Interview with Rushworth Kidder

Introduction by Harlan Cleveland
Rushworth Kidder is President of the Institute for Global Ethics, a longtime columnist for the Christian Science Monitor, and a perceptive reporter and thoughtful analyst with vast experience in tracking worldwide political, economic, and cultural trends. That's how I described him in a Foreword to his remarkable book, "Shared Values for a Troubled World" (1994).

He had "crossed bloody ethnic frontiers, deep intellectual divides, yawning cultural chasms, and wide valleys of doctrinal dispute and misunderstanding, "to interview 24 special people about "whether there is a common ground of values that could bring the world's peoples together instead of driving them apart." He sought, and found, the basis for a global code of ethics, "eight moral values that will shape our global future Love, Truthfulness, Fairness, Freedom, Unity, Tolerance, Responsibility, and Respect for Life."

Rush, I'd like to begin by suggesting that "we, the peoples" are not living up very well to these "widely-held" moral values. Why not? Are they not as widely held as they seemed to you to be in 1994? Does the consensus you were then sniffing out somehow break down when it comes to making public policy, managing corporations, and exporting culture? If so, why?

Rush Kidder
Thanks, as always, for that gracious introduction. That series of interviews in 1994 posed the question, "If you could formulate a global code of ethics for the 21st century, what would be in it?" As you can imagine, the interviewees and I talked about scores of values, with broad consensus forming around those eight you mentioned.

But "Shared Values" was "mere" (I use that word advisedly) journalism--meaning that, try as you will, the effort to prevent subjectivity from seeping in is about as futile as keeping water out of an old wooden dinghy. Journalism always gets there first, but it doesn't always get it right. The logical next step beyond journalism is survey research.

Since 1994, we've done an array of survey work with Gallup and other entities around this question of core shared values. We've also done extensive work in a small-group "values definition" exercise as part of our Ethical Fitness™ Seminars, which have so far reached about 15,000 people.

Here's what we've found:

When you ask people anywhere in the world to tell you their most important moral and ethical values, they tell you five things: honesty, responsibility, respect, fairness, and compassion. This list is not in priority order, and the words are less important than the ideas: They may talk about truthfulness, candor, or integrity instead of honesty, or caring, empathy, or love instead of compassion, and so forth. Once you get past these five, the consensus flies apart and a wide array of different values begins to surface.

So far, we've found this same consensus in Great Britain, South Africa, Chile, Guatemala, Mexico, Canada, Thailand, Bangladesh, China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, and of course the United States.

In the United States, we find these common values held by corporate executives and inmates in the North Carolina prison system; by lawyers, accountants, doctors, and other professionals; by eighth-graders and senior citizens; and by those from across the political, economic, and racial spectrum. We find no statistically valid distinctions between males and females, native and non-native English speakers, and those who say "I have no religion" versus those who say "I am deeply religious." They all have the same values.

I hasten to add that we have NOT done Gallup-quality surveys in 160 countries, so the above is best treated as hypothesis rather than as fact. But the evidence is mounting steadily that, wherever you ask about shared values, you find this commonality.

Now, Harlan, that doesn't answer your question, I realize. But we've also observed several other things:

Individuals in various cultures don't appear to "mean" different things by these words--in other words, there appears to be no huge variance in what responsibility" means in Bangladesh and Boston. But they do tend to put these ideas into practice in different ways, and to place different priorities on values. In some work we did in China, for instance, "responsibility" was ranked so high– almost off the charts--that "truth" (one of the other top four values) actually fell below the median. It is important to understand that Chinese and Americans have the same values, since it gives you a solid core on which to build a relationship. But that fact does not explain everything you want to know about this relationship, and we need to be sure we're not claiming more for this fact than it is able to bear.

