[MUSIC] Welcome to the second part on our session on types of unethical behavior. The category of unethical behavior in which we will focus in this session is of particular relevance for our course, since it represents the first step on the slippery slope towards ethical blindness. Since we teach this course here on Coursera, we had discussions with you our participants on whether ethical blindness is a binary concept. You either are or you're not ethically blind. Our video on shifting baselines already pointed at a very different understanding of the phenomena. We understand it as a process, in which we become habitually accustomed to not seeing the ethical dimension of our decisions. As we already cited in our Enron video, one of the traders of the company once stated, you do it once, it smells. You do it again, it smells less. The awareness for the ethical dimension of a decision seems to fade away over time and our shifting baseline session already describe the mechanisms that trigger this process. Instead of arguing that someone is or is not ethically blind, we would argue that the decision-maker can be more or less blind or more or less aware of the fact that a particular decision smells. Over time, awareness may decrease more and more, until it's finally entirely gone. If this is the case, it is important to understand the entry point of the process and here we draw from the work of the psychologist Albert Bandura, who proposed the concept of moral disengagement. The concept of moral disengagement has stimulated a lot of research, mostly in social psychology. The bottom line of all those studies is the following, people who manage to morally disengage from some unethical action are more likely to take this action. So what is moral disengagement? We all have moral standards and we use these standards to regulate our behavior. Any behavior that would violate our standards would typically be identified as such and our self-regulatory control mechanisms would ensure that we do not commit such action. Most people would, for instance, condemn any action that would harm other persons. This would be against their moral standards. They are not ethically blind. They see that a particular action, such as harming someone else, would be wrong and so they would not do it. They do care about others. But then there are many situations in which behaving according to our moral standards would incur costs or would be against our own interests or would force us to act against our in-group or against some authority. Note that there are many situations in which it is not easy to determine which course of action would be consistent with our moral standards. These are ethical dilemmas. We already discussed them in the first week of this course. Whatever you do in such a situation, you realize that you need to violate one of your values in order to live another value. You're forced to get your hands dirty, one way or the other. Ethical blindness is typically not an issue here. On the contrary, people are fully aware of the conflict and they suffer or rationalize to cope with the situation. Like the poor participants in the Milgram experiment, who were torn between disobeying authorities or giving an electric shock to someone else. >> Moral disengagement can be seen as a way out of such a situation, as a way of stopping the suffering. According to Albert Bandura, there are several mechanisms we can use to morally disengage. Each of them allows us to take actions that violate our moral standards. The first three mechanisms are how the behavior's seen and evaluated. Moral justification basically means that unethical behavior is seen as having a moral purpose, which in turn, makes it socially acceptable. Examples would be torturing in order to get some information that's necessary to protect others or justifying holy terror by religious principles. Euphemistic language can be used to make harmful behavior respectable, and reduce responsibility for it. For instance, military attacks are labelled as clean surgical strikes. The victims are referred to as collateral damage and terrorists name themselves as freedom fighters. An advantageous comparison contrasts own harmful behavior with the clearly harmful behavior of someone else, thereby trivializing the own immoral behavior. For instance, the American military interventions during the Vietnam war lead to massive destruction and these actions were advantageously portrayed as saving the local population from communist enslavement. >> The next mechanism is about the detrimental effects, minimizing, ignoring, or misconstruing the consequences. It is relatively easy to harm others, if the harmful consequences of one's actions are ignored, if they are not visible, if they are not linked to one's own action, or if they are realized at a very remote place. Psychologically, it makes a difference whether someone kills a sleeping victim with a knife, or whether he is using a computer mouse and a screen to navigate a drone in order to kill this person. >> The next two mechanisms for moral disengagement are about the link between action and effect. Displacement of responsibility distorts the link between actions and the effects they cause. People are eventually willing to execute orders, if a legitimate authority takes over the responsibility for the consequences. In such a case, an executor of an inhumane action may not perceive it as his or her own action any more. He or she is just the functionary. He or she is only producing the effect but the action, true actor is someone else. Remember what we said about Hannah Arendt's banality of evil or the Eichmann trial. Eichmann argued that he was just a bureaucrat, executing orders. Diffusion of responsibility, when everyone is responsible, no one is responsible. This is especially apparent in very large groups. Collective action provides anonymity, which allows weakening of moral control. In a large group, it is, in fact, very easy for each group member to perceive their own share and impact as minimal. So why exactly should you be the one who does anything or stop doing something unethical, if there