The good news? More people than ever before (at least in recent-ish history), across various industries, disciplines and contexts, seem to explicitly care about ethics. Ethics this, responsible that. Honestly, I can’t believe how far we’ve come in terms of our acceptance of these ideas as being important. The stories I have from even a decade ago… This stuff was often laughed out of the room.
But, and as I and my colleagues / friends have called out on many occasions, there remains a significant gap between intentions and actions.
Mat and I cover this in the context of Responsible AI in this video.
There are important systemic reasons for this. I’ve covered some of these reasons - shared mental models, narrow goal orientations etc. - in the past. In fact, these are the most significant drivers of the ethical intention to action gap, the lack of verifiable organisational trustworthiness and the overall net harm most organisation contribute. They all deserve attention and investment. But today I’d like to talk about skill, which of course cannot be separated from the systemic (the lack of skill I will refer to is largely ‘caused by’ the systemic drivers).
In short, few of us have cultivated the skill that’s required to finesse our way through morally complicated territories (an important note here. I often interact with people who are very morally assertive, but don’t necessarily have what I’d consider the requisite knowledge or experience to support their epistemic confidence. Dunning Kruger plays out in many contexts). But, and a little like the process of actually adding net new muscle to a human frame, I’m going to propose, even without major systemic change, we, as individuals, can get 10x (hahahaha! I hope this joke is appreciated) or more better at ‘doing ethics’.
Let me start this brief exploration be explaining something from exercise physiology / sports science. Say hello to the SRA cycle (or stimulus, recovery and adaptation cycle).
The basic idea here is pretty simple. You seek some type of adaptation. In order to achieve that you need to create some kind of stimulus (i.e. lift weights). You then need to create favourable conditions for recovery (i.e. nutrient dense meals, deep rest etc.). If the ratio between the two is pretty good, there’s a decent chance you’ll realise an adaptation (i.e. hypertrophy).
Getting better at doing ethics can be pretty similar (you could also apply such an analogy to the very highest level gist of ‘learning’. I won’t do that today because, holy fark that’s a complicated area). You might aspire to have a better grasp on a fairly pluralistic landscape of moral theories - in service of making better decisions in your work - so that you might contribute to better outcomes in the world. In order to do this you need to create some stimulus (i.e. reading, engaging in dialogue, observing others in action, practicing the process as describing values, highlighting them in context, exploring how they relate to a given decision, describing a decision, exploring that actions best aligned to said decisions, monitoring implications, doing the whole thing in a fairly participatory way etc.). You need to do this over and over, with necessary down time, space for reflection and integration etc. in order to adapt. Think of this as your moral / ethical equivalent of recovery (neurons firing and wiring together and all that). Over time, you will likely see positive adaptation in the form of more applied knowledge and real-world experience dealing with the uncertainty, ambiguity and gravity of value-sensitive / ethical decision making. Because of this you’ll be better placed to positively contribute at work or in any other life context.
The cool thing here is you can do this alone (just as you might start doing calisthenics at home with some basic equipment). You can do this with guidance and support (of various kinds, ranging from YouTube videos through to more descriptive texts through to coaching or observing and participating in real workflows). And, just like you might with Strava or something similar, you can do this in a social / communal setting, where you are collaborating and coordinating for shared betterment (I’m not going to touch on positive competition, incentives and discincentives etc. in this context today).
None of this requires the organisation you work for to ‘transform’, which, I trust is a somewhat useful realisation.
Now, I get there are lots of practical considerations here (especially opportunity cost). So you have to assess how personally important something like this is to you. Your answer is very likely to differ from mine.
Anyways, there’s some stimulus for you to sit with, recover from, and hopefully use for positive adaptation.
If you’re looking to spend some time down in the weeds with the theories, approaches or tools that can help you get better at doing ethics, hit me up.
With love as always.
Oh, and don’t forget to…