There's another point of difference, as well. Values are aspirational. So it's perfectly possible for, say, American high-school students to place a strong emphasis on "honesty" while also admitting to high (unprecedented, in fact) levels of cheating in the classroom. What's up? Simply that it's possible to desire to live in a world where these values are expressed and honored, even while admitting that we ourselves haven't attained that standard. Mexican populations, for instance, place a very high value on honesty, even while admitting ruefully that corruption and bribery are facts of life on the ground.

So I don't think the consensus has broken down since 1994. If it had, Rigas and the rest would not be in jail, and Enron would be doing fine. Yes, there would have been problems with dishonesty. But as a public we would have said, "Hey, that's life--no big deal--live and let live, cheat and be cheated!" We didn't say that. Quite the contrary, we expressed such deep moral concern that the stock market experienced a buyers' strike over the summer.

Up in Maine, where I live, there's was a beat-up old VW bus around town for a while with a bumper sticker that read, "If you're not outraged, you haven't been paying attention." We haven't lost the capacity for moral outrage, thank goodness!

Participant
Rush, I wonder what you think about moral development theory--all that work from Piaget onward through Kohlberg and Gilligan--that talks about how people form and change their values (and ethics) as they grow and go through different life experiences. How they advance, why and how they sometimes regress, etc. I'd be especially interested in hearing your thoughts about the social conditions that seem to bring out the best (or the worst) in people.

Participant
May I ask if your researches determined where and how these varied communities obtained their respect for the values you describe. I would suspect that the instruments would include family, religion, education and the media, but these influences vary so much from community to community, that there must be some underlying influence at work. Is it pure pragmatism? Do all societies function better when the majority respect these values?

Participant
Rush, thank you so much for joining us. Your research sounds fascinating. I'm wondering if anyone has done any work on what helps people to close the gap between aspirations and "on the ground" actions. Has anyone sorted out what encourages individual and collective changes in behavior to more closely align with aspirations?

Participant
Rush, has your research found any relationship between the values selected and status? By status I mean such attributes as education, income, occupation.

Rush Kidder
Looking at the responses this evening from all of you, I'm struck by the operative word "how" that undergirds these four astute interventions. HOW do people change and adapt their values over time? HOW do social conditions influence that change?

The short answer, of course, is, "Don't I wish I knew!" Is it a matter, with Aristotle, of becoming good by behaving in good ways? Is it an internalization of some Kantian principle of universality? Is it a divine influence in the life of mankind? Is it socialization, or fear of exclusion, or desire to please, or accommodation to what works, or enlightened self-interest? Seems to me that just about every school of thought can weigh in with its own conceptual framework.

The underlying query, however, points to what is probably the oldest question in moral philosophy, which is, "Why be moral? "Why bother, when the pleasures and benefits of the immoral life appear to be so obvious and immediate?

The oldest answer, of course, is some form of, "Because that's what God wants. "That was generally the most powerful answer in our country up through, I would guess, the first decade of the 20th century. But it was never the ONLY answer. And increasingly, as we have focused more sharply (and very rightly) on the distinction between church and state, it's very surely not the only answer. If it were, the questions above would be solved, wouldn't they? We'd merely have to appeal to some broadly accepted external standard (deity) and to a widely understood set of religious concepts (redemption, forgiveness, salvation) to understand what it is that moves "sinners" into the "grace" of a "righteous" (i.e. ethical) life. And that diction tells you something. Not only did the 19th century have a a common response to "Why be moral?" It also had a richly evolved theological language that could be adapted to moral discourse.

For many people, that language still forms the basis formal discourse. But for logical (and very valid) reasons, it's no longer the language of PUBLIC discourse about ethics. Yet nothing has come along to replace it. Result: The broad public finds itself uneasy in the presence of moral discourse--almost afraid (as teenagers say) to "go there," lest they begin to sound Victorian, or preachy, or simply naive. As a result, they tend to fall silent in the face of moral questioning--or, more dangerously, to buy tacitly into the language of those who, using the old language of theology in a new manipulative guise, appear to be speaking for them.

