Living an examined life. What is ethics for?

Dr Simon Longstaff of The Ethics Centre on the intrinsic value of ethics and its vital role in everyday life

Dr Simon Longstaff has presided over The Ethics Centre for 34 years. He is an Adjunct Professor of the Australian Graduate School of Management at University of New South Wales, a Fellow of CPA Australia, the Royal Society of New South Wales and the Australian Risk Policy Institute. In 2013, he was made an officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for “distinguished service to the community through the promotion of ethical standards in governance and business, to improving corporate responsibility, and to philosophy.”

Dr Simon Longstaff is an Australian philosopher and the Executive Director of The Ethics Centre, a not-for-profit organisation whose purpose, as they themselves define it, is to “bring ethics to the centre of everyday life”. The Ethics Centre is a unique organisation not as much because of the focus of their work and what they do but because of how they do it. It is the only organisation which provides a national free helpline called Ethi-call designed to guide anyone who is facing a difficult ethical decision in their personal or professional life.

The Ethics Centre’s Primary Ethics programme seeks to educate primary school students about ethics while The Ethics Alliance aims to provide ethical guidance in business. The Centre works with various branches of the Australian government and have submitted a proposal to the Commonwealth Government to establish the first Australian Institute of Applied Ethics whose purpose will be to help restore trust in public institutions by providing independent advice on the ethical conundrums in modern Australian society.

The Ethics Centre’s wealth of knowledge on ethics and morality in the form of articles, audio and video content, conferences, reports and research papers, free courses and other materials, provides truly actionable and practical insights on how to navigate the complexity of human life. Anyone who wants to contribute to their important work can become a member or make a one-off donation.

I recently had the great opportunity to talk to Simon about the foundational value of ethics, and its role in spheres of social life like economics, technology, religion, the military, public debate, and human existence in general. As he often argues, we can’t achieve ethical perfection, but we can and should try to be at least 10% better, by reflecting on our decisions and asking ourselves: “If I do this and tomorrow it becomes common knowledge, how would I feel about it?”

The interview was edited for clarity.

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Simon, you're often asked to provide a definition of ethics, and the way you usually describe it is that ethics is what defines human choice, it's the ability of humans to act beyond desire and instinct. And as you've pointed out before, ethics deals with a very practical question, which is: “What should I do”? Ethics is a branch of philosophy which is why I think a lot of people kind of avoid ethics in everyday conversations because they probably see it as this abstract, theoretical thing. But actually, human choice is about a very practical implication in everyday life. And you've also mentioned that ethics is often confused with its cousin morality. So I think a good way to start this conversation is what is the difference between ethics and morality, and why do you think people tend to stay away from ethics in everyday life and daily conversations?

Well, thank you for that. It's a very good starting point. The question that philosophers have been asking both in East and West for thousands of years, concerns whether or not we can understand the basis on which human choice is exercised and all that flows from those choices, for good or for ill. And what we've come to realise in a fairly obvious way, is that when you come to answer the question “What ought one do, what should one do”?, you are typically borne into an environment which provides you with an initial set of core values and principles.

For many people, they are attached to their culture. Often they're attached to religion and they often come as a set which are already fashioned in advance of you being born so if you take the question “What ought one to do?”, there is for many people a predefined box of core values and principles and it might be a Christian box, it's got Christianity in it, it's got not just those values and principles but it's also got revealed truths and exemplary lives and things of that kind. And there's a Muslim box, the Jewish box, and a series of philosophical boxes like utilitarianism and things like that.

Each of those boxes is a morality to package which you can draw upon in order to answer the question “What ought one to do”? And as I said earlier, from the moment you're born, you're usually being inducted to use one of these boxes. So there are multiple moralities that are available for one to draw upon. Often you begin without much choice at all. It's just something you're given. The difference between living a moral life is that you can take the box of core values, a morality, and you can apply it really just...In fact, many people grow up habitually saying: “This is good, this is bad, that is right, that is wrong”.

