“Virtue of character [i.e., of ēthos],” writes Aristotle in Book II, Chapter 1(1) of the Nicomachean Ethics, “results from habit [ethos]; hence its name ‘ethical’, slightly varied from ‘ethos’.”

In other words, principles shape practices, and practices repeated over time (as habits) in turn shape virtue of character.

Listening to a 21st Century Creative podcast episode with entrepreneur and endurance athlete Jarie Bolanger yesterday, Jarie made a similar point: he was compelled to write an “entrepreneur’s ethos” because he hadn’t seen anyone develop a serious code of conduct for innovators.

Situational ethics matter, of course. But to know what the right thing to do is in any situation, it’s important to first grapple with the foundations of right action in general.

Actions and habits that build character and community are a great place to start.

Reading a bit of Aristotle this morning, I am reminded of the importance of prioritization.

There are, he says, many activities — each of which seeks its own good (or end). Medicine seeks health; generalship seeks victory; bridle-making seeks harnessing (which in turn seeks horsemanship).

As we confront all these actions and ends, what we are really presented with are choices. Specifically, we are asked to accurately discern which goods are the highest, and to prioritize those. If we seek health, for example, we had better pay attention to our dietary, physical, and medical pursuits. Sweets and treats are goods, but the pursuit of health ought to subordinate them to the goods of exercise and nutrition.

Ethics are a shorthand for the choices we make about which goods to pursue and how we prioritize them. And one of the easiest ways to go astray is to put lower things before higher.

Beautiful bridles complement good horsemanship, but a better bridle won’t make you a better rider. More often than not, you can’t trade money or minutiae for time in the saddle.

I’ve recently started reading (at last) Anand Giridharadas’s Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. It’s easily one of the most provocative books/theses of 2018, for my money.

There’s plenty to explore there, but one thing that jumped out to me in the first chapter was how a young college student’s exposure to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics alerted her to one of the fundamental conundrums of the human experience: the problem of confusing means and ends.

Writing specifically about money, Aristotle notes how the pursuit of wealth for its own sake warps people and society. He does not ignore the reality or utility of money (which is threaded through the Ethics, the Economics, and the Politics); rather, he offers strong caution against directing our lives to its acquisition.

This is an old idea — surely older than Aristotle, and repackaged in modern sources from the New Testament to This is Water.

But you don’t have to look very hard to find people who seem hell-bent on being the richest guy or gal in the cemetery. Or people blinded by the pursuit of power for its own sake without any clue about what to do with it. Or even people more committed to virtue-signaling than to doing truly virtuous work — by words only when necessary.

Any ethical code that can’t usefully tell ends from means can’t have much practical use. Ditto an ethic that is silent on how to employ means in service of ends.

We all have deep ideas about ends and means. They’re worth surfacing, discerning, examining — and, if necessary, editing — from time to time.

Next time you consider making a purchase or casting a vote, ask yourself what kind of story about ends and means you’re about to endorse, and whether you’d wish that on yourself and those you care about.

Lest the last two days’ posts give the impression that progress may not be possible, it’s important to tack on a note on heretics, who have been a powerful force for progress throughout history.

This is also an excellent opportunity to direct your attention to Maria Popova’s treatment of the “imperfect, . . . brilliant, . . . truth-see[ing]” G. K. Chesterton’s Heretics at her site, Brain Pickings.

She quotes Chesterton writing (in 1905) that “The word ‘orthodoxy’ not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong.” And though it would take much to convince me that power and privilege — in some form, held by some group(s) — will ever be totally removed from the human experience, I’m also prepared to endorse Chesterton’s view: when it comes to “orthodoxy” today, particularly as relates to upholding the status quo, to be orthodox is often to be in the wrong.

Sometimes that’s worth the compromise. Some people dedicate their lives to maintaining enough stability to allow society as a whole to evolve, and that’s laudable. And there are lunatics who would see all of society and its systems torn down either for fun or for some utopian delusion.

But then there are heretics — the sometimes loyal, sometimes not-so-loyal, almost always lonely opposition — who dare to question the conventional wisdom and the soporifics we sell ourselves as The Way Things Are.

These people exist in public and in private, and across the political spectrum. They are those who say this can’t be all there is, or this is not who we are, or I don’t think this is what we are about. That’s thankless work, and the world they call into being rarely comes into being in precisely the way they advocate.