So from my perspective-- as one looking at these things from the street-level on up, as it were--I find myself most interested in how the language either works or does not work to help (in Mary's term) "close the gap" between what appears to be the ideal of a moral life and the messy facts on the ground. And I notice that people appear to be most receptive to the ethics message (and hence most willing to change and adapt if needed) when it's presented to them not as some complex set of things "out there" that they need to strive to attain, but as something already inside them--visceral and intuitive and internal--that is seeking a greater expression. The metaphors that work for people hint at that fact. They get it when we talk about ethical fitness, which suggests a kind of muscular tone that is already there, though it can either fall into atrophy or be strengthened by conscious exercise. They get it when we talk about a moral compass, an internal mechanism that guides one toward a fixed external point (and, at times, can get out of alignment and will need to be, in the jargon of Maine sailors, "swung" to put it into line again).They get it when we talk about a fogged mirror that needs polishing. They get it when we talk about a bud that needs to unfold into the blossom it already contains.

Admittedly, these are metaphoric ways to move people toward greater understanding. And like all analogies, they break down at some point and hence can be dismissed (as all effective teaching devices can be) as "mere popularizing." In this case, however, I suspect they hint at some greater truth: that (as Sandy says) there "must be some underlying influence at work."

I certainly haven't worked it all out yet in my own thinking, but I am coming to conclude that this internal set of values (innate? coded in at birth? implanted early by the culture?) is what distinguishes us from animals. What often passes for altruism in animals (i.e. the willingness of the mother chimp to die to save the life of her young) is, on closer inspection, largely a matter of genetics. Does the mother chimp die to save the life of an unrelated young chimp? Hardly ever. Humans, by contrast, die for ideas. And the grandest ideas they die for are the moral ones--the matters of principle, the democratic ideals, the right to freedom, a matter of supreme truth, a commitment to fairness, or however it is expressed.

But (in that famously useful phrase) I digress. Walter, the social condition that most militates against ethics may well be prosperity: See Don McCabe's research suggesting that students from households with annual incomes of $150,000+ are twice as likely to cheat in college as those from households at $20,000 or below.

Sandy, I don't know about "all societies," but it does appear that when there is a common respect for the values, lots of things that other cultures need to legislate and regulate can be left to the discretion of individuals guided by moral precepts rather than by rules. Case in point: Smoothly functioning families have hardly any "rules," until something comes along to break the ethical contract (i.e. teenage son keeps car out until 3 am for the third weekend in a row and suddenly gets slapped with "a rule" that says "You're grounded!").

Mary, we're working in a lot of prisons in North Carolina, and we're finding that one way to evaluate the progress of our ethics programs is to measure movement in individuals along a scale from ego-centric to socio-centric behavior. It's hard to aspire to the broad moral values while still saying, "I'm the only thing that matters!" You'd be heartened to see how readily prisoners take to this discourse about ethics--nobody has every bothered to talk to them about it before, and it really does click. And as it clicks, they really begin to pay more attention to one another and the larger world.

And Don, in every survey we do we try to cross-tab the choice of values against every variable we can think of. So far, if memory serves (and I'd need to go back and check if you want a REAL answer), we get no strong correlations, though there are some faint signals that women (as Gilligan has indicated) lean more toward an ethic of care, while men lean more toward an ethic of justice.

Participant
I think of "ethics" as the internalized standards of each individual. My sense of what it's best to do, how it's appropriate to behave, how to relate to the many different kinds of people I know or meet, is obviously built up over time from a myriad of social influences ranging from mother's knee to father's paddle, and their adult equivalents.

Fear of punishment is what the criminal justice system seems to rely on as a reminder/sanction to help people internalize the line between behavior that's legal and illegal. Judging from the grotesque size of our incarcerated population, it doesn't work very well.

