Missing the Forest for the Trees.

All of us would like to think that, as Americans, we are ethical people. And all of us would like to think that we work for corporations or business enterprises that are guided, in no small part, by ethical concerns. All of us would like to think that our national government acts in an ethical and moral manner. Finally, all of us think that the world would be a far, far better place than it is if only people--other people, that is--acted more ethically than they do.

Few, then, would deny the enormous importance of ethics, and fewer still, I suppose, would deny that we need more ethics of some sort in our lives. Yet, despite this apparent interest in ethics and ethical behavior, we go to enormous lengths to avoid dealing with ethical issues, and this tendency to flee from moral concerns is particularly pronounced in the United States.

Obviously the last sentence needs some further explanation. For one thing, how can the most religious people in the world--at least in terms of belief in God, church attendance, and so forth--be accused of removing themselves from a wide range of moral issues? But ethics is not religion. While there is, and should be, an overlap between the two, ethics and religion are certainly not one and the same. Religion is ultimately based on some metaphysical view of "the ultimate," and the rules and doctrines of a religion are the means of responding to that ultimate. Morality or ethics, on the other hand, is a concern with what we consider to be "right" or "just" behavior. If you still have trouble separating the two, think of all the people you know who profess to be religious (and may well be) yet whose behavior in a variety of ways borders on the unethical or even goes well beyond it.

The other kind of response I would anticipate to the assertion that we Americans flee from most of the moral issues around us is the simple answer that this isn't true. We engage in debates about ethical issues all the time--whether it be the sexual trysts of our politicians, the morality of surrogate motherhood, the ethics of affirmative action, mothers who sleep with their daughter's boyfriend, and so on. And on one level at least, this position is absolutely correct. We do talk a lot about ethical issues of one sort.

But there is an incredible range of moral issues that we simply refuse to address. What these issues are and how we go about systematically ignoring them is the subject of the present inquiry.

Think Small: Ethics As Individual Behavior

Ethics as a field of study is divided into two realms: micro-level ethics and macro-level ethics. As the names would indicate, the former deals with ethical issues individuals face in their daily lives, while the latter focuses on ethical issues of a more global concern. What interests me is the relationship between these two.

Although there is no inherent conflict between them, and, in fact, they should complement one another, what has happened is that micro-level ethics has completely crowded out the other. That is to say that when we think and talk about ethics we invariably deal with micro-level phenomena. We think small and we almost always think about the behavior of single individuals. By the same token, we almost never think about the ethics of larger groups or institutions or systems. Let me provide two examples of what I am talking about.

The first example is one of the most commonly employed tools used in teaching ethics: the so-called whistleblower. The factual situation changes slightly depending upon whether we are speaking about bioethics or business ethics and so on. But the individual is invariably placed in a situation where there is some degree of misfeasance, usually in the workplace.

This might be an employee discovering that someone else is padding the data or that the company is somehow violating the law. The question is whether or not to tell the authorities. Although there might be some broader societal implications at stake (particularly if the misfeasance threatens the safety and well-being of others), still, the whistleblower is in so many ways a classic example of a micro-level ethical problem. That is to say, its purview never goes beyond that of the isolated individual and how this person should respond to a particular situation.

What apparently is off limits is any sort of question about any aspects concerning the ethics of the broader socioeconomic system. More particularly, what goes untouched and unexplored is the governing law in the United States--the "at will" doctrine--which, as the name indicates, allows an employer to fire an employee for just about any reason whatsoever. Absent this legal background, there is no real ethical issue to speak about. Yet, still, this is not part of most Americans' ethical discourse.

What the whistleblower scenario does, then, is to assume the correctness or the justness of the premise it is founded upon. It is assumed that there is no real ethical question raised by employer-employee relations. It is assumed, for the most part, that there is no strong duty that the law has--or should have--to protect the solitary worker who is placed (in real life or in a hypothetical situation) in essentially an impossible position. All that is left for "ethical discussion," then, is the question of whether or not to blow the whistle in the particular situation in which the person has been placed.