And they follow a set pattern of decisions. Whereas an ethical life, as you've indicated, is by definition an examined life. It rejects the idea that even virtuous habits are all that you need to live a fully human life. It goes back to the claim by the Greek philosopher Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living, based on the idea that we are participating, because each human being is participating in a form of being, which is defined by its ability, as you noted, to go beyond mere instinct and desire, which is part of our animal nature. And instead to make these conscious choices. So Socrates says, well, if you don't live this life, this examined life where you can take that extra step, you're not really living the fully human life. That lesser life isn't really worth it.

And that's precisely why people don't like it, as it turns out, because many people say, “Actually, life is simpler to me. If I can just follow a set of habits which I learnt as a child, in my childhood, as part of the culture in which I belong, it's a business of having to think about things. It sounds like it's a bit too difficult, requires too much of me. So let's not take up cognitive space by reflecting on whether I buy eggs from chickens that have lived a good life in free range. Why do I have to bother with that? Why do I have to bother about environmental questions or why do I have to bother about whether to tell the truth to someone when it's a bit inconvenient?” And so many people run away from that basis and that's, I think, part of it. It's not so much that it's abstract, because this is a branch of philosophy that's very focused on the day-to-day questions of life. I think it's more that life becomes, for some people at least, apparently more difficult.

Right. And who and when should teach us ethics then?

Well, I think in a good society we should begin learning how to think from the earliest point we can really. I think children have a very strong moral sense. They also become confused when they see adults doing things which don't seem to accord with what they've been told to expect. There may have been very good reasons for why those adults had to make an alternative and perhaps difficult decision. And children are capable of engaging with those reasons, even from as young as kindergarten, when they're first starting to move away from family into school and even before that.

So I think we should do it early. I think it's something that parents and community members and certainly schools should do. But of course, many people don't want to do that either because they'd say: “I just want my child to be like me. I just want them to follow the same path I followed. Life would be a lot easier. I don't want them asking too many difficult questions”. And so it's not necessarily the case that this is a popular thing for parents to do, even though I think it really is an important part of their contribution to their child's living a better kind of life.

You've spoken about ethics’ enemies before, and these are hypocrisy on the one hand, and the unthinking custom and practice, on the other.

Yes.

Which basically explains, I think, why sometimes good people do bad things.

Yes.

How can we make sure that hypocrisy and this unthinking custom don't disempower us to behave ethically?

Well, the first thing is, to start with one of the points you noted, is that most of what goes wrong in the world isn't perpetrated by wicked people in the conventional sense. More often than not you see good people making bad decisions. And when you ask them about it and say: “Well, why did you do it?” They will say to you truthfully: “Well, I didn't see it: “Why didn't you see it?” “Because everybody was doing it. Because that's just the way things were done”.

That is the second part. That's the unthinking custom and practice. It finds it much easier to develop in circumstances where there has been hypocrisy because that breaks trust. It becomes like an acid that eats away at the bonds that hold people together. So the solution to both problems actually, both to the problem of hypocrisy where you say one thing and you do something else, and then to the unthinking custom and practice is to embark upon a kind of leadership called constructive subversion. People think: “Really? You want me to be subversive?” The answer is: “Yes”, because what you're asked to subvert, is not the whole world, but that tendency towards unthinking custom and practice. So whatever one's role, you can exercise a kind of leadership of this kind by saying: “Well, why aren't we doing this?”

And if somebody says: “Well, we're doing it because everybody does it”, that's the only reason for doing it, then you can point out that that's a very inadequate basis for choosing to act. Instead you should be attaching what you do to a set of core values and principles. But the reason why it's not destructive but instead it imposes on you an obligation to be constructive is that if you're doing this, not so much in your personal life — in this case you've got a lot of flexibility but if you're say, in an organisation which has itself already defined for you its purpose, its values and its principles, then your obligation is to be constructively subversive in order to help this organisation to become more like what it says it wants to be.

