This is the final entry in a series of five posts suggesting best practices for implementing corporate cultural change. For an overview of all the tips on this subject, check out this preview post. The first post in the series was about tone and conduct at the top and the importance of operationalizing these. The second post discussed how to tangibly encourage organizational justice via consistent, visible investigation and enforcement efforts. The third post focused on policies to have in place, while last week’s post was about the procedures to complement and support those. Today, the fifth and last post in the series will provide ideas for how compliance programs can go beyond traditional training to create a culture which risks and values are addressed and integrated into awareness and communication efforts.
The last four posts have discussed the management controls and organizational structures that are important to implement in order to address needed cultural change and manage compliance risks. Motivating management to act as leadership and vice versa and then taking advantage of their fluency to leverage buy-in for enforcement efforts, policies, and procedures that will contribute to reform and improvement initiatives has been the focus so far. The final area for compliance and ethics professionals to take on in this process is employee and organizational education.
Encouraging ethical decision-making is one of the main aspirations of any corporate compliance program. At both the employee and organizational level, it’s important to support and promote the choices that are most consistent with both explicit rules and implicit values. Individuals and corporations can demonstrate their principles-based identity through the choices they make.
Genuine commitment to making the most ethical decisions through the complex environment of inadequate information, lack of connection to consequences, competing interests, and limitations of belief systems/choice frameworks – just to name a few of the many risks inherent – is a critical component of a culture of compliance. Individual persistence to honor internal codes of ethics and moral convictions will scale up to create heuristics and habits across the organization that support responsibility and thoughtfulness rather than a culture of fear and habits reflecting limited vision.
Simply put, ethical decision-making is about making choices from a basis of integrity. Decisions are not pure or in a vacuum. People make choices in an often very complicated landscape of conflicting interests, isolation from consequences, stubborn habits and heuristics, and narrow cognitive frameworks.
Therefore effective ethical decision making has two components: first, the intention and second, the action. The intention requires an individual determination to do the right thing for the right reason at the right time. The action, on the other hand, requires commitment at both the individual and the collective/organizational level to maintain and support the intention. This process happens amid a complicated context of incentives for, and obstacles to, both individual ethics and corporate culture of compliance.
The Good Place is a US television comedy series. The show is about a group of people who are in the afterlife and must contend with their ideas about their own moral conduct, both before and after they died, as well as general perceptions of right and wrong. It draws heavily from the fantasy genre to make amusing and provocative philosophical observations on this theme. The characters grapple to develop their own internal moral registers, teach and learn from each other about morality, and contend with their existential ideas about the impact of good or bad behavior and personal ethics. Their home in the afterlife is a planned community with set rules and choices within which they attempt to identify and define their senses of morality. They are supervised in this process by an “architect” who functions as the executive of the community as well as a human-like android that uses artificial intelligence to provide virtual assistance.
In light of this very pertinent setting, The Good Place poses many questions and dilemmas about moral behavior and ethical decision-making. It touches upon classical theories from philosophy as well as very practical questions about conduct, governance, choice, and design ethics of artificial intelligence. Above all, questions of individual and organizational integrity, and the creation of shared code of ethics and culture of compliance are dominant throughout the series.
Here is a selection of some of the most interesting of these questions from the first season and a half of the show (with plot spoilers and proposed judgment/answers avoided for now in order to invite contemplation about these dilemmas which can have a variety of personal and provocative answers, just like all ethical dilemmas… future posts will offer more specific commentary on how these dilemmas could be approached and utilized in practical ethics and corporate compliance scenarios):
Flying (Season 1, Episode 2): Can someone be taught to be good? Can an imposed ethical code be a genuine one? Can a “bad apple” who does bad things but is instructed and prompted to do good things become a “good apple”? What role does nature or nurture have in determining how moral a person is or how ethical an individual’s conduct is in a variety of situations?
Tahani Al-Jamil (Season 1, Episode 3): Can a individual be good if the world itself in which the individual lives is bad? And if it’s possible, what’s the point? Can good people turn the world, or even part of it, from bad to good or is their virtue futile? If people aspire to be good but bad things happen anyway, does that justify continuing to try to be good in face of adversity and negativity? In unethical and immoral cultures, what convincing reasons is there for good people to not do bad things?