Not only is this wrong, it also is not the way things have to be. To me, the more interesting and certainly more important ethical issue is the global one of whether the law ought to protect an individual who blows the whistle. But even if someone doesn't share this sentiment of relative importance, I would hope that one could see just how incomplete the whistleblower scenario is without any kind of discussion of the ethics of the broader system upon which it is based.

Why do we ignore the global issue? In my view it is not coincidental. Global ethical issues are invariably much more difficult to deal with. And they quite often "threaten" to take us into ethical realms that, for one reason or another, we prefer to stay away from or which we have designated as outside the scope of ethical inquiry.

The ethics of our capitalist system is one area we seldom delve into, and so is employer-employee relations. It's safer and more manageable to stay away from these areas. And we have also found that we can still "do" ethics even when we systematically avoid these questions and issues.

Let me use a specific situation as a second example of how we Americans ignore global ethical issues and focus instead on micro-level phenomena. Recently, there was an ethical firestorm (of about a week's duration) that arose when the media reported that certain Western drug companies, which were testing AIDS medicine in Africa, had given a placebo to some of those who had volunteered to be subjects. If I am reconstructing the scenario the correct way, what was apparently so bothersome to people (those of us in the West at least; I'm not so sure if there was the same moral outrage in Africa) was the fact that it was considered immoral to purposely exclude people from a medical treatment known to prolong life.

What the public debate completely (and conveniently) ignored, however, was the much deeper moral issue that we can only pretend will go away: in the next decade or so, tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of people in Africa (and elsewhere) will die of AIDS. Only a very minute number of these people will ever receive any form of Western medicine or Western treatment. But there has been barely a peep about this ethical issue.

I am not suggesting that the two situations are exactly the same. But they are far more similar than we would like to think they are.

The AIDS testing scheme calls forth the kind of ethical language that we are familiar with. We can readily talk about such things as "informed consent," and we can also be bothered by the fact that Western drug companies had purposely gone out and recruited people to become subjects in these studies (so I suppose there was some expectation of receiving some form of treatment). However, we aren't as familiar with the moral language and the moral thinking that goes along with the deaths of hundreds of millions of people. Apparently, we also cannot fathom the thought of possessing any kind of moral duty to those who will be infected and who will die of AIDS--without any form of Western assistance whatsoever.

But it is not just about concepts and language. We zero in on the morality of providing a placebo to a relatively small number of people in a controlled experiment because this also serves to absolve us of having to deal with the larger and more painful ethical issue of our broader responsibilities to those afflicted with the HIV virus. The larger ethical issue threatens to change our lives while the AIDS testing issue doesn't. The smaller issue also allows us the pretense that we are really "doing" ethics, when I would suggest that there is very little evidence this is actually what is taking place.

Out of Bounds: Treating Certain Issues As Having No Ethical Component

Although there is a marked tendency to "think small" in dealing with most ethical issues, in doing so we at least recognize the existence of some moral component, although we invariably treat only a small segment of what is almost always a much larger and more intractable moral issue. There are, however, certain areas where we simply refuse to recognize the existence of any moral issue.

In the United States, the distribution of wealth and income is such an issue. The richest 1 percent of the population owns as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. Mention this to someone and watch that person's eyes glaze over. Michael Walzer discusses this in an article entitled "The Big Shrug" in the February 2, 1998, New Republic. After citing statistics of the growing inequality in the United States, he writes:

   No one seems to care about any of this. I suppose that's an exaggeration.
   The people who organize the studies obviously care, and they are trying to
   get others to care. But their general strategy--issuing reports in tones of
   surprised discovery and barely repressed outrage--doesn't seem to be
   working.

We certainly can see the moral issue when it involves our neighbor who cheats at cards or at golf. But when it comes to something like who owns what, we fail to see any kind of ethical issue arising. Instead, it is simply seen as the way things have always been (which isn't true) or the way things have to be (which also isn't true) or that somehow capitalism would completely collapse if we attempted to tinker with some of its end results (and there is absolutely no indication of this being true, either).