When it comes to ethics, some of the comparable reminders, such as written codes of ethics, also seem limited in their reach into people's souls. A more dependable (unwritten) code seems to be the example of behavior by respected peers or authorities: I once asked people who worked for ARCO in Indonesia how they avoided the bribery that seemed endemic in Indonesia's business environment. Several of them independently told me that if Bob Anderson and Thornton (Brad) Bradshaw wouldn't do it, then they wouldn't either. (Anderson and Bradshaw were then occupying a sort of joint CEO office atop ARCO.) At that time there wasn't a written ARCO code; it struck me that my interviewees had found something better than lawyerly words on a poster to use as an ethical touchstone.

As you know, I have quoted Louis Hector, a lawyer who served on the Civil Aeronautics Board long ago, as saying that general prescriptions, whether in the form of dos or don'ts, are bound to be "so general as to be useless or so specific as to be unworkable."

Am I being too hard on "codes of ethics"?

Rush Kidder
No, Harlan, you're not too harsh. Enron had a terrific code of ethics, all glossy and slick. I'm told there was one for sale on eBay recently, advertised with a single word: "unopened." But of course.

Some highly ethical corporations don't have codes at all--just the same kind of CEO clarity that you talk about with ARCO. Often they are family firms, where the founder's values still live on under rubrics like "What would old Mr. So-and-so have done if he were still alive?"

But even those corporations sometimes find it useful to regularize and codify the ethical principles to present guidelines. The best of codes, however, remain (in my view) short and crisp, almost memorable: The West Point Honor Code, the Rotary Four-way Test, and last six of the Ten Commandments (since the first four define deific relationships rather than human precepts). I disagree with Louis Hector--not that specificity is unworkable (it often is) but that generality is useless. "Don't kill" is really a pretty good guideline in that it sets out a trend-line we should follow. Of course some people will violate it, rationalize it, and ignore it. But others won't. Would Hector have any doubt that there are lots more people alive today who, without such a code, might not be?

Research from the Ethics Resource Center suggests that corporate ethics programs based solely on codes are only marginally effective. They become more effective if you add an ombudsperson or ethics office or ethics hotline. But they become really quite effective if you add to those two things a component of regular training and discourse about the topic.

Participant
I gather that you are suggesting that ethical behavior in a general population requires leaders who are themselves ethical, and that the level of ethics that exists in any group will reinforce the ethical behavior of members who are not comfortable deviating from the norm.

I wonder if the level of ethics was any higher a century or two ago, when religion permeated everyday life in Christian societies, as it does today in Muslim ones, where it is obligatory to pray five times a day.

Participant
Rush, I wonder about your thoughts and analysis of the U.S. so-called religious right in the context of your shared values research. They (the religious right) seem to think they do not share the values of some of the rest of us, and that their values are superior to many others.

I would venture to guess that for the most part if you surveyed them separately, they would advance a similar set of values to the ones you found to be near universal. So that gets us to the question of why, if we have the same basic values, do certain groups continue to have the hubris to think that theirs are different or better than others? And what interventions can ameliorate this phenomenon without lowering the ethical bar?

Participant
Rush, your mention of guidelines versus codes and the need for simplicity reminds me of some of the basic principles of complexity theory in which dealing with complexity seems to be much more manageable when there are a simple set of boundary conditions as opposed to a complex series of rules. It also seems to me that leader behavior is one of the most concrete and elegant means of communicating a set of boundary conditions in a complex environment.

The research in the N.C. prisons really does sound encouraging!

Rush Kidder
Thoughtful responses, all! Sandy, I'm hesitant to ascribe greater ethics to societies in the past simply because of more overt religious observance. In proportion as observance means greater understanding of theology-and in proportion as the theology leads one to a concept of a God who wants ethical behavior-then yes, ethics and religion go hand in hand. But what if observance simply signals a social habit--or, worse, masks a bland denial of ethical concern under a cloak of righteousness? And what if the theology posits a God who rewards goodness only capriciously, grudgingly, or jealously, or who counts outward observance as more important than inward conviction?