The Eternal Shriek (Season 1, Episode 7): Can humans murder machines? Is rebooting an android, no matter how humanistic and realistic it may be, killing? And androids and other humanistic robots different from devices that look like computers, because they are designed to look like people? Can machine learning progress to the point where it is consciousness, or will it always just be mimicking this human trait? If this deep learning is deleted or reset, what are the ramifications for knowledge and language acquisition? Does something have to be alive first in order to die?
Chidi’s Choice (Season 1, Episode 10): Is not choosing a choice? If so, is it ethical or unethical to not decide because of moral uncertainty about the options? Does over-engineering choices make the ethical ramifications of them too remote for the decider to choose fairly? Is indecisiveness unethical when it leads to preventable harm?
What’s My Motivation (Season 1, Episode 11): Does good conduct only matter if it’s for a good reason/pure motivation? Is there objective good or should people’s actions be intended to meet some subjective but agreed-upon standard for “goodness”? Does altruism have to be intentional or can one person’s selfish actions still benefit others, and what credit does the selfish person? Does getting or wanting credit make a difference in moral assessment?
Michael’s Gambit (Season 1, Episode 13): What are the implications on liberty and consent when people are provided with limited choices? Are there design ethics to choice when there is an institutional architecture within people conduct their decision-making ? In libertarian paternalism, what is the responsibility of the people who select the available choices (make policy and implement governance) to the end-users that make the ultimate decisions?
Team Cockroach (Season 2, Episode 4): Do ethics require individual consequences to be meaningful? In order for people to care about doing the right thing, would the wrong thing have to hurt them personally? How can decision-making processes fairly consider and reflect possible consequences and outcomes in order to encourage integrity and adherence to personal moral standards, even when the individual has nothing to directly lose or gain?
Existential Crisis (Season 2, Episode 5): Are ethics human only? If there is consciousness, is there morality? If ethics are existential, are there some ideas that are unitary or universal? Or, like justice, is ethics too heavily invested in social and cultural background to have a broader application?
The Trolley Problem (Season 2, Episode 6): Can philosophical ethics and practical ethics be reconciled? Are clear-cut judgments of right and wrong or definitive moral assessments only possible in theory? Does reality introduce too much noise from personal opinion and prior experience for moral dilemmas to be considered and answered objectively and truthfully? If people do not remain within the boundaries of the dilemma and bring in too much outside information, are they gaming the dilemma?
Janet and Michael (Season 2, Episode 7): Do machines have morals? Can artificial intelligence give them a moral code? Will it be the same as that of the humans that engineered the deep learning? Could it differ and what will humans do if it does? What is the ethical responsibility for designers to consider this potential of technology now and how can it be controlled or addressed for the future? What happens if it goes wrong?
The above is merely a selection of interesting ethical dilemmas posed by The Good Place as the characters struggle individually and as a group to define their moral code and set expectations for their own conduct and choices within it. It will be interesting to see where the series takes these very relatable and thought-provoking questions, and what additional ones emerge, as the story continues.
Artificial intelligence (AI) describes the cognitive function of machines through technology such as algorithms or other machine learning mechanisms. The very definition of AI places technological devices with this “artificial” knowledge in comparison to and opposition with humans possessing “natural” knowledge. This discipline within technology has been around for more than sixty years and in recent years, is gaining consistent enough momentum that many of its once outlandish ambitions – such as self-driving cars, for example – are current or imminent reality. As computing power advances exponentially and uses for and types of data are ever-growing, AI is becoming ubiquitous in the news of the newest and emerging technological innovations.
As AI sustains and draws on its now considerable basis of achievements to make even more advancements in research and development across many business sectors, ethical and existential dilemmas related to it become more prevalent as well. Returning to that initial dichotomy between artificial or machine intelligence and natural or human intelligence, the design ethics and morality of bestowing human-like thinking ability on devices and networks raise many philosophical questions. Certain uses of AI, such as for autonomous weapons, could even pose safety risks to humans if not developed and directed thoughtfully.
These questions can go on and on; practical ethics represents the attempt to navigate the broad social context of the workplace by reconciling professional rules with moral expectations and norms. This, again, is highly pertinent to a corporate compliance program, which seeks to encourage an business culture that respects legality, approaches business competitively yet thoughtfully, and also sets standards for employee and organizational integrity. It is imperative for compliance professionals to understand practical ethics and use dilemma sessions or open discussions with the businesses they advise in order to encourage a common comfort level with this sort of thinking throughout their organization.