What has happened is that we have somehow designated distributive issues as being out of bounds in terms of ethical inquiry or judgment. Of course, there is the constant complaint about the salaries of no-field, no-hit second basemen who will make more money in one baseball season than most of us will make in our entire careers. But note that even this discussion never attempts to come to terms with what the "just" amount of payment or salary would be. In fact, we don't even employ moral language here. All we know--or at least all we can state--is that bad ballplayers like this are making "too much."

Other industrialized societies are able to present what a just distribution of wealth and income would look like, but we Americans seem either unwilling or unable to do so. And because of this, an issue that is dripping with ethical concerns has been placed completely outside the purview of what we will consider.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil.... Removing Ethical Issues from Our Moral Consciousness

Ethical issues should challenge us. Ethical issues should, in some way, be disturbing. But most of us would rather not be disturbed. The majority of people in the world cannot avoid ethical situations because they live them--although they wouldn't think of their quiet and desperate lives in these terms but, rather, simply as a means of struggling for survival.

For the most part, we in the United States enjoy the luxury of dealing with only those ethical issues we want to deal with and, along with that, ignoring those we wish to ignore. But sometimes ethical issues we would prefer not to talk about come into our lives unannounced and uninvited. One such issue has been the arrival of asylum seekers to Western shores.

A decade or so ago, when immigration numbers were much smaller, we did a lot to encourage asylum seekers. They were, among other things, proof positive that our system of government was better than communism. But as the number of asylum seekers grew (and as the Cold War itself wound down), we began to respond in just the opposite fashion. Asylum seekers are simply no longer welcome.

And the beautiful thing about living in the United States, as we have seen, is that we have the wherewithal and the ability to remove an ethical dilemma when it no longer interests us or when it no longer serves our purposes. And this is exactly what we have been in the process of doing with asylum seekers. Through a variety of means--"safe" alternative countries, visa restrictions, carrier sanctions, and so forth--our government is in the process of removing a thorny and pesky moral issue from the consciousness of its people. The fact that the overwhelming majority of refugees are fleeing from countries experiencing the highest levels of human rights abuses in the world is of little interest to most Americans. The fact that 95 percent of the world's refugees are given a haven (but not a very safe haven) in the developing world also has very little meaning to us. What we do know is this: we are tired of asylum seekers and we have the means to remove this issue from our moral consciousness, which is exactly what developed Western countries are in the process of doing.

What Does This Have to Do with Us? Refusing to See How Our Actions Affect Others

Refugees and asylum seekers almost never become "our business" until they arrive at our country's front door or, better yet, present themselves in our collective national living rooms. At this point it becomes difficult to pretend that these issues are of no concern to us--which is the reason we've gone to such lengths to remove the moral issue from ever arriving in the first place. But most ethical issues don't intrude into our lives the way refugees do (or did). So we have placed ourselves in a position where we can (and do) pick and choose the ethical issues we wish to address. And apparently there aren't many of them.

One of the most remarkable feats in all this is our rather fantastic ability to completely disassociate our moral consciousness from our actions in the world. As a superpower, the United States is able to act in the world in a manner that other countries simply couldn't conceive of doing. Yet, although our country's presence is enormous, we almost never see any connection between our government's actions and events that take place in other countries. And beyond this, we never apply any form of moral compass to the actions our leaders perform and the policies they pursue in other countries. Instead, if we ever think about how our country acts in the world (which is seldom enough), we simply and readily assume that its actions have been positive, and by no means could it ever be responsible for bringing harm to others.

Guatemala serves as an excellent example of our ability to completely disassociate ourselves from any moral standards or judgments. Guatemala is a country that over the past forty years has been to hell and back, experiencing a civil war in which over 200,000 civilians were killed. And right smack in the middle of much of this has been the United States. Ours was, after all, the country that overthrew the democratically elected government in Guatemala. It was our government that then went on to help create one of the most brutal armies in the world. In the ensuing years, the United States continued to support and equip one genocidal regime after the other. We've also placed on our own payroll a number of Guatemalan "assets" known to have committed very serious human rights abuses.