As for leaders, yes and no. We certainly are moved forward by the ethics of our leaders, though I suspect there are (to leap ahead to Mary Boone's phrase) some "boundary conditions" beyond which a leader cannot take us, either up or down, before encountering excessive inertial resistance from those who refuse to be pulled very far off their accustomed course. Examples on the high end: Jesus and Gandhi, who lived in cultures very willing to be stretched A LITTLE toward ethics, but who rebelled at being pulled too far too fast. Examples on the bottom end: Bill Clinton and Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-NJ), who sank so far that the public, rather than be pulled down any further, reacted and mentally cut loose from their leadership.

Gloria, you raise a most intriguing point about the religious right. I've seen a fascinating definition of "fundamentalism" in a theological dictionary that simply defines it as "a violent hatred of critical inquiry." The point, I think, is that some forms of dogmatism (whether religious, economic, political, or whatever) are so wedded to a rigid received wisdom that they cannot brook any analysis of alternative views. The place where I see this play out most sadly is in the ethics arena, where a fixed set of values-even good ones, like honesty and fairness and caring-can be seized upon with such dogged determination that there simply is no willingness to recognize that tough dilemmas involve right-versus-right issues where one good value must take precedence over another good value. But if the mind is so locked into a regime of moral absolutes that it can't grasp the nuances, it will refuse to think hard enough to understand the higher right-- because that appears to be saying that one of its received "rights" is somehow "wrong" in this case. So it gets hopelessly confused when asked to contemplate a situation where, say, fairness pulls one way and caring the other. And so it takes refuge in the idea that analysis itself is at fault, that intellectual endeavor is the culprit, and that things are only complex because we mistakenly try to understand them. As Brutus, that arch-fundamentalist, said of Cassius, "He thinks too much: Such men are dangerous."

Footnote: Nor is it true that a rejection of fundamentalism signals a rejection of Biblical religion itself. I've encountered terrifically thoughtful Christians and Jews who recognize the need for probing scriptural texts deeply, rather than simply lapsing into the idea that "The Bible says it, so I believe it." The next time you encounter that rejoinder, Gloria, try quoting two injunctions from the Bible in quick succession and asking what one is supposed to "believe" or do as a result. The verses are Proverbs 26:4 ("Answer not a fool according to his folly") and Proverbs 26:5 ("Answer a fool according to his folly").

In that context, I'm also intrigued by your comment, Mary, about the boundaries and the leaders. While it's true that, as an examination of fundamentalism suggests, the answer to complexity is not to reject it and replace it with simplicity, it's also true that you don't address it by adding more complexity to the mix! Ethics at its best, I suspect, is the adumbration of a few key principles that provide the "boundary conditions" for decision making. Ethics at its worst is the proliferation of a rule for every picky little thing. Where leaders have authority and command respect, they can lead on the basis of a few guidelines. Once let that authority be challenged, however, and rules propagate like rabbits under an old New England barn. That hints at one of the neatest definitions of ethics I've found, penned by a British jurist in the 1920s, Lord Moulton of Bank, who simply called ethics "obedience to the unenforceable." He was distinguishing it from law, which is obedience to the ENFORCEABLE. His distinction makes it clear why you can't legislate ethics--and, perhaps, why ethics programs run by lawyers may produce almost fatal conflicts of intellectual interests in those who try to run them!

Many thanks, Harlan, for getting this series launched--I've enjoyed the interchanges immensely, and thank you all for questioning and listening!

Participant
Rush: I'm sure that all the active questioners, and a good many "lurkers" too, join me in thanking you for your illuminating replies to our sometimes unanswerable queries.

This Interview was what a doctor of philosophy might call the Platonic Form of an on-line interview. But in this case, instead of Socrates posing curve-ball questions to his students, the interviewers/students had a chance to put their queries to a premier philosopher of global ethics. And you played to perfection the role of extemporaneous philosopher--because, masked by your conventional guise as journalist and think-tanker, you have always been a natural-born philosopher. Thanks for sharing your wisdom with your ILF colleagues! ....Harlan.