cameron/colby

Photo: Tyler EmersonThis evening I attended a lecture on Ethics with keynote speaker Randy Cohen of New York Times and All Things Considered fame. The event was sponsored by the Center for Practical Bioethics, and I was rather expecting a focus on biology, but the issue never so much as came up.

Randy is the go-to guy for the nation's ethical issues, though he would be quick to denounce the height of his own ethical standards.  Moreover, he generally discounts the impact or even existence of personal character, and believes his success is due quite entirely to luck and social advantage, not any aptitude he might posses.  Randy is a believer in the idea that the community a person is surrounded by determines the moral choices and ethical behaviour of an individual rather than the character of that individual -- not just during youth, but from moment to moment.

The best indicator of your income is your parents income level, and according to Randy, the best indicator of your behaviour is the behaviour of the person sitting next to you at the time.  Essentially, there is no moral superiority or individual responsibility, but rather a systemic community responsibility bound to those with power to create an environment that encourages people to be ethical.  Randy cited numerous statistics and research studies to back up his claims.  The outcome of his conjecture is that people are mindless and flighty automotons who mirror behaviour and can neither be congratulated nor held responsible for their choices in the vast majority of cases.  From time to time there may be independently ethical individuals, but such behaviour is often inconsistent and exceedingly rare, and we cannot rely on it to create an ethical society.

He spoke for some time about poverty (and prosperity) not being indicative of character, but rather being indicative of the economic circumstances in which one is in.  When Randy's argument was countered by a speaker he said something to the effect of 'that would be nice to believe, but it is not my opinion that statistics support the existence of individual character'.

He pointed out that cheating in school, plagiarism, and music downloading are due to changes in technology that encourage these activities rather than any sort of moral decline, and that they continue due to our lack of creating innovative solutions to address them.  Note I said address and not legislate -- Randy is against RIAA lawsuits and school zero tolerance and affirmative honor codes.  He stresses that harsh penalties actually lead to more crimes because people refuse to turn others in or to convict them with such extreme penalties in place.  Rather, he asserts that there ought to be easier better alternatives to cheating created, and that there ought to be simple low-impact ways to discourage it.

A few experimental examples he referenced include:

• Subjects were dramatically more likely to help an old lady in need if they serendipitously found a dime in a pay phone before hand.
• Subjects were led across campus to an unimportant lecture event.  When they were told that they were very early and had time to waste they were quite likely to stop and help a man in dire need of medical attention.  When given no mention of time constraint they were moderately likely to help him, and when told they were in a hurry, they were extremely unlikely to help him. Being minutely late to a superfluous event dramatically affected ethical behaviour.
• Subjects being interviewed in a room in which smoke was coming from the vent were dramatically less likely to report that the building was on fire, if other individuals were in the room did not appear to notice the event (diffusion of accountability, assumption that others must know what's going on).
• In the Stanford Prison Experiment, normal people were committing prisoner abuse and sexual humiliation within 6 days on their own.  The soldiers at abu-girab were just normal people who had a failing of leadership to address a steadily declining situation.  People will adjust to anything over time as their expectations and justifications and peer-acceptance evolves.

The most immediately obvious thing about Randy is that he is quite a humorist and a rather vocal leftist.  He also seemed to be a bit down on America and its lack of upward mobility, citing that it is worse than Europe / England.  (I'm not sure I believe that, but he didn't reference a stat, so I can't specifically dispute it).

When he could brush his political opinions aside, he gave some strong insight into ethical behaviour.  What he did not do is point out very many solutions.  Several audience questions, including that of my friend Airick, ventured into the realm of "Okay, so what do we do about it".  Fortunately, after the event, I was able to catch a Thai dinner with two surprisingly action-oriented professors and a few bright young entrepreneurs who were apt to discuss just such issues.

During the course of the discussion, we ventured into cultural, social and economic development plans, which I will save for another day.  Perhaps if I'm "lucky", you will hear about them as part of a cohesive plan.  In fact, if a number of us aspiring citizens are very "lucky" day in and day out for a number of years, you may even see dramatic results. ;)

(Well, I suppose now that I've gone there, I might as well refer back to Lucky or Smart.)