand, food companies may be less free to put rubbish in our food, and schools might be less free to offer students what they “want” to eat. On the other, lobby groups may be less free to present obesity as a lifestyle choice. But those are consequences, rather than deliberate choices between competing Rights.

This approach—trying to decide on what is good for the group or for society as a whole—is the traditional one, and the one to which we instinctively revert when confronted with a real dilemma. Now it is true, of course, that such an approach has a number of inherent problems: notably, who gets to define what is good for society, who decides what that means in practice, and who implements it? All that’s true: the problem is that any other approach (such as competitive affirmation of Rights) generally produces a worse outcome, one based on who has money and power. Consider, for example, the following two assertions:

• people have a right to a healthy diet.

• governments have a duty to promote the health of the people.

The practical difference between them is very obvious. One is a slogan, the other is a requirement for action.

But as our society has moved farther and farther away from holistic approaches to problems, and more and more in the direction of the competitive affirmation of Rights, the resulting conflicts have had to be managed somehow, and the chosen method is a massive increase in rules and laws designed to impose new duties and obligations. As we have seen, every Right generates at least one corresponding obligation. The more complex and nuanced the Right is, or the more open to interpretation, the more complex and nuanced have to be the rules established to make sure that all likely obligations deriving from these Rights can be enforced, while taking account of the need to enforce completely different and even opposing Rights at the same time. The immediate result is a massive increase in rules, and in some cases laws, sometimes involving surprisingly private aspects of our personal daily life. The longer-term result has been that, paradoxically, people today generally have less autonomy in their daily lives than they did fifty years ago, even as they may have more theoretical Rights. And many of the obligations established by the internal rules of organisations are not, in fact, prescriptive, but defensive. They exist because they have to exist; they exist, quite cynically, so that an organisation can tick a box showing how virtuous it is, and avoid criticism, even while it continues to treat its staff like dirt.

What the late David Graeber called the “Utopia of Rules” can be a suburban Kafkaesque  nightmare at its worst, but in most cases it’s administered by people who are not themselves evil, or necessarily even ill-disposed, but rather caught up in a liberal-state logic of a rule for everything, with all conflicts generating new and more elaborate rules, and all unexpected problems being treated as failure to draft rules that are complete  enough. One of the consequences of such systems is that—as with laws generally—those with the time, patience and education to master the rules have an advantage over those who don’t. The last time I looked at the Code du travail, the collection of employment law in France, it was a thousand pages long. There are highly paid lawyers who are lifetime specialists in small parts of it. For all that the Code contains Rights and safeguards for employees, few ordinary workers who left school at sixteen will have the remotest idea what they are or where to find them.

But consider a street market in the Middle East or in Asia, where the traders know each other, and the customers know the traders. The first thing you notice is a sense of cooperation and mutual trust. You want that? Well, I haven’t got one left, because I’ve sold all mine, but my friend down there has. I’ll send someone there to pick one up. He’ll pay me back next time. Ah, sorry I don’t have change for that note: no, the price we agreed is the price, so my son will just get the trader in the next stall to change the money, and then I owe him a favour. Depending on the country, many of these people will be poorly educated: some may be illiterate. But they are held together by simple rules that ultimately benefit everyone. In such a society reputation counts for almost everything: treating your staff badly, selling poor-quality goods or not honouring informal contracts will get you ostracised.

It should be evident by now that even in principle no new system of Rights and Rules, no thousand-page compendium of contract law, no corps of market inspectors, no commercial courts, can ever produce the same effect. The difference with such innovations is one of psychological orientation. No longer, What should I do, but increasingly, What can I get away with?

This happens whenever the liberal state replaces unwritten rules with written ones. There are several reasons why. People accept unwritten rules much more easily. “Treat people with respect, be honest and do a good job” are instructions that hardly anyone will have a problem with. If they do, they can always find another job. By contrast, a fifty-page book of detailed rules, with a Powerpoint presentation and a compulsory half-day “training” course will probably manage to alienate the majority of a workforce. At a minimum, people will feel they are being treated like children, and not trusted. And of course the defence of these new Rights, and the enforcement of these new Rules, will empower new groups of people with their own agendas.

Consider the difference between the traditional “treat your fellow-workers with courtesy and respect” and some such linguistic monstrosity as

“(X organisation) is passionate about mutual respect and tolerance between all its human assets, and the creation and maintenance of a safe working environment for all, especially including these people, those people and the other people, as well as the ones over there. Thisism and Thatism, as well as Theotherism, will not be tolerated. Assets who feel that there have been violations of these guidelines should immediately bring them to the attention of  the Assistant Director General for Rights and Diversity, who will open an enquiry.”

You know the kind of thing. (I wish this was a parody.) But the difference isn’t just verbal, it’s moral. The first option is normative and general, and places the onus on the individual to understand and follow the general rules. But it also places a responsibility on the organisation and its leaders to set a good example, and establish a healthy working culture. When was the last organisation you encountered that did that?

It’s easier, paradoxically, to have elaborate rules and procedures, because it depersonalises the whole system. Leaders are no longer responsible: books of rules are. Rather than trying to actively ensure that things go well, the system waits passively for complaints, and the burden is then on the individual to seek redress in exercising a “Right” that may be largely illusory. No wonder so many organisations today are breaking down under the strain.

It can’t be stressed enough, again, that the liberal state ideology replaces “how should I behave?” with “what can I get away with?” That is to say it replaces a moral and social judgement with a technical and procedural one. After all, the role of lawyers has historically been to find a legal justification for a course of action that their client or employer has already decided upon. The larger the corpus of material is, the easier this justification will be to find. By contrast, nobody these days will say to someone in a position of power “are you sure you should be doing this?”