But to completely ignore or try to silence their testimony is not only to ignore pearls of real truth, but to join a long line of less-than-illustrious figures.

Quick: can you name Galileo’s or Joan of Arc’s chief prosecutors?

Now, would you join them?

Last night, I had a conversation over dinner with a couple of friends who are both waaaay smarter than me.

Part of what’s fun about our friendship is that all of us are interested in roughly the same topics, but from different angles: domestic vs. international, qualitative vs. quantitative, research vs. journalism.

Last night, we applied our various frames, methods, and trainings to politics and policy. And one of the big sticking points we quickly came to was the question of truth-telling in politics. When “flip-flopping” (i.e. changing your mind in response to the evidence — the rational thing to do) is anathema, and the moral-political imperative to tell the truth or change course might seem to contradict the retail-political imperative to reassure people that we’re just as exceptional, infallible, and indispensable as we ever were and ever will be, is an honest look at the state of the Union (or of the world) even possible?

After dinner, I went home and read a little bit from one of the great theologian and preacher Walter Brueggemann’s books. Lo and behold, I came to a sermon delivered on the 100th anniversary of the preacher’s own home church. And what does he tell this community that cared for him as a child and for his family even before he was born?

He uses the first couple of paragraphs to establish his own ties to the community, then spends the first two full sections of his sermon singing the glories of the first century of its existence (admitting, from time to time, that of course not all members were saintly all of the time).

Then, in the third and fourth sections, he does something remarkable: he says, “as we remember, we also look forward.” And he throws down the challenge, saying that the worth of those first hundred years will be determined by the work of the next hundred. On that anniversary, he insists that the work begins by asking “what will the [community] be now, what now will we do … in a community that has become ethically complex in a world that is deep in bewilderment and violence, when old ways are fading?”

I don’t think that message was put to a focus group before it was preached. Do you?

Our politicians might take a lesson. Instead of pandering to us, or offering endless platitudes and paeans to founders and heroes and the old ways that are (rightfully) fading, what if they asked us to celebrate what’s best in our past by building a better future? To engage with the ethical complexities and bewilderment and violence of a modernity the founders could not have imagined rather than shutting our eyes and clinging by our fingernails to the status quo?

That would tell us much about the state of the Union, wouldn’t it? To see if we could hear such an invitation, and rise to it?

***

Walter Brueggemann is even more fun to listen to than he is to read. To hear him in his own words, I recommend this episode of On Being.

I was having a conversation with a friend yesterday afternoon and she mentioned a situation that came up in a gathering she’s part of. She was with a group of people who were talking about the future of business — how it might be more human, more humane, less harmful to people and planet.

All was going swimmingly until someone in the group pointed out what an elitist project this was: what could it possibly mean for people of different class, status, culture, or opportunity? You know, the kind of people who can’t gather in a major European city for a day to talk about better business?

This apparently led to a breakout conversation and some commitments to explore how to bring the ideas of the gathering to less privileged people. And here, I’d like to add an asynchronous riff along those lines.

On one level, I believe this person was absolutely right. The people in a room like that, for a conversation like that, are almost inherently going to be people for whom the system works, and who already have the freedom and opportunity to try to innovate around the edges. They’re not producing T-shirts for pennies a day, or otherwise working jobs that bear the real costs of our current ways of doing business.

But on another level, I think it’s more complicated. If the people with power and privilege aren’t having conversations like that, how will things change? And if the goal becomes meaningful, humane work for all people on the planet right now, how shall we start making that reality?

Power, to use a popular term, is leverage. Working to help people with leverage see how they could move the culture forward is good work. Helping them understand that they’re responsible for how they use their leverage (or don’t) might be even better work. And helping them use their leverage to help build the culture is great work.

Wealth, power, and privilege aren’t going away. (Who holds them might be changing, though.) If we can begin to talk about who holds these levers, what’s expected of them, and what they expect of themselves, we might — just might — be able to lever up the quality of a lot of people’s lives.

And that might be very good and humane business indeed.

Only questions today, no answers or definitive assertions.

• What are the ethics of trying to change someone’s mind?
• What are the ethics of trying to change the culture?
• If “first, do no harm” is a good general rule, how far into the future do we have to extend our care, and how are we going to define and assign harm?
• What are the ethics of tribes today? In other words, if it’s true that small groups have strong associative power, how can we build tribes that also help build the culture (as opposed to increasing partisanship and factionalism)?
• What does it mean ethically when we change our own minds?

