Check out these TED and TEDx talks on privacy expectations and technological innovations. As advancing technology makes a more complex impact on society than ever, individuals’ needs to cultivate their sharing practices and define their privacy expectations are increasing in importance.
Check out these talks by Sheena Iyengar on choice theory. Mostly from TED or TEDx events, plus one INKtalks video, these lectures provide a great overview to Iyengar’s brilliant work on the psychology of choice in a variety of contexts. Through Iyengar’s theories of choice, the many influences choosing and decision-making can have over individuals’ lives become vibrant and clear.
Check out these TED and TEDx talks on the ethics of innovation in technology. This includes compliance risks and ethical considerations in knowledge acquisition, engineering, and design.
Traditional discussions of morality have often focused on dichotomies of good and bad, virtuous and evil, right and wrong. This polarized thinking simplifies the world into opposing absolutes. In this view, all people and all conduct stand on one side or other of an imaginary line. Bad people are responsible for all evil actions and wrong decisions, whereas good people should always be expected to behave in a virtuous manner and to make the right choices. This views resigns any hope of someone who is judged “bad” making positive contributions to the world or being expected to have integrity; these people must be controlled against, excluded, and blamed when events take the wrong turn. Good people, on the other hand, are subject to straying from their presumably natural interest in behaving with integrity and must be prevented from doing so and punished if this ever happens, followed by being re-judged as bad if they do not respond to punitive and remedial treatment.
The limiting and unrealistic expectations of such a system are clear. In practice, this retrograde view can have chilling effect on a truly progressive understanding of organizational integrity and dynamics or any true restorative justice for individuals. Unfortunately, rules-based systems tend to produce these polarized, inflexible views. Mandatory compliance with its roles and responsibilities and reliance on policies and procedures can have such an outcome. Of course, the law, internal requirements, and regulatory expectations often do follow a bright line and so adherence to these expectations is as straightforward as a yes or a no. However, this strict structure must be supported by a more dynamic and realistic system of values and principles. Only then can the culture of compliance reflect the true nature of people and their choices and actions, which are all much more complex than a choice between two contrasting modes.
In an increasingly inter-connected and digital society, challenges to privacy and reputation are frequent. Even before social media put everyone at constant pressure to “overshare,” when people’s very personal details were not always a quick Google search away, privacy was still under threat. A person’s visibility and public representations are often judged and demanded for credibility and honesty evaluations performed by employers, potential partners, members of the community, and even complete strangers. Giving up privacy in favor of radical openness may be the way some reality stars have attained their celebrity, but for many people this feels invasive and like a violation of security.
In a broader sense, people’s individual privacy settings in terms of what they wish to share or disclose, how, and to whom, have a direct bearing on reputation. Cultural practices around privacy and information sharing can give rise to serious reputational risk that impacts individuals and communities and frays the social fabric in which transparency is desirable or even possible. These norms and ethical expectations are intensified in the digital age, where an individual’s personal information can never truly be deleted or taken back once it is made public.
Integrity as both a personal and an organizational value is one of the central and recurring themes of this blog. Promoting and supporting integrity in individuals as well as in the groups in which they live and work is essential to encouraging cultures of compliance and ethical decision-making. Indeed, the foundation of the moral conduct people wish to see in each other and in their institutions in order to enhance the stature of truth and honesty in today’s complicated, interconnected world starts with placing personal emphasis on integrity and character ethic. With a strong and well-articulated individual commitment to moral engagement, people can purposefully contribute to the integrity of the communities in which they live, the groups in which they gather, and the organizations in which they work.
As shown above, defining integrity as a core value in all areas of life – self-identification, leadership, relationships with others, community engagement, social responsibility – is a powerful, purpose-driven approach. A commitment to recognizing integrity as a virtue and using a strong internal sense of its importance for one’s personal moral code enables individuals to be credible and responsible and to model these values to each other. With time, institutions and organizations will reflect the integrity promoted by the individuals within them, elevating the ethical register of society.
One of the most poignant and timeless discussions related to ethics is the concept of justice. Justice is the measurement of fairness and is defined by theories which vary wildly between and within cultures and countries. Administration of fairness is as crucial to ethics as are, for example, other fundamental ideas of morality such as trust and honesty. Theories of justice may focus on equal distribution, individual treatment, societal consequences, or even punishment and reparations. These differing theories all have their own foundation in a culture’s ethical values and are then impacted by historical events, jurisprudence, or religious beliefs in a variety of ways. Even though justice is so varying and individual, efforts toward and desires for it are indeed universal, and the ethical fundamentals of its moral pursuit are shared as well.
In application, justice and the ethics of its interpretation and attempts to reach it in society is a major topic in the modern legal system, with the actions and decisions of lawyers, judges, and parties to cases all having major influence on the execution of different efforts toward fairness. Individual entitlements, such as to property, other wealth, basic goods, and social status, are also distributed with questions of equal rights or arrangement of inequalities under some vision of justice and ethics. Finally, as provocative as justice itself is the concept of injustice, or errors of justice, and how damage from this can be acknowledged, avoided, or corrected.
A successful and robust corporate compliance and ethics program will have a blended focus on rules-based and values-based controls. Taking an integrated approach to performance and conduct is necessary in order to facilitate awareness of and adherence to compliance risk management efforts and expectations. Rules and values cannot be separated, and should indeed be balanced together to make the most compelling call to action by employees and management.
Legal and regulatory guidelines and company policies and procedures form a clear foundation for the rules and make up the structural, mandatory portion of a compliance program. Deriving this from external and internal requirements is somewhat straightforward and can be accomplished with methodical planning and continuous updating and education.
Values, on the other hand, form the ethics discipline and come from the moral codes of individuals and the commitments to integrity made by the organizations within which they work. While more resistant to obsolescence than rules and regulations, values are far more challenging to identify and express, and even harder to imbed authentically and sustainability within a corporate culture. Values provide the voluntary motivation for doing the right thing at the right time for the right reason, despite forces or interests that may impede or work against that, and including when taking this action requires inaction.
Therefore successful compliance professionals will rely upon the basis provided by rules, while evoking the emotional and personal appeal of values. Providing incentives for inner success and enabling individuals to make ethical decisions and act with integrity gives purpose to employees and credibility to organizations.
The below TED/TEDx talks emphasize the importance of values-led people and organizations and the ways they impact society, interpret ethics, and define success.
Values-led people and organizations will form a culture of compliance with the strongest incentives for ethical decision-making and a prevailing emphasis on integrity, purpose, and inner success. Taken together with a strong controls framework to incorporate rules-based compliance foundations, an emphasis on values will give credibility and authenticity to corporate governance and strategy.
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.
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.
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.