So it’s perfectly logical for an employee, after reading the fifty-page manual, enduring the Powerpoint presentation and the half-day training course, to sit down and analyse how he or she can turn all this to their advantage. Yes, this is a Right and this is a Right. This gives me an opportunity to complain about X and Y. This could be a problem, but I can argue that taken together with that paragraph, I’m not actually doing anything wrong. At which point, of course, organisations cease to function as organisations, except in the sense that pirate ships apparently did.

Which brings us back to ethics, finally. As every first-year philosophy student learns, the Greek word ethos simply meant “character,” and ethics began as the study of human behaviour. So the basic question of ethics, as summarised by Michael Sandel, is “what’s the right thing to do?” Here, “right” is a value judgement. It is not the exercise of Rights, nor is it the careful parsing of detailed provisions to construct an argument with footnotes that says you should be allowed to do something (or somebody else should not be). It is a moral judgement, often an instinctive one, which should reflect what you have absorbed from society and culture, and what the norms are of the profession, social or political movement, religion, or any other group you identify with. You are, or you should be, your own Ethics Advisor, and in almost all cases your advice to yourself will be “yes, that’s OK," or “no, I shouldn’t do that.” But Liberalism has already passed this way, and instead of Doing the Right Thing, we are encouraged to Do What is Best for our Rights. Thus Ethics Advisors don’t exist to tell us what to do, but to provide an ethical parachute to enable us to jump safely out of awkward situations. “Well, perhaps on reflection you shouldn’t have attended that performance of Siegfried at Covent Garden followed by the champagne reception and dinner, but I accept that you genuinely believed there would be a work-related component to the evening, even if you now can’t remember what led you to believe that.”

The problem is, that it’s much easier to destroy than to build up. Liberalism’s self appointed historical task of brushing away all tradition, all culture, all religion, all morality, in favour of rational laws, regulations and directives based on normatively generated logical and scientific principles has been very largely successful, and we are living with the results. But we are starting not to like them, which is one thing that gives me a little hope for the future. Clearly, you can’t expect to restore traditions, let alone create them, overnight: nor, perhaps should you. But I’ll close with three reasons why I think that the RightSpeak/Utopia of Rules approach may be losing its power.

The first is weariness and exhaustion. Every idea ultimately has a sell-by date, and intellectual fashions are no exception. At some point, new forces will arise in society and in organisations, that see it as in their interests to jettison this approach in favour of another. But more than just fashion is involved. In politics, RightSpeak, which is a discourse largely limited to the PMC and its aspirant members, is subject to heavier and heavier assault from both organised and informal political forces on the ground who value community, solidarity and culture more than they do standing around in circles screaming at each other. The attempted dismissal of such forces as “populist” is becoming less and less effective. Likewise, its now accepted that organisations are becoming increasingly dysfunctional: we read of NGOs that have largely stopped working because their members are engaged in permanent RightSpeak wars with each other, publishing houses forced by their employees to sack best-selling authors, or newspapers where reporters spend most of their time trying to get each other fired. In the end, no organisation and no society can continue like that for very long without coming apart, and political forces will arise to take advantage of the fact.

The second is changes in the nature of society. RightSpeak is only viable as an organising principle when things are going well. Adversity presents us with a choice: cooperate, or suffer together. For all that various interest groups tried to force RightSpeak interpretations on the Covid crisis (“the real victims of the crisis are X or Y”) there was a curiously perfunctory and ritual quality to the lobbying. After all, one could ask, so what? If the “real” victims of Covid are X or Y, it’s still not obvious that the usual remedy—giving them money—would actually have achieved anything. And Covid is not going away, just as there are a series of other nasty medical problems waiting their turn. People are worried about these problems, just as they are worried about poverty, inflation, insecurity, crime, immigration and many other things that the RightSpeak discourse cannot properly accommodate, let alone provide answers for. As a matter of simple logic, a system based on competition cannot provide a holistic solution, except by accident, and this is becoming increasingly obvious.

The third is the approaching end of what has, for elites at least, been a comfortable era. We have yet to really see the consequences of global warming, of the war in Ukraine, or of the economic disruption linked to the end of globalisation. For most of the western population, the generation after 1945 appeared to be when the historic scourges of war, disease, starvation and poverty had been banished. The professional classes who grew up in that period regarded those battles as won for all time, and put their minds to other things. Their own children and grandchildren then, growing up in turn in relative security, and increasingly remote from the concerns of ordinary people, strained after new evils and discriminations to fight, like lepidopterists seeking increasingly rare butterflies. Now, that attitude seems to be more and more like a luxury. It’s not that the future will necessarily be apocalyptic—we must certainly hope not—so much as that, for political, intellectual and media elites, the last generation or so has been an un-repeatably secure moral playground in which more and more exciting and glamorous RightSpeak initiatives can be undertaken. The future won’t necessarily be like that, though, and may well require a return to more traditional society-based and community-based efforts if we are to address some of these problems with any hope of success.

Speaking of which, I referred in passing last week to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man: its full title, though, includes the phrase “and the Citizen.” The concept of “citizen,” meaning an active member of a political society, has largely been abandoned these days: it’s not really compatible with RightSpeak, because it assumes obligations as well as Rights, and, whilst most people will complain about having too few Rights, not many will complain about having too few obligations.  Indeed, whilst it’s fashionable to criticise Greek democracy for being elitist and partial (only about ten per cent of Athenians were citizens, for example), it’s often forgotten that being a citizen carried with it the obligation to fight, and perhaps die, in the Army, to provide your own weapons and equipment, and to be prepared to serve the city in various capacities, sometimes selected by lot. The active citizen, with obligations as well as Rights, has more or less disappeared as a political type in our day: in the difficult times coming, we may need to think of it as a model once more.