Stealing is always wrong, right?

That’s usually treated as a pretty basic and general ethical claim. But today, I want to look at what kind of stealing counts and what we often overlook.

Let’s start with this passage from Seth Godin’s article “Let’s Stop Calling Them ‘Soft Skills,’” the whole of which is worth your attention:

Theft

If an employee at your organization walked out with a brand-new laptop every day, you’d have him arrested, or at least fired. If your bookkeeper was embezzling money every month, you’d do the same thing.

But when an employee demoralizes the entire team by undermining a project, or when a team member checks out and doesn’t pull his weight, or when a bully causes future stars to quit the organization — too often, we shrug and point out that this person has tenure, or vocational skills or isn’t so bad.

But they’re stealing from us.

Seth Godin, “Let’s Stop Calling Them ‘Soft Skills’” (31 Jan 2017)

I think it’s true that actions like those count as stealing. Anyone who’s ever worked with or for demoralizing people knows the feeling of having hours, days, weeks of her life stolen.

Part of the challenge with this kind of theft, though, is that both the act and any response are social and political. Can you tell your boss he’s stealing your time or talents? What kind of culture would you have if you carelessly “prosecuted” teammates for stealing-by-demoralizing?

If we treat this as an enforcement or compliance problem, I don’t think things will get better. People will fight to avoid being publicly labeled thieves, even if it’s true that they’re stealing our best work and care.

Instead, it’s important to see this as an ethical matter for ourselves, as employees and especially as managers. With power and responsibility come the ability to steal people’s time and talents, and we shouldn’t give ourselves permission to do that even in exchange for some treasure.

The truth is that we know this kind of behavior is real theft: we can see it and we can feel it. But, as with so much else in the realm of morality, it’s really hard to legislate against it effectively. What we might be able to do is to start a more honest conversation about the standards we’re going to hold ourselves to, and how we’re going to deal with people who steal from the group in this way.

Bad management (of self and others) costs real money, after all. Opportunities are missed, people leave organizations to escape their managers.

What are we going to do about that, now that the economy so prizes efficiency, connection, and discipline, and we’re all working in public like never before?

This weekend, I had a chance to read Scott Perry’s ebook Be Creative on Purpose. (Visit him here for a free copy and to see his other work. I particularly recommend the best advice he received in 2018, which he was generous enough to share with all of us.)

I like so many ideas in that book, but one of my favorite things about it is how up-front Scott is with his ethical claims.

That was personally refreshing to me, since it reminded me in the reading how near and dear that idiom is to my heart. I also think it’s important in general for people to demonstrate their ethics in their work — and, when they have the generosity to show their work in the way that Scott does, it can help the rest of us see how valuable this is, and how we so often leave ethical claims implicit.

Generosity, for example, is a one-word meme that contains the germ of a much larger set of beliefs about how the world works and how we’re meant to work within it. It sounds attractive (and I happen to think a more generous world would be a better one, and therefore that more generous work is worth it), but it really helps to think through that idea aloud to ensure we have a chance to see it, test it, and decide whether and how to accept it.

On that note, I hope more creatives have this conversation more publicly. Creation, after all, is a deeply ethical act with lots of ethical consequences. In order to realize the promise of a creative, entrepreneurial culture and economy, we need to be clear with each other about the kind of culture we want to create and how our work is helping to create it.

If it’s true that the personal ethics of people in position to affect the rest of us can have direct consequences for us, that begs the ancient question as to whether there is a significant difference between personal and public or institutional governance. Is it OK for bankers to manage their own money one way while taking risks with others’? Or for the state to enact justice up to the point of violence and killing, while denying those recourses to its citizens?

The consensus view seems to be that it’s complicated, and I don’t have a truly novel answer to pose here myself, at least at this moment.

But I had reason the other day to contemplate the difference between justice blindfolded versus justice open-eyed, holding the sword firmly but the scales less so.

And that made me wonder: when and where is our culture too blind to context, or too willing to let groups of people acting together do things that would be unacceptable if performed individually and personally?

You wouldn’t want to get too carried away in either direction, of course. Total relativism tends to descend into chaos, one way or another; total impartiality tends to split the baby, leaving everyone ill-served. (It also might be a fiction, if often a convenient and sometimes a necessary one.)

So, no: I don’t have easy answers here. But I think we’d better be asking better, tougher questions about this.