That is, you point out the apparent inconsistency that is where the hypocrisy lives. Say: “Well, why are we doing this?” And somebody says: “Well”, then you say: “Actually, no, let's try and think, is this something we ought to be doing, given what this organisation or what we've agreed, however it might be, to be our core values and principles?” That takes a certain amount of moral courage to do that, because a lot of people don't want to be disturbed by these questions. They prefer actually to be left just to get on with things. But if you have that moral courage and the wisdom to do this in a constructive manner, then it can be very, very powerful.

I'd like to talk about the building blocks of ethics, or what underpins ethics, which is values, which is about what is good; principles which is about what is right, and purpose which explains why something or someone exists. I wonder why ethics cannot be universal in the sense that different countries and cultures, as you pointed out earlier, they have different priorities. I think you've previously talked about countries like the United States, which value liberty above all, while countries like China put a bigger value on harmony or order. And on top of that, there are different ethical theories or frameworks which can be applied to reflect on our choices or explain our behaviour — I'm referring to utilitarianism, deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics. So I wonder why ethics cannot be universal?

Well, part of it is universal, so the basic structure, that there are values and principles that structure our choices, that is universal. Every culture, in every time in history, human beings unavoidably are being driven by what they think is good and what they think is right. So that part is universal throughout all time but you're correct to point out that there then can be differences across cultures in terms of the relative priority of values that might be shared in common but also, in terms of how a shared value might be expressed. So we'll start with that where you might have two people in different cultures who both value friendship. One will express that value by spending time, maybe having a meal, things like that.

But there are some cultures where friendship has a ritual component involving the giving and receiving of gifts. And if you're unfamiliar with that expression of friendship and you walk into that cultural environment, and suddenly you find someone either expecting or offering a gift, you might think that they're trying to do something improper because on the face of it, it's a form of behaviour you don't recognise for being connected to friendship. So it's very important when you're engaged with different cultures to suspend your judgement to the point that you say: “Am I actually seeing a different value being expressed or something which I hold in common with these people but being expressed in a different way”? It’s like a gene can be expressed differently depending on the epigenetic environment. But that said, there are differences in priorities.

And you've pointed out two very notable ones in the world. And it's not so much a problem that relative priority can be given to, say, liberty in one place or harmony in another. It's rather to realise that more likely than not, both of those values are present somewhere in the list. So it's not as if the Chinese worldview doesn't value liberty, it's just that they don't value it as highly as harmony or order. And it's not that the Americans typically don't worry about, don't care about some kind of harmony, although in the current environment perhaps they don't.

They probably have it there, but it's a subordinate value. So we're often talking about quite flexible things. Something like liberty can become less important than security after say a terrorist attack even in the US where we saw them supplant liberty with security and they made a whole lot of predictable changes in which they changed their law and their technology and their buildings all because this new value was directing their choices in a way that was different to what liberty did. And that means that when you navigate the human landscape, the ethical landscape re-occupies humans, yes there will be challenges but it's not as if you ever enter into territory which is totally unfamiliar to you.

The reason for that is partly to do with the role that purpose plays because there are certain purposes which necessarily entail shared values so the typical example of purpose which I use which is very physical is that to do with a knife. You ask the question: “What is the purpose of a knife”? Well, people come pretty quickly to say: “Well, to cut things”. “So what is a good knife”? “A good knife is the thing that cuts things well”. “What does that entail”? Well, it means the blade has to have a certain kind of sharpness, has to be shaped in a way that is fit for the purpose it serves, if it is for peeling an apple, then it's a different blade required than say, I don't know, cutting up meat, something like that, or spreading butter".

And equally, the handle has to be fit for the user. So you could have a perfect blade on a handle that no one can use because it's too long or too large and it's no use. So the same sort of idea can apply to certain types of activity or institutions. Law firms, lawyers, everywhere should have a more or less equivalent concern for justice. Journalists should have everywhere a more or less equal concern for truth, given the defining purpose which they serve. And to that end, what you look forward to see is a set of values and principles that can be made, in some sense, relatable from one place to another, because of those factors.

