Moral Courage

324 Pages·2006·1.26 MB·English

by  Rushworth M. Kidder

MORAL COURAGE
P R INCIPLES
Moral
Courage
E
D C
A N
NGER END U R A
RUSHWORTH M. KIDDER
For Lucha Noerager Vogel
who lit the way
Contents
Preface v
CHAPTER ONE
Standing Up for Principle 1
CHAPTER TWO
Courage, Moral and Physical 19
CHAPTER THREE
The Courage to Be Moral 39
CHAPTER FOUR
The First Circle: Applying the Values 77
CHAPTER FIVE
The Second Circle: Recognizing the Risks 109
CHAPTER SIX
The Third Circle: Enduring the Hardship 139
iv Contents
◗

CHAPTER SEVEN
Fakes, Frauds, and Foibles: What Moral Courage Isn’t 175
CHAPTER EIGHT
Learning Moral Courage 213
CHAPTER NINE
Practicing Moral Courage in the Public Square 245
Notes 279
Story Index 295
General Index 297
Institute for Global Ethics
About the Author
Also by Rushworth M. Kidder
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
As I talk about moral courage in workshops on ethics, I sometimes notice
people staring quizzically back at me.“So what?” they seem to be asking.
My response to their unspoken question is simple: “Don’t you wish
that Enron’s board had had enough moral courage to challenge those
phony financial schemes? And aren’t you glad that Winston Churchill
had enough moral courage to stand up to the Nazis?” Suddenly they get
it. Moral courage isn’t an esoteric branch of philosophy; it’s a practical
necessity for modern life. Its presence or absence explains some of the
world’s greatest successes and failures. Over time, the examples will
change, yet the willingness to take tough stands for right in the face of
danger will remain, as it has always been, the pinnacle of ethical action.
Moral courage is not restricted to great events and famous individu-
als. It is relevant not only in the boardroom and the war room but also in
the kitchen and the schoolhouse. This book grows out of decades of
observation of ethical individuals across the spectrum of human activity.
Some are well known, while others lead very private lives. Like two earlier
books that flowed from my work with the Institute for Global Ethics, this
book is rooted in the experiences of real people, building its argument
largely through their stories. The first of those books, Shared Values for a
Troubled World: Conversations with Men and Women of Conscience, made
the case for a common core of global, cross-cultural values. That point is
vi Preface
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crucial: without the recognition that values don’t need to be imposed but
can instead be discovered, ethical discussion can too easily be dismissed as
your values versus my values. The second book, How Good People Make
Tough Choices: Resolving the Dilemmas of Ethical Living, built outward
from those values. It recognized that ethical issues arise for two reasons.
People can be tempted away from core values—by being dishonest, say, in
the face of a community commitment to honesty. In that case, ethics is
a matter of right versus wrong. Or people can face dilemmas in which
two deeply held values are in opposition—fairness, perhaps, versus com-
passion. In that case, ethics is a matter of right versus right. To address
this latter sort of wrenching dilemma, Tough Choices proposed a right-
versus-right model for values-based decision making.
This book completes the trilogy. It recognizes that while people may
have fine values and develop great skill at moral reasoning and ethical
decision making, such mental activity counts for little if their decisions
sit unimplemented on the shelf. What’s so often needed is a third step: the
moral courage to put those decisions into action. More broadly, what’s
needed is the courage to live a moral and ethical life.
The observations underlying this book stretch back well before the
founding of the Institute for Global Ethics in 1990. In my former profes-
sion as a columnist and correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor—
a newspaper noted for its depth, balance, global concern, and ethical
stance—I found myself interviewing scores of individuals in leadership
positions who exhibited, in various ways, a remarkable capacity for resolve
in the face of risk. I began to sense that their courage grew out of an ethical
commitment, a kind of inner moral compass calibrated by a set of core val-
ues. After a while, it became almost axiomatic that to talk to true leaders
was to talk to people who demonstrated a kind of daring integrity. What
was that courage? Where did it come from? How did they get it? Could they
lose it once they had it? Could they teach it to others?
These questions and more came with me into my work at the insti-
tute. During the last fifteen years, my colleagues and I have conducted
hundreds of seminars and workshops on ethics around the world. These
Preface vii
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seminars usually require each participant to share a tough, right-versus-
right dilemma from his or her own experience. When the discussion is
finished and the outcome is finally revealed, I’ve been struck by how often
the result reveals real courage on the part of the teller.
As this recognition of moral courage was growing up within our work
at the institute, the importance of it was steadily rising in the world
around us. Articles, book chapters, and talks on ethics made reference to
this quality. Four years ago, sensing this trend, we drafted a report on
moral courage that immediately became the most popular download on
our Web site. Since then, we’ve bent our efforts toward the completion of
this book.
I say “we” because a book of this sort has one author but many
creators. I am deeply grateful to my colleagues at the institute for their
professional insights, their conceptual wrestlings, their suggestions for
individuals to interview, and their unflagging encouragement. Without
that collective give-and-take over many years, the ideas in this book
simply could not have come to fruition. In particular, my thanks go to
Graham Phaup, Marilyn Gondek, Patricia Born, Martin Taylor, Paula
Mirk, and Sheila Bloom for their pioneering thinking and their practical
wisdom; to Martha Bracy, who helped me draft our initial white paper on
moral courage; to Jeffrey Spaulding, whose editing of my weekly columns
for Ethics Newsline (where many of these ideas were worked out) has been
immeasurably helpful; to Melissa Parisot for her work on a feminist per-
spective on moral courage; and to my personal assistant, Marc Fair-
brother, who did much of the research for this book and coauthored a
part of chapter 8. Great thanks are due to Jonathan Ingbar for educating
me on the psychological literature relevant to moral courage, some of
which is reflected in sidebars in the following text. I’m indebted to a
strongly supportive institute board of directors comprising my good col-
leagues and friends David Adams, David Anable, Carlos Ramos Garcia,
Theodore Gordon, Elizabeth Hart, Anne E. D. Kidder, Janet Norwood,
Robert Pratt Jr., Charles Rainwater, George Reid, Philip Smith, Deborah
Steckler, Colburn Wilbur, Marcia Worthing, and Mary Margaret Young.
viii Preface
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I’m grateful to Lucha Vogel, who more than anyone provided the con-
stant encouragement that finally caused me to commit to this undertak-
ing. I’m most appreciative of conversations with and support from
Charlotte Burton, Louise Greeley, Jack Hubbell, Katherine Lazarus,
George Moffett, and David Winder. Once again, as in the writing of each
of my books, I’ve drawn strong support from my wife, Elizabeth, whose
moral clarity, penetrating analysis, and deep love has so often pointed the
way through ambiguities and doubts. And I’ve been greatly helped by dis-
cussions on this topic over the years with our daughters, who both exem-
plify significant moral courage in their respective professions.
Citations in the text have been assembled into a notes section and are
easily traceable by page number and key words. I identify characters in
the narratives by full first and last names whenever they have given me
permission to do so. If my sources requested anonymity, I used only a
first name, invented for the purpose, and sparingly altered details of loca-
tion, employment, or relationship that might otherwise betray their
identities. In each case, however, the narratives used here reflect authen-
tic experiences, captured as I have heard them, and wherever possible
verified with the source even when anonymous. Courage, to be moral,
must be grounded in ethics—and so must the writing about it.
Camden, Maine
February 2004