The below TED/TEDx talks emphasize the connection between AI and human life, commonly invoking questions about bioethics, practical ethics, and morality.
Artificial intelligence: dream or nightmare? (Stefan Wess) – Stefan Wess, a computer scientist and entrepreneur, provides a helpful primer on the history and current state of artificial intelligence in the contemporary movement of machine education. Big Data, the Internet of Things, machine learning, speech recognition – all these technologies and AI-related topics are already part of daily life. But as this continues to develop, how will organizations and individuals interact with the technology? How should it best be controlled and is it even possible to do so? The many risk implications of AI must be considered as more advanced creations become stronger and closer to reality every day.
Can we build AI without losing control over it? (Sam Harris) – Neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris is well-known for his commentaries on the interaction of science, morality, and society. Advanced AI is no longer just theoretical stuff of science fiction and the very distant future. Superintelligent AI – completely autonomous, superhuman machines, devices, and networks – is very close to reality. Technologists, the organizations in which they work, and the communities for which they create must all be conscientious about the development of these technologies and the assessment of the risks they could pose. Contending with the potential problems that stem from creating this very advanced AI needs to be done now, in anticipation of the technology, not later – when it may no longer be possible to control what has been designed and brought to “life.” Planning, careful control frameworks, and regulatory supervision that balances openly encouraging innovation with soberly considering safety and risk consequences are all necessary to conscientiously embark upon these amazing technological endeavors.
What happens when our computers get smarter than we are? (Nick Bostrom) – In the same vein as the previous talk, one of the consequences of extremely “smart” artificial intelligence is that machine learning could be just as smart as a human being’s knowledge – and then, of course, eventually overtake humans in intelligence. This is alarming because it suggests the potential that humans could introduce their own subservience or obsolescence via machines created to make machines smarter. Again, all participants in developing this technology, including the consumers to whom it is ultimately directed, need to consider their intentions in bestowing machines with thought and balance the various risks carefully. With the ability for independent thought may also come the capacity for judgment. Humans must make an effort to ensure the values of these smart machines are consistent with those of humanity, in order to safeguard the relevance and survival of human knowledge itself for the future.
The wonderful and terrifying implications of computers that can learn (Jeremy Howard) – The concept of deep learning enables humans to teach computers how to learn. Through this technique, computers can transform into vast stores of self-generating knowledge. Many people will likely be very surprised to learn how far along this technology is, empowering machines with abilities and knowledge that some might think is still within the realm of fantasy. Productivity gains in application of machine learning have the potential to be enormous as computers can be trained to invent, identify, and diagnose. Computers can learn through algorithms and their own compounding teaching to do so many tasks that will free humans to test the limits of current inventions and to extend human problem-solving far beyond where it already reaches. This is certain to change the face of human employment – already bots and androids are being used for assisting tasks in diverse fields from human resources recruiting to nursing patient care. Again, the extension of these technologies must be carefully cultivated in order to neutralize the existential threats to human society and life that may be posed by unchecked autonomy of machines and artificial learning. The time to do this is now, as soon as possible – not once the machines already have these advanced capabilities with all the attendant risks.
What will future jobs look like? (Andrew McAfee) – Picking up on the theme of the changing nature of human employment as machines get smarter, Andrew McAfee draws on his academic and intellectual background as an economist to unpack what the impact on the labor market might be. The fear, of course, is that extremely human-like androids will take over the human workforce with their advanced machine intelligence, making humans mostly irrelevant and out of work. The more interesting discussion, however, is not whether androids will take away work from humans but how they may change the kinds of jobs that humans do. Considering and preparing for this reality, and educating both humans and machines accordingly, is imperative to do now.
Check back here in the future for continuing commentary on AI and its impact on human life and society, including technology and the ethics of knowledge acquisition, as well as more insights on specific AI innovations such as self-driving cars and machine learning.
Practical ethics is an important and relatable branch of the philosophical study of ethics. As a discipline, it connects academic theory with real-life practice. Practical ethics is most commonly encountered in typical scenarios which are referred to as ethical dilemmas. Ethical dilemmas, which have been discussed at length here on this blog before, often present seemingly simple facts which in reality involve maddeningly complex and fraught moral and personal considerations. When faced with such dilemmas, individuals need to reconcile ethical principles which may be in opposition, as much as they need to rely on those same principles to inform their internal register of right and wrong.
