Considering Professional Ethics: July 2024 

Professional Ethics Requires Personal Time Machines

Comments from David Goldman (FASPE Chair)

The 2024 FASPE Fellows wrote, staged, and presented short “skits”—11 in total. Each took a creative, narrative approach, intending to open a window into a current ethical issue in the professions. One of the skits, written and presented by a group of Business Fellows (not always thought of as the most creative/artistic bunch!), touched on a fundamental FASPE theme: the ethical responsibility of professionals to look into the future, to consider unintended, unanticipated consequences of their behavior. 

Entitled Bearanos: One Tiny Cub Changes Everything, the skit employed the same narrative device that was so gripping in this year’s Tony Award winner, Merrily We Roll Along. The skit proceeded in reverse chronological order. Thus, they started with the outcome and, in succeeding scenes, we were able to see how we arrived at the end. Step by step.

Merrily and the Business Fellows ask: should we have been able to anticipate the end? Did we try hard enough to think about where we were going? In fact, were all of the steps that led to the end so incremental, so modest, that the process of normalization blinded us to the possible consequences, regardless of what we intended?

Consider this: in the early 20th century, a modest inventor named Thomas Midgley played a major role in developing leaded gasoline, thus creating the means that powered generations of a global, automobile-based culture. At the same time (and he didn’t know this would be the outcome!), his invention was among the largest contributing factors to the current environmental catastrophe, namely our carbon footprint. More, Midgley played a major role in developing the first chlorofluorocarbons, known by the brand Freon, thus leading to the largest contributing factor to what we know of as the holes in the ozone layer. And what of the potential lead poisoning caused by his gasoline? 

If we were to write the play of Thomas Midgley’s inventing career a la Bearanos, i.e., in reverse chronological order starting with today’s environmental impacts, would that end of climate change and environmental disaster have been obvious in the later scenes that chronologically, if not dramatically, predate the first act? Could or should Midgley have anticipated the consequences of his inventions?

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Perhaps the Midgley example is on the far end. Could he have understood the environmental impact of leaded gasoline and CFCs, or even in his wildest imagination foreseen the intricate web of highways that surround the world’s cities and the streets that clog our towns; or could he have anticipated a refrigerator and air conditioner in every house, a world filled with aerosols? Maybe not, but let’s turn it around on today’s professionals:

  • Do our lawyers and judges sufficiently consider the consequences of their overly clever arguments and precedent-setting decisions, i.e., beyond the narrow case at hand? 
  • Even beyond opioids, do our medical product companies sufficiently consider the economic and health consequences of the aggressive marketing of complicated treatments?
  • Do our religious leaders appreciate the political and social impact they have by engaging in and promoting our so-called culture wars?
  • Do our journalists take into account the influence of their financially driven promotion of (even by merely reporting, without commentary, on) misinformation and conspiracy theories?
  • And, of course, are our technologists sufficiently introspective and curious about the consequences of what they are creating?

It is an ethical responsibility of those with influence to consider, to search for, the potential consequences of their behavior, even (or especially!) of their actions that would seem to fall directly within the purpose of their professions. Could the doctors in Germany in the early 1930s have anticipated that their aggressive eugenics policies (including forced sterilizations) would lead to the murders of the handicapped by the end of the decade? Could the lawyers in Germany in the early 1930s have anticipated that their enforcement and participation in the “Aryanization” (meaning theft) of Jewish-owned businesses would lead to mass deportation and murder? Could the clergy in Germany in the early 1930s have anticipated that their cozying up to the National Socialists would lead to complicity in genocide?

Yes, these are the extremes. But they are emblematic. The extremes matter because they are instructive. Indeed, they are harsh reminders to today’s professionals that their actions have consequences—not just today for their direct clients, patients, parishioners, et.al., but also tomorrow to potentially larger populations. 

Professionals: ask the questions; work your crystal balls. It is your ethical responsibility. 


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