Absolute ethics

I receive a fair share of e-mail from people who complain about "ethical relativism." It's ruining the world, they say. Unfortunately, most of these people have a faulty knowledge of what ethical relativism is and whether what they're complaining about fits the bill.

Free IT resource Hear how top CIOs turn change into a competitive advantage. Sponsored by HP Free IT resource TechNet: More ways to know it, share it, and keep it running. Sponsored by Microsoft

Part of this is the fault of those people who use the term as a straw man to set up against whatever it is they're trying to sell. Preachers are famous for this. Some have a pretty rigid view of the world, and anything or anyone who disagrees with their narrow approach is condemned as an "ethical relativist." They're much happier with the idea of moral absolutes.

And I have to admit that the idea of moral or ethical absolutes is comforting. If you can get them all down in simple language in a book or reduce them to a formula, people think, it relieves you of all that rational discourse and keeps you from the shoals of the dreaded "relativism."

But absolutes are tricky things. Applying them to real-life situations is often a lot harder than you might think. And we all have to apply them, revise them, create exceptions, and tweak them -- no matter how much we say we don't.

I got to thinking about this recently when a reader wrote in saying he had some simple principles by which he tried to live his life. One of those principles, he said, was integrity. If he tells someone he's going to do something, then he does it. End of story.

You can't argue with that. It is a good way to live your life. There's nothing better than someone who is principled and reliable. If only it were that easy. The teacher in me immediately saw the glaring loophole in his otherwise admirable philosophy. What happens when you give your word to do something and then determine that what you've agreed to do is in itself unethical?

For example, you promise your friend on his deathbed that you will give his valuable gold ring to a mutual acquaintance, who is expecting it. You take the ring and your friend dies. However, before you can deliver it, the police inform you that the ring is stolen and they want to return it to the rightful owner.

What to do? If your ethical principle is absolute you must deny the police and give the ring to the acquaintance. Most of us would, instead, give it to the police -- and I suspect my correspondent would too. So, how do we account for the absolute principle? Have you done something unethical by not keeping your word?

Some people tell me they base their whole system of ethical belief on the Ten Commandments. Again, a very laudable enterprise. I'll readily agree that if we have fewer people stealing, lying, and killing each other, the world will be a better place.

Now the commandments say I can't kill you, steal from you, or lie to you -- but where do they say that I can't pop you in the nose from time to time? You can certainly try to extrapolate that from somewhere, but it's not in the text. So you either need to tweak the absolutes or read something in that's not there, which kind of ruins the idea of an absolute. (I'm not picking on the commandments here, but merely using them as an example because I'm more familiar with them than other religious systems, as I assume are most of my readers.)

The most frustrating situation comes when the absolutes collide -- no matter where we get them from. If I believe that I must obey my parents, and I also believe that I must not steal, what do I do when my parents tell me to steal? Which of these absolutes takes precedence? There's nothing in the text to indicate that. And if you give any credence to the order in which they came down, the one on obeying your parents, since it comes first in the order, would seem to have more force, although that's only a wild observation.

The key is that we have some thought-out rational process by which we adjudicate the clash between our so-called absolutes. And when we do that, it is our rational process -- and not the principle -- that really takes precedence. So, all this talk about an ethical method is not wasted and is not opposed to the so-called absolute principles. It is a very important overlay that helps us to regulate our behavior so that we're not hamstrung by absolutes that, followed mindlessly, may lead us into unacceptable behavior.

When I was teaching, I used to challenge my students to come up with a moral absolute that could never, under any circumstances, be violated. When they tried, I could always come up with a case in which they would violate the principle, and consider it ethical to do so. As my fellow InfoWorld columnist Bob Lewis says, "Context is everything." And nowhere is this more important than in ethics.

Write to Carlton Vogt at ethics_matters@infoworld.com. To discuss any of these issues, you can go to the Ethics Matters forum at www.infoworld.com/forums/ethics .