I’d like to talk about ethics and religion. They have an interesting relationship, I think. In one interview that you did previously, the interviewer asserted that people nowadays have lost their ability or interest to behave ethically as opposed to previous times to which you responded that it's not entirely true because people have never had this interest in examining their life in that sense, and taking responsibility because ethics is also about taking responsibility. It's been easier for them to live by the rules that an authority prescribes which could be the church, could be religion or a public institution. Are ethics and religion at odds with each other and why do so many people think that you cannot be an ethical person if you don't believe in God or if you're not religious?

So part of the reason, we'll start with that last question, is to do with how people explain the human capacity to make conscious choices. Religious people typically, certainly within the monotheistic religions of things like Judaism, Christianity and Islam, they say that we are able to do this, that is we're not just purely animal in nature because we're made in the image of God. So they tie the whole phenomenon of ethical decision making back to a certain metaphysical or theological claim and they also typically will ground their choice of core values and principles in a narrative which involves revelation or some kind of divine intervention where things have been given to you and this isn't just in the monotheistic religions, you'll find something similar taking place in classical religions say in the Greco-Roman world and in other places, too, where spirits or beings give you the source of enlightenment or knowledge to make good choices.

Of course, scientists tell a different story. They say actually, the reason why we are not just bound as animals are, to follow instinctive desire, isn't entirely natural for us. It's a socio-biological part of our evolution and elevation of the human species to the point it occupies at this point, again, for good or ill, because we can be incredibly destructive with our choices. And they say, well, it's science. You don't have to find some kind of theological explanation.

But people like me say: “Well, actually, I don't think I have to choose between those two things. I'm just going to start with the simple, brute fact that we have this ability”. It's just true. We just know that we can do it, and we can practice it, and we can come together. And you, theologians and you, scientists, you might want to spend your days arguing about this, but I'm going to get on with the process of saying, well, what follows from this fact that I can do it, wherever it came from, and it's demonstrably true that if I want, I can use this faculty without having to resolve the question of theology or science as to its origin, and in fact lots of people have worked out well what does it mean, and start to get thicker and thicker notions that a good life for a human being would be a life of flourishing — the Greek notion of eudaimonia.

Now, it again of course calls you to reflect and of course it's less satisfactory for some people than a religious package, those moral packages we were talking about before, which means that you don't have to think. It not only comes to you with a pre-set framework but also that claim of authority. Where does this come from? It comes from God, the gods or spirits or from some thing that is other and greater than oneself. And in fact for a very considerable period of human history, certainty was assured not by anything we could do for ourselves, but by the activities of these greater than and other than us. So we would pray to them, sacrifice to them, do all sorts of things to try and get some kind of control over an otherwise messy universe.

But with the origin of René Descartes and the emergence of the European Enlightenment, we actually turned all of that on its head because, I think you may recall in Descartes' radical thought experiment where he's sceptical about everything, eventually he has to stop doubting the fact that he exists, to be thinking about this at all and that has massive cultural implications because now certainty doesn't come from something out there but something inside here, and of course that's a complete threat to all of those systems of theology that are based on starting with something out there and that's the tension really between those theological worldviews and those philosophical or rationally based world views even though they have the same values and principles even then, they'll still get annoyed with each other because of that puzzle as to where authority lies — inside or out.

You've done a lot of work on military ethics and you've worked with the Australian defense force for years. I’ve always found it hard to place ethics in this context of the military, war zones, the defense industry. Because on the face of it, the military and defense forces are about bringing about peace but the means they use are forceful, it’s violence against other people, there is a lot of collateral damage, and wars generally exact a heavy price on the civilian populations. And we often hear this expression,“war is hell”, as a way, I think, to justify unethical behaviour on the part of soldiers. But there's also another dimension to this, which is moral injury. And I think the term appeared in this context, in military ethics. So can you please explain what the place of ethics in war is and explain this concept of moral injury and other related concepts like ethical restraint?

So no soldier or no person belonging to the profession of arms would ever say “war is hell” as a justification for atrocities. Only someone who's never been anywhere near war would think that. Rather, what they talk about when they say “war is hell” is that this is the most terrible, harrowing experience that human beings can encounter, and consequently since we are prone as a species to resolve difficulties through the use of violence, it's effectively what war is, there have been efforts over centuries to constrain how this violence is used so that it does minimum damage for only legitimate purposes. So you'll find a whole rich literature about the justification for war, which ultimately in its highest form is only if it secures a peace that would be superior to that which would have prevailed if no war had been fought.

