Hope antidote to morally bleak world

Roger Steare says we all know what's right but generally fail to do it. Photo / Supplied

Glance at a newspaper any day of the week and you read about an ethically compromised world, especially in business.

How, I ask the "corporate philosopher", does he maintain hope? On the phone from London, Roger Steare is philosophical: "Hope is all that's left when everything else has gone. It is by definition hope that takes us through when everything else looks bleak."

Steare acknowledges the ethical bleakness all around - immoral decisions by bankers leading to the 2007-8 credit crisis and subsequent recession; the price of housing at fundamentally unsustainable levels, destroying communities; and the head of BP stepping away from an environmental catastrophe with a £1 million ($2.17 million) pay off, and a £10 million pension plan for his troubles. Yet he remains optimistic.

Me, not so much. I've just taken Steare's online ethics test and am alarmed by my "moral character profile".

I score a mere two out of a possible nine for hope. "That's because you're a cynical hack," he says. "But there is hope because you just laughed."

He wants to know about my other scores. My highest are sevens for both excellence and fairness. "Ah, you're a balanced reporter and you have high standards." I'm just feeling a little better, when he asks about my score for love (six), self control (six), and humility (six). "Oh wow, you're Mr Normal - you're balanced." Mr Normal. Great.

Steare, a professor of organisational ethics, and corporate philosopher in residence at the Cass Business School in London, says the purpose of the test is to "understand how we as human beings make the decisions that determine our lives and the world we are creating for ourselves". Until we understand who we are, says Steare, we really can't make decisions about who we ought to be.

Initial results show what human beings really are is greedy and arrogant. In 2008, in conjunction with The Times, some 20,000 people from around the world took part.

It showed Britain as a nation of morally dubious, unethical people and Americans as the most ethical people in the English-speaking world. New Zealand had high scores for "social" and "principled" conscience - showing a good balance between the ethic of care and reason.

The new test, taken by about 5000 to date, aims to determine people's preference for 10 "moral values" - the Greco-Roman virtues of prudence (wisdom), justice (fairness), fortitude (courage) and temperance (self-control); the religious virtues of faith (trust), hope and love; and the "wellbeing" values of humility, honesty and excellence.

"People come to me and say, 'I got a one on love. What does that mean? Do I lack empathy?'." Statistically speaking, scores of four, five and six are in the normal distribution range while one, two, eight and nine, are at the edges. So yes, says Steare, a score of one on love is worth stopping and thinking about. "It means your feelings are less important than your rational decision-making."

But high scores - too much of a virtue - can be a vice. "Too much hope and you become delusional. Too much prudence or wisdom and you'll never take any risks. Too much love and you won't be discerning when it comes to the behaviour of others."

Good judgements, says Steare, come from reason and empathy, and no one virtue trumps all. "Christians would say love is the greatest virtue. But it isn't because high scores in love also map to low scores in self-control."

The test highlights gender differences in virtue. Females significantly outscore males on love, and are ahead on excellence, humility, courage, hope and fairness. Males significantly outscore females on self-control and wisdom and are just ahead on honesty. Both sexes are even on trust. Steare's view that humans are greedy and arrogant is a meta finding - we score positively on eight of the 10 moral value scales, but overall we are low scoring on self-control (greed) and humility (arrogance).

Steare sees a "very deep meaningful insight" in connecting love with self-control, also evident in the female gender values. "Women score highly on love but lowest on self-control. I say four words to them - shoes, handbag, red wine, lipstick - and they all laugh because it's true."

If all this sounds like pop psychology or theoretical musing, then it's worth noting Steare's standing in the business world.

He consults in ethics programs for global giants such as HSBC Bank, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Sky. And he gets called in to clean up the organisational mess when big firms screw up. In Wellington as a keynote speaker for the Human Resources Institute of New Zealand conference in September, he'll release an updated New Zealand moral profile.

Steare's test has a name you'll struggle to find in a dictionary - ethicability. It's also the title of his book - ethicability: How to decide what's right and find the courage to do it. It's relentlessly idealistic: "Ethicability is about being good, doing right, and leaving the world a better place."

Right. Still, I confess I'm perturbed that I've scored a six on rule compliance - what Steare calls the ethic of obedience - doing what you're told, rather than making decisions for yourself. I'd always seen myself as a bit of a rebel and an independent thinker. By my age I'd have hoped, too, for a bit more wisdom and more of a principled conscience.

"There are too many people in this world telling other grown ups what to do and what to think," says Steare. "We do make decisions in our personal lives, but I think something weird happens when we go to work and people don't make decisions in the same way."

Part of my problem, he suggests, could be because I work for a corporate company obsessed with 90-day reporting to the exclusion of all else. "What we're lacking in the modern corporation is that it doesn't have a sense of belonging." Undemocratic, and lacking in ethics, Steare sees the modern corporation as "a deeply dysfunctional form of association" resembling the departure lounge in an airport. In his book he says: "The corporation is simply a legal fiction. It is not 'human' and has no conscience of its own."

While the idea of ethics in business seems like a bad joke - think Enron, Bernie Madoff, AIG, Bridgecorp and Hanover for starters - for Steare it's a fundamental that must be addressed.

But while he's scathing of the role of bankers in the credit crisis - "Banks lent money that they didn't have to borrowers who wanted goods and services they couldn't afford or didn't need" - he also points to a society-wide problem. "Human greed and fear were the fundamental drivers of the crisis."

Similarly, on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, he says most, including US president Barack Obama, focused on BP's role, demonising outgoing chief executive Tony Hayward. Few addressed the wider picture. "The challenges for big oil represent the challenges for society. On one hand people say the environmental disaster is dreadful and on the other they say, 'I can't believe petrol is so expensive'."

Logically, doing the right thing ends up advocating for sustainability. "Our ethos as a species mirrors the ethos of the cancer cell - growth for its own sake. Ultimately it kills the host."

Steare says it's about growing up - moving from childish ethics, always wanting more, to an adult position of seeing prosperity in terms of wellbeing and meeting needs. He isn't fazed that no one seems to be listening. "Whenever I work with people I see the lights go on and a recognition they know the answers. They do know the right thing to do. They just fail to do it." Isn't that depressing? "Things haven't got bad enough yet for most people to shake themselves out of this delusion we have about the world and life. And recognise the sorts of things that make our family life and friendships meaningful and delightful are the things that can actually drive a functioning modern society." But he's adamant the ideal is there, just below the surface - as seen in times of disaster which tends to bring out the best in people. We live - well, some of us do - in hope.

TAKE THE TEST

Ethics specialist Roger Steare has devised what he terms a "moral character profile", which measures a person's conscience and their moral values. It's about, argues Steare, deciding what's right and finding the courage to do it.

His model divides our DNA into three moral strands: "rule compliance" or doing your duty; "social conscience" or your concern for the common good; "principled conscience" or integrity.

Steare's test combines an assessment of a person's conscience, together with scores on a range of moral values. So his profile includes wisdom, fairness, courage and self-control - so-called 'tough' values - religious virtues of trust, hope and love, along with humility, honesty and excellence.

Scores are based on a scale of one to nine, with one the lowest and nine the highest. Five is average and Steare suggests people who get a low score for any value might want to consider how they think, talk and interact with others. Equally a nine might give pause to reflect, given that too much of a virtue can become a vice. Online www.ethicability.org

Roger Steare will be in New Zealand from the end of August for a several speaking engagements. More information at www.hrinz.org.nz