Whether you listen to the Moral Maze on Radio 4 each week, or face difficult decisions in the workplace which stray beyond simple black and white answers, morals and the question of morality is something facing all businesses at some point and in some way or other.
We asked Guernsey’s foreign minister, Deputy Jonathan Le Tocq, for his take on the issue after we saw him raise the question of morality on his Twitter account in the wake of the #MeToo campaign which gave victims of sexual abuse a platform to speak out:
Morality is central to social life. Our moral judgments influence with whom we socialise, our work ethics, how we invest our resources. Such moral values may be subconscious and will likely change during our lifetimes, both as individuals and as communities, but essentially neutrality is a myth. It seems that human beings are born with certain innate moral values, so if morality is innate, are we born good and corrupted by the society around us? Or is it the other way around — we are born bad and have to learn how to be kind? If you are philosophically more akin to John Locke you will go for the former, if you’re with John Calvin, the latter.
The theory of evolution, natural selection and the concept of the survival of the fittest all point to the existence of a morality of “strongest is best” and in order to survive and thrive an individual or species must fight and put themselves first. The weaker lose and decline, the stronger win and increase. In other words there is a morality based around the strongest self-interest. Strangely, this is likely to appear to us as likely to produce rotten morals! However one cannot conclude that values based on such morality are good or bad unless there is some objective absolute by which to judge them, and we live in an era and culture which has grown averse to the concept of absolutes and largely rejected them. (Except of course for the one absolute that there are no absolutes!)
Clearly businesses and workplaces will have a moral culture, even if it is not self-conscious; indeed, it is perhaps where there has been no effort to regularly assess and review what the overriding moral culture is in a community or workplace that problems have occurred and remained hidden for years. It is clear from the #MeToo campaign that the vast majority of those who profess to being abused or victimised in the past were in working environments where, had the overriding moral culture been different, the incidents which have caused recent outrage may never have occurred, or at the very least been more swiftly and effectively dealt with.
There is also certainly a problem with what I call “revisionist morality” i.e. Judging the actions or inaction of others in past eras by what we might consider to be appropriate for today. However it has been perhaps surprising in recent years to see the volte face within a generation, from the social revolution, especially in sexual mores that occurred in the 60s and 70s which resulted in what has been termed the permissive society.
Former Labour Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt along with several other prominent politicians and leaders was prominent at that time in the advocacy and civil rights group the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL, now known as Liberty). Just over 40 years ago NCCL was affiliated with campaigns for the age of consent to be lowered to children aged 10, and included amongst its membership the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE). Whilst a few individuals at the time, such as Peter Hain spoke out against such things, he was criticised and mocked for doing so. Meanwhile Patricia Hewitt has more recently stated “NCCL in the 1970s, along with many others, was naïve and wrong to accept PIE’s claim to be a ‘campaigning and Counselling organisation that does not promote unlawful acts’. I should have urged the council to take strong measures to protect NCCL’s integrity [Georgia Graham, The Telegraph, 28/2/14] Similarly Harriet Harman has been criticised because she made “no attempt to remove PIE from [the NCCL’s] sub-committee on gay rights in the 1970s”. She was NCCL’s legal officer from 1978-82 and now describes PIE as “vile” and “regrets” its existence. None of this was happening in isolation of course as those of us who grew up exposed to the media in that era will testify.
Mary Whitehouse was the scourge of liberals in the 70s and 80s, pilloried by the media for her campaigns against the sexualization in advertising, family TV shows and in printed media. But she also spoke out against racism and religious intolerance. She considered the racist humour of BBC’s “Til death us do part” to be “entirely subversive to our whole way of life”.
Her views were considered prudish and old-fashioned at best, extreme and illiberal by many at the time. In her book “Whatever Happened to Sex?” she explained that as a happy family woman she had nothing against sex, but was totally against the exploitation and degradation of sex, and of women especially, in the media, which she believed promoted permissiveness and had a direct correlation on public morality and attitudes. Arguments which strangely resonate and seem logical to us 30 to 40 years later.
So where does that leave us today in terms of defining the best moral boundaries for society? The fact perhaps that we are now talking about boundaries is an indication of how things are changing. In fact, the fact we are talking about morality at all is, in my view a good thing! Moreover, listening to one another respectfully on such issues is a vast improvement. One problem in the past was that victims or potential victims were not listened to or taken seriously.
Gandhi was apparently once asked what he thought of Western Civilisation. “I think it would be a very good idea” he replied. We certainly need to be circumspect in order not to fall into the same traps again, and perhaps alongside that develop a willingness to learn from other cultures rather than to look down on them condescendingly as if we in the West have all the answers. We may be surprised by what we can learn from one another. There is a spiritual and faith dynamic to this as well of course, and in our increasingly pluralistic society this is becoming more prevalent and thus not an optional extra consideration.
So if we want to foster healthy working environments, less opportunity for bullying and intimidation, greater respect for one another and ultimately better industrial relations, we ought to welcome greater openness to discuss moral values and boundaries. Together it must be our intention that we give no room for a culture where exploitation, victimisation and intimidation is allowed to flourish.
You can follow Deputy Jonathan Le Tocq on Twitter here.
