WTF is an 'ethical career'?

And how can we actually have one amidst all this meta-madness...?

Let’s very quickly define terms.

Ethics is the deliberate process of reflecting on our first order (moral) beliefs in an attempt to align our decisions and actions to what we believe is most good and right. It can and often is a deeply practical thing. It need not exclusively exists in the realm of the professional philosopher or academic institution.

Given this, an ethical career is a career that is:

• Aligned to well thought out (well reasoned, ideally informed by many perspectives, including empirical evidence etc.) moral beliefs

• Deeply deliberative, with lots of reflection, genuine curiosity and ongoing learning

• Something you and others view with pride and perhaps even deep gratitude, likely resulting from the impacts you contribute to, the ways in which this supports the cultivation of your character, the way your work upholds certain rights, freedoms, values, the way it encourages you to express care and love etc.

Each of these points, along with many others I might add, could capture my attention for hours upon hours. I don’t have that, so I’m going to leave this detail a bit light and roll onto some more practical stuff I hope will support you in some way.

The backdrop

Before progressing, we need to consider where we’ve come from, where we are, and where we are likely to end up on our ‘current trajectory’. I can’t do real justice to such a complex topic here, so let me just say that I am pretty well aligned to much of the metacrisis framing in that we are amidst a global ecosystem of interconnected crises that have common underlying drivers. In this way I’ll suggest that our entire historicity as a species has produced plenty of great stuff, as well as lots of shit stuff. The paradox is that plenty of what we consider ‘great stuff’ is causally implicated in the shit, particularly systemic ecological overshoot.

This is an important backdrop as it has good potential to inform what guides our actions going forward. It can give us a deeper and more nuanced sense of the whole-of-system direction, magnitude and speed of change that’s required.

Such a statement is filled with assumptions on my end. One is that we probably should value ecological diversity, planetary stability etc. Another is that we ought to care deeply about ‘creating’ an equitable world. There are many others.

It’s important to call out the fact that my ‘frame’ is riddled with assumptions for many reasons, including the fact that plenty of folks I speak to don’t fully or even partially agree with my statements above (this is especially true if they’re in a techno-optimist or naive progress camp, but can also be true for many other reasons, such as religion, a given ideology or story etc.).

I cannot say I’m ‘for sure’ right about anything. But, through our process of collective reasoning, supported by the best available balance of scientific evidence from across disciplines (including those that feature subjectivity), I think there are plenty of assumptions and / or value premises we can posit with decent confidence.

Moving on.

In summary, our history is complex and we’re on a precarious trajectory. I believe there’s much we ought to (and actually can) do. One of the big ones is find a way to come back into right relation with what many cultures problematically call ‘nature’ (everything else in this word that is not humans or human civilisation). Another, which is interrelated and interdependent on / with the first, is that we ought to do everything we can to create a civilisation that gives every human being what they need to not just survive, but thrive (which first covers material needs, yet extends FAAAAARRRRR beyond this).

Why is all of this important?

Because this grounds my ethical deliberation. It’s my ongoing, ever-evolving frame of reference. By relating to this evolving perspective, I can keep sense checking and attempting to improve the goodness and rightness of how I feel-think-act.

I am not trying to push my frame on you. How you develop, evolve and exist in ongoing relation to that frame will be up to you.

Recognising there’s plenty of pre-work, that also doubles as ongoing work, let’s move on.

Ethics at and about ‘work’

I’m going to focus this on you, not the org you work in / with / for / in relation to (which is the ‘core’ of ‘my work’).

To start with, there are many ways you can think about what is good and right. And I’m not going to suggest you dive deep into the weeds of value theory. Rather, you can start by how you think the ‘work’ you do can be / become:

• Net beneficial (utilitarian approach)

• Respecting of people’s rights and freedoms (rights approach)

• Equity enhancing (justice approach)

• In service of the common good (common good approach), and

• Leading you to act as the sort of person you would most like to be (virtue approach)

Recognising these are largely ‘Western’ moral frames, you might also consider different approaches to relationality (of which there are many), care and responsibility (again, there are many). In doing this, you can draw from a much broader body of thinking from across cultures.

You could literally do this on a piece of paper or through dialogue. This doesn’t have to be perfect, mostly because there’s no such thing. But perhaps equally as importantly because what matters most is that you start doing it. By starting, and really feeling into the process, there’s a chance you will become better at it. By becoming better at it, it’s likely the work you do will be / become more planetary impactful, more respecting of people’s rights and freedoms, more aligned to the type of person you’d like to be, as well as more caring and responsible.

I mean it. Whenever you have a moment, or more like an hour, sit down with yourself and run a simple Q&A. Ask, is my work:

• Net beneficial (utilitarian approach)

• Respecting of people’s rights and freedoms (rights approach)

• Equity enhancing (justice approach)

• In service of the common good (common good approach), and

• Leading me to act as the sort of person I would most like to be (virtue approach)

• Caring, responsible and relationally enriching?

Write or draw as much or as little as is useful.

Then ask, what can I do, either in my current job or through some type of practical change, to improve my answers?

Again, write or draw as much or as little detail as is useful.

Consider sharing the output of this with someone you trust and respect.

Take some time. Come back to the outputs of the whole process. Then define real, tangible things you can do that help bring some of the improvements you’ve defined to life.

Do this process as regularly as you can. One hour, once per month seems like a doable(ish) thing for some people. This is what I’d suggest as a starting point in any case.

Know that, just like me, this will surface tensions. I’ve had more tension in relation to this (by living my values, I’ve had many significant stretches without any income at all, which creates a lot of stress in life…) over the last 13 years or so than I wish upon you. But this, in many ways, cannot be avoided. Tension is everywhere in the universe, and much of it is not just productive, but ‘necessary’ (for life as we’ve come to ‘know it’).

If you are willing, share the process, outputs, reflections, learnings and even impacts with the world. The more of us talking about ‘doing ethics’ in the context of our life and work the better.

With love as always.

Disclosure: I wrote this even faster than usual at the end of a long day. If there are logical inconsistencies etc. please call them out. I’ll come back and refine after feedback.