And of course it extends beyond, the highest order is securing peace for someone else to include self-defence and things like that. So there's a kind of a hierarchy of reasons, but there has been a recognition that simply invading another party in order to secure for yourself a benefit, whether it’s political or material, is not just, nor is it justified. Unfortunately, we don't have in the world today the mechanisms to enforce such a principle, so people who are strong enough do it and try and get away with it, as we've seen, for example, in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. But once it's started, the next layer of ethics is to do what's known as the jus in bello. First, in Latin, it's jus ad bellum — the justification for going to war. The second is jus in bello, what justifies the use of force in a conflict. And there's some really tightly defined criteria now. For example discrimination.

You are not supposed to use force to any degree against someone who is a non-combatant. And every time there is what's so-called collateral damage, that is an innocent person who is not in armed conflict, is killed, that is a failure. Now, some people tolerate a certain amount, we're seeing in conflicts for example between Israel and Hamas at the moment massive collateral damage because choices are being made to wage that war in a way which protects Israeli soldiers as a priority over the civilians who are being killed because of that decision to use force in a way which is not especially discriminating and in fact they have tables of how many they're prepared to allow to be killed or wounded in pursuit of a legitimate target.

The second term is that it's supposed to be proportionate use of force. That is, you only use the amount needed to bring about the desired objective. So somebody who uses overwhelmingly force, you know, it's a bit like using a mallet to crack an egg, you know, a sledgehammer to crack an egg or something, you just don't need it. That fails too. And that goes to that notion of restraint.

And the key concept here, and it's attributed to Michael Ignatieff, who is a Canadian who's spent a lot of time in Central Europe. But he made the point that there is a difference between a warrior and a barbarian, and that in the profession of arms, you should be a warrior. The difference, he says, the difference between a warrior and a barbarian is that the warrior exercises ethical restraint. That is, they do not do everything that they could do.

They only do those things which they should do. And in the best armed forces, and I would say I've seen this firsthand with the Australian Defence Force at its best, soldiers will even take those decisions to exercise ethical restraint, even if it threatens their own lives. In other words, they prioritise the safety of a non-combatant over the risk they take to themselves. Now, when you don't do that, when you are indiscriminate or disproportionate in your use of war or when you wage an unjust war, the risk is that at some point you as a combatant will wake up and say: “Oh my god, what have I been doing”? We saw this happen to lots of people in the war in Vietnam, almost any war, if it's an unjust war and it uses disproportionate or indiscriminate force.

If you're a combatant, and it's either an unjust war or one in which you've engaged in or been a party to disproportionate or indiscriminate force, then lots of people, when they go back to the relative peace and quiet of their lives, look back and ask themselves, how did I become the person who did those things?

That's where moral injury arises, when there is a dissonance between who you believe yourself to be in your essence and the things that you did, such that you suffer profound shame and regret. Particularly if you can't do anything about it, then that can lead people in the most intense circumstances to take their own lives, to suicide. So part of what you hope to do as a person exercising command in those situations, is to try and make sure that you don't put people in a situation where they'll suffer moral injury because not only then are you waging an unjust war using unjust means potentially, but you're also harming your own people who've probably committed much of their lives to serve.

So the role of commanders in the army is very critical in that?

Not just them, so what you look to do is to get moved from what's called command intent to common intent. So a very good commander will typically set out a framework on how they're going to undertake the activities which they've been directed to pursue. And then they'll make sure everybody has a common intent. And you do that really by cultural formation and getting clear about how everybody plays a role in maintaining the integrity of the system. This is especially important in what's called asymmetric warfare, when one side vastly outguns the other and can always dominate in terms of people, personnel or munitions.

