There are many people with good intentions out there. People who pledge to abide by honor codes in college and ethics codes in the workplace. Who make bad decisions and get caught up in ethical problems and even scandals. My co-author, Patrick Murphy, and I have found in our research that some people have moral lapses because of what we have called moral myopia.
Moral myopia is a distortion of moral vision that keeps ethical issues from coming clearly into focus. In fact, moral myopia can be so severe that an individual is blind to ethical lapses and doesn't see them at all. If everyone's doing it, I can't be wrong. Everyone's doing it, it's fine.
Moral myopia can take many forms, but it generally occurs at one of three levels. The individual, the organization, or society. A person with moral myopia may not see a problem with something like fudging the numbers on a timesheet or an expense report, or with lying to a supervisor or a client, in order to look a little better.
At the organizational level, an advertising executive might say, I could just never advertise cigarettes. But if her agency simultaneously has a tobacco account as a client, and she doesn't even see an ethical problem, then she has a form of moral myopia. I think the issue that we're blind to here at the university is...
diversity in housing here. It is kind of strange that you know this campus is all about like diversity and stuff yet the most populated area where most students live is just one type of like not diverse at all whatsoever. We found that moral myopia tends to occur most often at the societal level. Think about an advertising executive.
Assume that she knows that ultra-thin models and ads can have a negative impact on young women's perceptions of beauty and contribute to problems such as eating disorders. But she doesn't see any connection between the models that she selects for the ads and this societal problem. I just remember this one particular article that I read was talking about Victoria Beckham and how And her clothing line, before she puts it out to the public, she has it fitted on her body so that the normal woman can, like, to make sure that it's not just stick-thin models who can wear her clothes, it's the normal woman.
If you've ever seen Victoria Beckham, she's maybe 5'2 and weighs, I don't know, 75 pounds. Like, she's not by any means the normal woman. In general, like, as society, as, like, women as a whole, we have, like, a very distorted view of what is healthy and what is normal. How can smart people miss these things that should be so apparent? The culprit seems to be rationalizations.
Some of the most common rationalizations that underpin moral myopia are rationalizations such as, if it's legal, it must be moral. Or if it's not illegal, it must be ethical. Listen to what the CEO of a major company said to me. I think this is probably one of the most ethical businesses there is. It's so regulated.
Everything that we do has to go through our lawyers to make sure it's conforming to the law, and then our clients'lawyers. It's really hard to be unethical in this business, even if you wanted to. He's making a classic mistake.
Most all ethicists and legal scholars view the law as the minimum. Yet we get comfort from the law. Guess what this CEO's industry is? Advertising.
In poll after poll on industry ethics, advertising comes in second to last. The only industry less trusted than advertising is used car sales. I think one of the ones that's biggest in my mind is healthcare.
Is that for a lot of people who get to make the decisions about whether to give their employees health care, whether they view it as a state issue to give health care or a national issue to give health care, they have health care. They've never been in a situation, most of them have never been in a situation for any long or serious amount of time, where they haven't been able to go to a doctor. What occurs in companies, and in other types of organizations as well, is that someone gets so caught up in the enthusiasm of her organization, and its efforts to reach certain goals that she doesn't see signs that should be red flags.
And then there's the ostrich syndrome, just sticking your head in the sand and ignoring ethical issues. And we all know that that's never a solution. So last semester in my economics class we had homework quizzes that were assigned every week and we would answer questions on Blackboard online. In the beginning all the students kind of just did the homework questions on their own, but starting towards the middle of the semester we all kind of realized that we could compare our answers before we turned them in.
We at first weren't really sure if it was right, but we kind of just didn't want to think about the fact that it could be wrong. It's important to be aware of moral myopia and the rationalizations that support it, so that the rationalizations will raise red flags and prompt a careful examination. It can be helpful to have trusted advisors outside of our work unit, company, industry, or profession, because sometimes an entire group of people can suffer from moral myopia.
We don't believe it's us that's the problem. We see everyone else doing it and say, oh, it's them, it's not us, we're fine. I think a lot of it is kind of looking, is actually stepping into the other person's shoes, as opposed to just grandstanding and saying, yes, I know the plights of the poor.
Actually meeting someone and talking to someone who's living in those conditions. There needs to be a more healthy discussion of ethics and what is really right. You know, what frameworks are we using to evaluate certain issues?
It comes down to us and our responsibility as a society, as individuals, to take care of problems.