A Tale of Two Triangles, Part One: What Is Ethics?
I developed this material to present thoughts on ethics for our Southeast Michigan Chapter of Certified Fraud Examiners. While I’m not a CFE myself, I find the practice interesting, and it intersects well with audit, risk, cyber security, and cyber defense. There is a lot to unpack here, so I’ve divided it into several sections.
In this section, I’ll give you my working definition of ethics. It revolves around three stories.
Story One: Center of Moments - Many years ago, while driving to work, I heard an ad that didn’t try to sell me anything. Instead, it described a ship at sea, being tossed about in a storm. On that ship was an area known as the Center of Moments. This was the spot on the ship that stayed calm, even in the midst of the storm. The story reminded us that we all have our personal Center of Moments — that small, still area we can hold onto when things get rough.
I’ve written more about the Center of Moments here. Another way to think of it is as that inner voice — some would call it conscience — that helps you steer a way forward in life. We don’t always go in the right direction, nor always do the right thing — but often this small, still voice reminds us of what we can strive to become. Your Center of Moments is always there. You can hold on to your Center of Moments when times get tough.
Find it now.
Story Two: Hillel The Elder - I don’t know when I first came across Hillel, that great Jewish scholar who lived around the time of Christ. Here’s Hillel’s story. An impatient young scholar challenged Hillel and another elder: Could either of them state the meaning of the Torah while the scholar stood on one foot? In other words, could either of these scholars reduce the Torah to a sentence?
Hm, this sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Impatient young scholar, busy executive — is there a difference?
The first elder angrily refused the student, saying it wasn’t possible to reduce the wisdom of the Torah in that way. That left Hillel, who then famously said:
That which is hateful to you, so also do not do unto your neighbor.
That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.
Go and study. (1)
You may recognize the first statement as a version of the Golden Rule. But note that Hillel uses this as a means of restraint: refrain from doing something if it harms your neighbor.
We often express the Golden Rule slightly differently: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
I think of Hillel’s version as passive, and the second version as active. Both are necessary. One restrains you from doing bad things; the other motivates you to do good things.
And there’s this. While Hillel reduced the Torah to a single sentence, he also said to go and study. I think that’s very important. The world is complex, and situations arise where answers aren’t clear. While I strive to boil the challenges of ethics down to some simple guidelines we all can remember, I understand that there are complexities in life where any choice may appear to be far from perfect. We must do the best we can.
Part two of our working ethics definition is therefore both versions of the Golden Rule.
Story Three: Of Elephants and Hyraxes - I doubt you’ve heard of a hyrax. Here’s a picture:
They’re cute (at least, to other hyraxes). These little guys weigh between 4 and 11 pounds, and you can find them in Africa, along with their more famous relation, the elephant.
Yep.
This is one of the closest relatives to the elephant. So naturally, being a writer, I did a story using the hyrax and elephant as symbols of our world. I didn’t publish this thing, because it had strayed too far into politics, and commentary on day-to-day politics is a lot like a dead fish left in the sun: possibly good for the first few minutes, then stinking to high heaven and useless after that.
I won’t go into details, but the basic idea is that most of us are like hyraxes — small, social, and inclined basically to live peacefully. However, we constantly hear about elephants — larger-than-life individuals in business, sports, the arts, and politics—who dominate both regular and social media. (2)
At one point in my story, my hyrax (hypothetically, of course) looks at the elephant and says, “You elephants think you know all about what freedom is, barging around in the world, doing whatever you want and then bellowing about it. We hyraxes have had to figure out what freedom is on our own. Let me tell you what freedom is. Freedom means, living well together.”
Living well together.
I set the story aside. (3)
But the phrase “living well together” stuck with me. That hyrax had hit on something.
Living well together is, after all, a pretty good definition of the sense of mutual tolerance (respecting one another’s delusions (4)) that underpins both the joy and the challenge of participating in our communal human experiment. While there is joy in choosing to be alone at times, the truth is that we rely upon each other — seen and unseen — in this increasingly complex and co-dependent world of ours. Whether it’s wandering through the behind-the-scenes tech maze that makes the Internet possible, or using a smart phone to connect with colleagues or loved ones on the other side of the world, or driving down roads others know how to make and maintain, or even reading that stubborn piece of old tech, a book, we benefit from the problem-solving efforts of others.
Living well together. Humans haven’t yet figured out how to do that well, and we’ve been at it for thousands of years.
Beyond the fact that living well together allows us to coexist (relatively) peacefully, it is also the third phrase in this working definition of ethics.
It isn’t enough to follow your inner voice, which could lead you astray. It isn’t enough to practice both halves of the Golden Rule, either. After all, you could do murder unto others, because you yourself have a death wish.
For this humble definition of ethics to work, you need all three:
Your Center of Moments
The complete Golden Rule
Living Well Together
Actions (or restraints) that adhere to all three may give you a reasonably good compass for choosing ethical behavior in difficult situations.
You may disagree. If so, let me know what’s missing, what you would change or substitute, or what you would take away.
Next in the Triangles series: A Walk In the Woods
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Footnotes
(1) You can find the “standing on one foot” story here: https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/hillel/
(2) Indeed, in today’s world, you can make a tidy living by becoming an “influencer” — that is to say, while you may have nothing to offer of particular intellectual value, you can certainly gather (and take money from) loads of people, based on how you look or how you play at life. I’ve yet to meet an “influencer” on my walks in nature, by the way — other than Nature itself.
(3) Although the hyrax character is a pretty lively one, and I may use him somewhere else one of these days.
(4) Will and Ariel Durant – from “The Lessons of History,” p. 13: “We must operate with partial knowledge, and be provisionally content with probabilities; in history, as in science and politics, relativity rules, and all formulas should be suspect. History smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or logical grooves; it plays havoc with our generalizations, breaks all our rules; history is baroque. Perhaps, within these limits, we can learn enough from history to bear reality patiently, and to respect one another's delusions.”