In those cases, a weaker side will often seek to provoke an atrocity, particularly if it's a liberal democracy on the other side, in order to try and weaken resolve to continue the battle at home. Where if you see, say, if an Australian group of soldiers committed an atrocity, as has been the case in Afghanistan, once the public finds about that, it weakens the will of the community to support any kind of ongoing conflict. And so, a weaker party will seek to bring about that result, where they try and make you lose your moral authority by being and provoking very deliberately with the intention of causing atrocities. And we've seen this in a number of conflicts around the world, where a weaker side will keep on provoking, provoking, provoking until there's a response.

And particularly if you get drawn into conflict, say, in an urban setting, then it's almost impossible to fight without there being damage done to innocent people and to infrastructure and all the rest. And even though you say, oh, we tried our best to try and limit that, the more it goes on, the more you suffer damage as a result of that.

And what's the way to repair moral injury?

Well, first of all, the best is to prevent it so it means taking risks. I'll give you an example — you might be going into a settled area where there's a legitimate target say a command post or something and there's two ways you can go — one, you can fire a missile in, and obliterate the whole building including everybody who's in there, whether they are combatants or not, or, you could send in your own ground troops which means they'll be far more precise in what they do. They'll use far less lethal force, but they'll be far more exposed to the risk of death or capture. And you've got to make a decision as to what risks you take, how much by way of good training and support do you provide, particularly if it's a professional army as opposed to volunteers, it’s a bit different there, you know, where they've been either scripted or drafted in to serve.

It could be said that they don't have the training or the support to warrant exposing them to additional risk but that's the kind of calculation so you prevent it. Of course, if you don't do that and someone suffers moral injury, then the person who suffers it needs to be assisted to come to understand the nature of the circumstances in which they operate. And the best thing really is as I said — you don't want someone saying when they get back from a conflict: “If only I'd ask this question or if only I'd consider that matter”.

Often if you go through all of those “if only” moments in advance, then you may still fight an incredibly challenging and abrasive environment, but you've had…I don't know if you've ever ridden on a motorbike, people who ride motorcycles they wear leathers, you know thick leather out of garments because when they fall off the bike onto a rough road, that's the thing that gets rubbed away, not their skin. If they didn't wear it, it would be their skin that would be torn off but what you want to do in these highly conflictual environments, is to thicken your ethical skin so that when you get into an abrasive environment, it's that thickness that's being worn away, not your underlying sense of oneself, and you do that by preparation.

Right. I want to also talk about the economic value of ethics or ethics in economy. I agree with what you've mentioned before that nowadays we tend to perceive impact or value in monetary terms so unless we can quantify something or put a dollar sign next to it, it's not worth doing but you've pointed out that ethics has an intrinsic value so some things are worth doing because they are intrinsically good not because they're profitable.

And not because they're necessarily successful, either, I mean sometimes things don't work.

Sure, also that. Couple of years ago I think, you produced a very interesting report together with Deloitte, The Ethical Advantage. The report actually identifies that if you increase ethical behaviour, if you manage to do that in the society, it actually proves to be more profitable for that society. The report also talks about trust as the building block between public and private institutions on the one hand and the citizenry, on the other. And we've seen that this tendency of ours to always quantify things, has eroded trust in these public institutions, in the media as well, practically in every sphere of society. So I wonder what is the path for the media, let's say, or our governmental institutions to regain this trust?

So you're right, I was reluctant to have that research undertaken because I felt I was feeding into that tendency to make anything, all things only have value when they can be quantified. But I had to also consult my own belief about the importance of informed decision making. And one source of information is economics, so I thought, well, at least we should find out what the answer is to the question, about whether ethics has an impact on the economy. And as you correctly identify, there's a very profound impact, at least in a country like Australia for the reason that the better the ethical infrastructure, the stronger the trust and the more you can do in a society, the flexibility.

This brings us to your question, what do you do about it? The first thing about trust is that you cannot build trust unless you first declare publicly the basis on which you're prepared to be judged. And that means declaring publicly a standard of judgment or forejudgment that will guide you in your decision making and which others can apply to determine whether you've been consistent or not.