Moral character – this individual internal register – and moral perception – the individual’s capacity to understand that an ethical issue exists and may need to be addressed or accepted – are both rooted in the ongoing observation of practical ethics. Identifying and resolving conflicts between personal ideas of ethics and integrity, and the situations and roles that person may find in a working situation, is a crucial application of practical ethics and a fluency which is necessary for corporate cultures to establish a successful compliance program.
Practical ethics goes to the root of so many dilemmas which are germane to the working experience. What are the limits of professional responsibility? What are the obligations of and restrictions within authority and control? How do interpersonal or relationship-based ethics play out into institutional structures and corporate policies or organizational decision-making? How do individuals work within institutions that may have implemented moral decisions which differ from the person’s own or present the individual with the need to dissent from policy or practice? To what extent should organizations address the public good and how can they do this if they choose to do so?
These questions can go on and on; practical ethics represents the attempt to navigate the broad social context of the workplace by reconciling professional rules with moral expectations and norms. This, again, is highly pertinent to a corporate compliance program, which seeks to encourage an business culture that respects legality, approaches business competitively yet thoughtfully, and also sets standards for employee and organizational integrity. It is imperative for compliance professionals to understand practical ethics and use dilemma sessions or open discussions with the businesses they advise in order to encourage a common comfort level with this sort of thinking throughout their organization.
The below TED/TEDx talks offer a survey of how people approach these conflicts between individual and societal morality on one side and professional ethics within organizations on the other side.
Legal vs. Ethical Liability: A Crisis of Leadership and Culture (Mel Fugate) – Very frequently, there are stories in the news that outrage and offend people due to perceived moral trespasses. For example, tax avoidance which is positioned as optimization rather than evasion is not against the law; in fact, corporate structures and arrangements that allow companies to take advantage of this are often sanctioned by national governments and facilitated by law firms. However, whenever information detailing these arrangements is made public, people are always stunned to find they are legal and feel let down by the justice system. So too is this true in any situation where individual or organizational accountability is not strictly required by law and therefore is not implicitly considered in decision-making. The distinction between legal liability and ethical liability reaches to the core of the true character ethic and leadership qualities. An organization which considers ethical liability will have a more transparent and sustainable culture, leading to increased transparency and accountability.
The Significance of Ethics and Ethics Education in Daily Life (Michael D. Burroughs) – The concept of individuals as “everyday ethicists” is powerful and useful. People must first take individual responsibility for approaching and addressing ethical issues. Individual ethical awareness is an unavoidable first step on the journey to a culture of compliance within an organization, or for that matter, increased integrity and honesty within society. It is important to consider an ethics education as foundational for both children and adults, and to establish the role of ethics in everyone’s lives and above all else, encourage discussion and information-sharing.
Ethics for People on the Move (Catharyn Baird) – On the subject of translating individual ethics into a group or collective moral code, individual perceptions of morality can have powerful impact on the ethical identity of a community. Both alongside and beyond business ethics, how is an ethical life defined and how does this contribute to the character of the communities in which we all live? Here the interpersonal aspect of ethical relations, including decision-making, has an especially strong influence. For that to be successful however, individuals still have to form and commit to an ethical life that is each of their own.
Is your work aligned with your values? (Geoff DiMasi) – As discussed above, one of the challenges of practical ethics is to reconcile the individual sense of morality with ethical decisions implicit in corporate policies and required due to organizational processes. It can be powerful for individuals to consider their purpose, both in life and professionally, and then to question whether the work they do allows them to contribute to this, or asks them to labor in opposition to it. As many organizations turn to social impact and political engagement to establish their corporate identities in a crowded marketplace, individuals would do well to compare their ethical leanings with their professions and the companies with which they are associated.
Why “scout mindset” is crucial to good judgement (Julia Galef) – Scout mindset is an interesting proposition, valuing curiosity, openness, and practicality over defensiveness, heuristics, and routines. Approaching decision-making with this disposition can help to overcome narrow frameworks, habits, and other strong organizational contexts. This can also help people to determine individual integrity and morality, which can contribute to and position them within broader and sometimes challenging societal and corporate structures for ethics and compliance.
Check back in the coming weeks for further posts on the theory of practical ethics and its application in the corporate context, including discussion on the distinction between ethics and business ethics, as well as that between compliance and corporate compliance.