Compromising Compromises
In almost every corner of modern life there are reasons to compromise rather than stick dogmatically to a strong and extreme position. This issue itself can be a very debatable one and some will say that compromise on the most important issues is unacceptable and morally repugnant. If only the world was always so black and white, life would be a lot less morally conflicted. I remember in high school, I attended a Catholic boys prep school in Rome run by the Brothers of the Holy Cross, I had to choose to take either a religion course or an ethics course. Registered Catholics had no choice, they had to take religion. The rest of us (I had been baptized Catholic, but raised protestant, so I was not officially a Catholic in the school’s eyes) had to choose. The 100% affirmative choice by each non-Catholic in my class was to take ethics. It was symbolically appropriate that they got their ethics teacher from the American Seminary in Rome, a place where devout young Catholic men went when they wanted to enter the priesthood. I never understood whether these guys were either more devout or better students of God, but it seemed impressive that they were the seminarians placed at the right hand (their seminary was literally just south of the St. Peters, west of the Tiber River) of the Pope and presumably within the jurisdiction of the Holy See if not within the confines of the Vatican City State. I don’t remember the name of my ethics teacher, but I remember him as a jovial guy from the Midwest and I recall attending his yearend ordination held in the grandeur of St. Peters Basilica.
Ethics as a discipline is more interesting than you might expect. It is a branch of philosophy that deals specifically with moral principles and how people behave and conduct their daily lives. The core principles are listed as:
- Beneficence and nonmaleficence – do good, not bad.
- Fidelity and responsibility – it’s all about accountability.
- Integrity – be honest and don’t lie.
- Justice – be fair and competent.
- Respect for people’s rights and dignity – respect people’s privacy and confidentiality.
That list come through in many medical practices but as a study alone is the subject of many books and lectures, I am sure. The three types of ethics are deemed to be virtue ethics (how to live your life), consequentialist ethics (are you doing good or harm), and duty-based ethics (is it right or wrong and how do you decide). That is a lot of heavy stuff, especially for high school students in the late 1960’s.
I am finding myself in more and more situations where I am forced to consider the moral dilemmas that are defined by the discipline of ethics, and, unfortunately, I feel like I am doing it in a world where ethical standards are at ebb tide. I am reasonably certain that whenever someone is faced with an ethical dilemma of meaningful proportions, they think they are the first person to ever face such a conundrum and that their surroundings are morally bankrupt. These circumstances are anything but new. They have existed as long as man has walked the earth. There was a cave man who had to decide to defend his kill or be killed and leave his family to suffer. That same guy needed to swap a club with a hidden crack in it for a piece of flint stone to light a fire, in hopes that his trading partner would not find his deception out.
The dilemmas are the same, but the circumstances and perhaps the stakes are always different. Do you stop at a red light in the middle of the night if your wife is in labor? The law says you must, common sense tells you not to and rationalize the choice. Presumably therefore mankind has found the need for judges. Someone without vested interest must decide for societies sake what is right and what is wrong under certain circumstances. These were the discussions we had with our seminarian friend. He put a lot of time into the topic of the importance of compromise to keep society on an even keel. It’s a fascinating topic for an ethics course because we mostly think of ethics as right and wrong, but the greater plane of equity requires us to consider compromise.
The two places I struggle most with these days are in the areas of politics and work. In politics today there are many such compromises. We are led to believe that the art of politics is the art of compromise. The most effective and respected congressmen are those that work both sides of the aisle and gather consensus. The despicable extremists (right and left) hang their hats on the hooks of righteousness or self-interest. Divisiveness is damned and collegiality and working within the norms is praised…until recently where the right sees its future eroding in a sea of immigrants and diversity while the left sees the right’s dirty tactics as impairing justice for years to come through the debasing of the judiciary (those very judges who are supposed to be impartial ethical deciders). The Gordian Knot of political ethics is a challenging and all-too-real confrontation waiting to explode as limits are tested each day. Compromise seems necessary and inevitable.
In the work place, the ethical challenge I confront most often is between optimism and realism. People like to say they are not pessimists, but realists and that is all well and good until you recognize that realists rarely move the world forward. Daniel Boone could have stayed in his prosperous life in Virginia, but instead he went where others feared to tread, over the Appalachian Mountains and into what is now Kentucky. Realist would have said that the risks and unknowns were not worth the exploration. Daniel Boone, a man who had plenty to lose, decided that optimism about what lay to the west and the benefits of the opportunity were worth the risks. Did he know all the risks he would encounter? Probably not. Did he benefit as much as others who settled behind him? Probably not. Are we fortunate he took the risks and went west? Absolutely? Would others have done it eventually? Probably. Did the world benefit from him taking on the risks he took on when he took them on? Certainly. Did others go before him and die due to those risks in obscurity? Most certainly. Do you always know exactly when the time is right for exploration? Rarely. Did Boone compromise or did he execute an extreme uncompromising strategy? No clue.
I have no absolute conclusions about either the political or work ethical dilemmas I highlight, but what I do know from my brief but impactful study of ethics in the cradle of civilization, is that the only certainty about the compromises of compromise is that it depends.