Because if I don't tell you how I'm willing to be judged, then you'll never trust me because you'll never know the standard which I claim to uphold by my actions. That's the first part. The second thing is, you won't trust me if I do tell you my core values and principles that is the standard for judgment, and then don't actually apply them. You'll say I'm a hypocrite, and with justification. So the two very simple things to describe are firstly, you need to tell the world who you are and what you stand for.

That is, what are your core values and principles, and therefore that you're prepared to be judged as to whether those things are effective. And then you better follow on from that. Where it becomes difficult is that in a highly sceptical, if not outright cynical society, those people you're trying to convince will not be convinced even if you treat them in a manner entirely consistent with what you’ve said, unless you also treat everybody else in the same way.

So if you’re say in a business, trying to build trust with consumers, and you treat your consumers entirely consistently with what you've said, they won't trust you, even though their experience is good, unless they can see how you treat each other in that business. So if you treat your own colleagues in a different way to what you've said is the standard for judgment, they'll say: “Ah, this was just a little bit of marketing spin to try and manufacture rather than earn trust”. Equally, if you don't treat your suppliers in a manner which is consistent with the standard for judgment, people will say: “Ah, you don't really believe it, do you? Because here's a vitally important stakeholder that you don't treat them in a manner that's consistent”.

Well, the same applies to government. If you're a government or a public institution trying to build trust with the community, you must start off by saying: “This is who we are, this is what we stand for, here are our core values”. And then you've got to apply them consistent across all aspects of society, you can't say: “Oh well, there's one group here, the rich people and we'll treat them one way but we'll treat you all a different way”. People say: Well, what do you stand for?, unless one of your principles is to treat rich people better than poor people, I mean if you're explicit about it, they might not like it but they might say: “Well, at least you're doing what you said”. But otherwise, the challenge for leadership in the public and the private sector in gaining trust is to be trustworthy — not to try and manufacture trust as an end in itself but to be the thing which is deserving of trust and they’re trustworthy, and they do that by having a clearly articulated set of core values and principles which you then consistently apply across all key relationships.

Have you found that these private and public institutions which The Ethics Centre works with to bring ethics to their work, are more receptive or they are more resistant?

Some are. I mean really some are and some are not, and it depends very much on the effect. If something bad has happened, then they're usually be a bit more receptive. If things are going well, they're probably in one of these habits or like a groove of doing things that's all going well. Why would we change? Why do we need to think? And there are some who don't want to put their toe in the water because they think life will be difficult, so they say, let's better off, just turn a blind eye to what might be going on.

So it's a very mixed response, Jana. But the good ones who are trying to prepare themselves for a future where there's lots of challenge and lots of opportunity, they do take this seriously and they try to prevent bad things from happening, and this is one of the problems with ethics, it's incredibly powerful but most of its effect is in things that don't happen. So it's pretty hard to claim credit for something that never occurred, you know, the bad decision that wasn't made, the disaster that did not unfold, the damage that wasn't done to a community or to the environment. But that is the actual fruit of good ethics. It lies in all of the bad things that don’t happen.

I want to talk about ethics in disagreement. You've mentioned before that you don't have to agree with someone in order to listen to their perspective. And this is something that The Ethics Centre is doing with FODI, the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, which is a forum that brings contradictory views into the public debate. So why do you think people in general find it hard to expose themselves to views that misalign with theirs? Especially nowadays, I think this has become a stronger instinct.

So the Festival of Dangerous Ideas looks to bring forward ideas that make people go: “Ouch”, that are uncomfortable, slightly spiky ideas. Not for everyone, of course, the person putting forward the idea always thinks it's perfectly obvious. And we do that because we think there's a difference between being safe from an idea and being safe to explore an idea. And too many people, particularly in recent times, have wanted to be safe from anything that challenges them. And that goes to a certain fragility of identity.

And it's also partly a product of the way in which social media constantly calls upon people to affirm their ability to belong to a group by saying yes, yes, yes. And that can become intense to the point where you start saying yes to ridiculous propositions, which are being advanced by those who just want to raise the bar for belonging higher and higher. And if you're feeling a little bit fragile, you don't want to be kicked out of the group to which you belong to. So you may be drawn to more extreme views, but also part of those extremities might be to screen out anything which is questioning your consensus within that bubble that you belong, a bubble of belonging.

