Ethics Beneath the Surface

Abstract

Whereas there is much focus on improving the cognitive aspects of ethical decision making, many of the drivers of managerial action are nondeliberative. The explosion of academic work in behavioral science has highlighted a number of decision traps, blind spots, and behavioral biases that can substantially influence ethical decision making and action. This note focuses on a number of specific behavioral influences and how they relate to ethics. In addition to highlighting how these behavioral influences can impair decision making, we discuss ways they can be harnessed to potentially improve ethical decisions and actions. Excerpt UVA-E-0409 Dec. 18, 2015 Ethics Beneath the Surface Ethics is an inextricable, centrally important facet of business. Many approaches to values and ethics in business focus on deliberative processes—that is, they involve how we reason and think through the ethical implications of a particular business decision. As a practical matter, there's good reason for this deliberative focus: navigating the world of business requires that leaders actively consider values and ethics in their decision-making processes. By improving our deliberative, cognitive approaches to reasoning about ethics in business, we improve the likelihood of better business decisions that are consistent with individual, organizational, and societal values. But this is not enough. Decision making of any kind is characterized not only by the cognitive, deliberative reasoning employed, but also by a number of other influences, such as our emotions, our intuition, and other unconscious processes. As a result, decisions are, in part, driven by such influences, rather than resulting from a comprehensive, deliberative decision-making process. Sometimes we are aware of these influences; most of the time, however, we are not. These nondeliberative forces can create or contribute to a number of biases or decision traps that can adversely affect our consideration of ethics and values, resulting in “blind spots” and impaired decision making. Therefore, in striving to improve the ethics of our decisions, it is not sufficient to just work to improve the way we employ deliberative reason to guide our actions; we should also seek to better understand common ethical blind spots in order to better avoid them. The purpose of this note is to raise awareness of such blind spots. A consideration of behavioral ethics—biases and noncognitive triggers that influence our moral judgment—serves as a complement to a focus on enhancing our deliberate approaches to ethical decision making. Joshua Greene employs the analogy of a camera to describe the way our brains function in forming moral judgments; the human brain is compared to a dual-mode camera, which contains both automatic settings and a manual mode. Under certain circumstances—when problems or dilemmas are familiar, for instance—we tend to default to “automatic” mode. When faced with less familiar dilemmas or problems, we can switch to “manual” mode, invoking more cognitive flexibility and deliberative reasoning. Both ways of approaching ethical decision making are important, and we ignore one approach or the other at our peril. For leaders, this can be critically important to understand, as contextual factors in the business environment can amplify the consequences of blind spots. Consider, for example, the deaths and injuries caused by the Ford Pinto. In the early 1970s, Ford was facing inte