are so many in the same position as you? You may have heard of Kitty Genovese, who was stabbed to death in 1964 at nighttime on her way to her apartment. This event became famous for an article that appeared two weeks later in The New York Times, which claimed that many people witnessed what has happened, but no one called the police or the ambulance. Presumably because everyone believed that at least one of the others had done this already. This special kind of diffusion of responsibility has since then also been called the bystander effect or the Genovese syndrome. >> The last two mechanisms are related to the victim. Blaming the victim, this makes it easier to do harm because, after all, the victim somehow deserves it. A perpetrator may later say, for instance, that the other one started the whole fight with some provocations. This triggered some justifiable defense reactions and at the end, the initial aggressor was suddenly and somehow dead. So the victim is portrayed as the bad guy and what happened was his own fault. Dehumanizing the victim, dehumanizing victims means that these victims are no longer seen as individuals with feelings, hopes and concerns, but more like objects or as animals. This process of animalistic dehumanization is most commonly established through the use of a metaphor. For example, the Nazi regularly compared the Jews to rats and the Hutus used the term tootsie and cockroach interchangeably in the majority of their propaganda. Killing a human being is certainly harder than killing a disgusting animal. >> It appears that unethical behavior should not be observable as long as people do care about others, but these mechanisms of moral disengagement do the trick. Normal people who have intact moral standards and who care about others may eventually behave unethically and they can even do so without having to change their moral standards. These mechanisms may just offset the self-regulatory processes, which normally ensure that people behave in accordance with their moral standards. We said that moral disengagement typically starts with an awareness of some conflict. Something similar can be said when a decision-maker perceives an ethical dilemma. As we have explained in the very first week of this course, actors experience an ethical dilemma if they are in a situation in which values clash with each other. That is, a situation in which people cannot behave without violating at least one of their values. Acting against any of their values brings people in conflict with their moral standards and is typically unacceptable for them. For instance, you might be expected to do something in your organization that violates your feeling of justice, but at the same time, your in-group expects you to do as they do and you want to be a loyal group member. Once you decide to go in one or the other direction, a dynamic process is triggered. You gravitate towards one of the options and you do so repeatedly, neglecting the other more and more over time. Think of what we said about temporary dynamics and shifting baselines. Every action you take will have an impact on you, who you are, how others perceive and treat you, and what you will see. If you take sides, chances are that you, at some point, will no longer be aware of the other value that constituted an important element of the initial conflict. At some point you do not see it anymore and you may take actions that you perceived long time ago as unethical, because these actions were inconsistent with one of your values. You can become ethically blind, with respect to this particular dimension. First, it smells. Then, it stops smelling. Examples include journalists lying in their articles in an attempt to protect the environment, activists destroying property when fighting for animal rights, or people killing others when fighting for freedom or for the right religion or for some -ism, that is, some ideology. Probably all experienced some conflict at the beginning. Some managed to always see the conflict and the dimensions and values involved and they always tried to strike a balance. Others managed to suppress one side, to morally disengage from one dimension and from one value, and ultimately, behave unethically with regard to this dimension, in an attempt to do good with respect to something else they focus on. >> As we see, it is not easy to navigate through the complexities that modern life presents. Ethical and unethical behavior is an interesting topic, but also a thorny territory. It is often not easy to evaluate the actions and omissions of others who see the world surrounding them from their point of view, which is definitely not ours. That being said, tolerance is a value we shouldn't forget about it. To summarize, there are various types of unethical decisions. Some people have sometimes bad intentions and often they know what they do is wrong, unethical, or illegal. Another type that we discussed is that people just don't care for others. Such egoists typically produce allocations of resources that others may find unethical, but that will not bother the egoists. They don't care what the others think about them. The type of unethical behavior that we find most interesting in the context of course is the one in which people do care about others. They have good intentions and moral standards. Here we looked at the continuum that starts with awareness that the old behavior is unethical, coupled with attempts to nevertheless continue with this behavior. This requires though that the self-regulatory system is set off. We discussed various mechanisms that may help us to morally disengage, as Bandura has put it. Something similar can be said for an ethical dilemma. An ethical dilemma is characterized by awareness that there is an ethical issue. If we consider the temporal dimension, we can see that both the process of moral disengagement and also the way we handle a dilemma could eventually result in ethical blindness. That is, in a mental state in which the awareness is gone, the conflict is no longer perceived as such, and people behave unethically without noticing it. Thanks for watching. [MUSIC]