So if you're feeling a bit insecure, you're likely to be intolerant to ideas that are inconsistent with your worldview. You certainly don't want to be seen to be agreeing with anything that’s going to force you into a position of conflict with the groups to which you belong. So you tend to shut things down, and the centred ground, which is where these complex matters should be engaged with by reasonable people who can have a principled disagreement from time to time, it starts to shrink.

More and more things are excluded. And so the serious purpose behind something like the Festival of Dangerous Ideas is to push at those boundaries as hard as we can. Not necessarily to shock, but to preserve as big a space in the middle, where it’s possible, where reasonable people can go to encounter ideas and to disagree.

Yeah, it's a great way to do it, and you're doing a very good job. But I guess, as you said about your work with the government, sometimes it's easier, other times it's harder to convince people or to at least get them to listen.

Yeah, our job is to give them the opportunity, not to tell them what to think. But even that can be complex because all you have to do is put a certain person on the stage and people say, you're this or you're that. Fortunately, every year whenever we do this, we're attacked as being too far to the left, too far to the right, too progressive, too conservative. Everyone attacks us, which is usually a pretty good sign that you're about right in the middle.

Yeah, correct. I'd like to talk about ethics and technology also. So The Ethics Centre has done a lot of work examining the relationship between ethics and technology. And I don't want to make this a binary choice because I don't think it is — there are nuances to it. But are you more of a pessimist or an optimist when it comes to how modern societies develop disruptive technology? I think last year you moderated a very interesting debate about whether humanity was designing its own demise by the rapid development of disruptive technology, and towards the end of the debate you raised a very interesting question which was: “Would it matter if we cease to exist? And if so, why?” So I'd like to pose this question to you. What do you think? Would it matter and why?

So firstly I'm an optimist. I do think although it's going to be a bumpy road, the capacity for the technology to alleviate great drudgery, suffering and all the rest, is remarkable. But it's going to require us to have very profound conversations about what makes for a meaningful life. And that means making some distinctions we haven't made for a while between, say, work, jobs. So you can be engaged in...I mean, a lot of people who've been at home building families have done remarkably meaningful work, caring for people, children, elderly, whatever, but it's not a job. And so we know as a society how to distinguish between the two, but we have to do it more often.

That question about why does it matter if anyone survives possible extinction, it goes back to that observation that we were talking about before about the distinction between ethics and morality, and the particular form of being in which we participate. So the question is, let's assume that consciousness that we all participate in, is an emergent property of the universe. As I say, you could see that the theological or scientific or whatever grounds, or whatever it is, that the universe has given rise to a form of being which can care about the kinds of questions we've been talking about and which can debate a matter like, does it matter whether we continue or not.

The fact that we can debate that is in itself a really significant indication that there is something special in a form of existence that can do that. Therefore, unless we encounter other forms of being that can also do this, and we are in a sense redundant, given we don't know yet of any other form of life that can do this to the extent that we can, it's a reason why we should preserve our form of being rather than be indifferent to our existence.

But that's not to say we should put ourselves up on a pedestal and say well you know fine for us but everything else can go to hell. If we are that kind of thing make these kind of ethical choices then it follows from that we ought to do it and we ought to start thinking about the impact that we have on other species at whatever level of development they are and about life on this planet and about our role in the universe we shouldn't say here is our special attribute which gives us a place to continue and then say and do nothing with it. So that's why I think we are bound if we wish to justify our own survival, to ensure that we are responsible in everything we do including in our technology and our deployment of it.

My last question for you is what is The Ethics Centre to you?

It's been a place to work and to live as best I can in the modern world, to try and carry on the project of Socrates, I suppose, through my life and work in a modern context and so without having to worry about the hemlock.

I'd like to thank you for this interview and for the work that you're doing, The Ethics Centre is truly a unique organisation. Thank you so much, Simon.

Thank you for the opportunity to chat with you in more detail.