Yet, from a moral perspective, none of this matters. As a people, we simply haven't been willing to evaluate our government's actions in Guatemala by any standards other than to somehow rationalize that those actions were justified because of the specter of communist domination in that country. But even beyond this, we don't even seem willing--or able--to see any connection whatsoever between our own country and Guatemala. It's as if Guatemala is in a completely different universe and its existence and well-being are completely irrelevant to the U.S. government and the American people. And in moral terms at least, this happens to be true.

When All Else Fails, Simply Ignore All the Empirical Evidence to the Contrary and Declare Yourself "Ethical"

Recently it was reported that nearly three-fourths of Americans now describe themselves as "environmentalists." The reason why this was "news" was because this number has increased considerably since the first time the question was asked in the early 1970s. My hunch is that this number will continue to rise, to the point where nearly every man, woman, and child in the United States will readily consider him- or herself an "environmentalist."

Are we Americans really environmentalists? Of course not. In fact, in many ways, the United States possesses the worst environmental record of any country in the world and certainly has the single worst record of any of the industrialized nations. Among other things, it spews out considerably more carbon dioxide--which is the major cause of global warming--than any other country in the world.

In addition to being able to pick and choose the ethical issues we wish to deal with, one of the other wonderful things about living in the United States is that there is nobody around to tell us we're wrong. There is no one, no country, and certainly no institution that is in a position to confront us with these issues. (This, by the way, doesn't prevent us from lecturing the rest of the world about their environmental inadequacies.) We simply ignore the mountain of empirical evidence to the contrary and declare ourselves environmentalists, which is another way of describing ourselves as "ethical" people.

Pretending to be ethical (despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary) happens in a number of other ways as well. For example, we Americans think of ourselves as an extraordinarily generous people. Instructive is a study conducted recently by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, which asked a national sample of respondents what percentage of the federal budget was spent on foreign aid. The median response was 15 percent. Respondents were also asked how much foreign aid the United States should be giving. The median response was 5 percent.

In fact, the United States spends nowhere near these amounts: only 1 percent of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid (and as a percentage of the gross national product, what we provide is the smallest in the industrial world). Moreover, very little of this is actually spent on the poorest or most desperate countries. Instead, our foreign aid practices are overwhelmingly geared to furthering our own interests, not those of others. But it is certainly nice to pretend otherwise.

So did these widely reported findings--clearly showing that we give nowhere near the amounts in foreign aid we were so certain we were giving--change anything? Hardly. Not only did they not increase our allocation of foreign aid to some level deemed appropriate by the American people, but the level of foreign aid continued to decline. Rest assured, what did not change was our own self-image. Again, notwithstanding overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary, we will continue to think of ourselves as generous and humanitarian--and moral --people.

Most discussions of "ethics" are not only meaningless but inherently dangerous. The reason for this is that the entire enterprise of ethics should somehow challenge the premises our lives are founded upon. But ethics--or at least what passes as such--utterly fails to do this. But we know (or think we know) that we are somehow "doing" ethics. So the end result of all this is that, under the guise of engaging in some ethical issues, what we are also accomplishing (unwittingly or not) is that we are actually avoiding ethical issues.

A lot of jokes are made about the field of economics because of all the assumptions it makes (that is, perfect competition, complete mobility of resources, and so on). But "ethics" makes as many assumptions as the "dismal science" does.

We assume as "just" the distribution of the world's resources whereby most things are owned by us--a relatively small (and getting smaller) percentage of the Earth's population. We assume as "just" a world in which a country possesses complete control over its borders. We assume as "just" a world in which there is no duty to assist the suffering in the world, although there apparently is some kind of duty to provide medicine to those we have coaxed into participating in one of our studies. We assume as "just" a world in which we provide a trickle of foreign aid to other countries while complaining about the "compassion fatigue" we feel from a generosity that exists only in our own fertile imaginations.

We assume as "just" a world in which we confront those ethical issues we wish to address and ignore those we want to avoid. And the final tragedy is that, along with all this, we will continue to be absolutely convinced that we Americans are the most moral and ethical people in the world.

Mark P. Gibney is the Belk Distinguished Professor of International Ethics at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. His latest book is Judicial Protection of Human Rights: Myth or Reality? (Prager Press, 1999).