This
is the time of year I plan our upcoming visit to Maine, primarily to Camden,
the town where I grew up. For the last ten years those visits have included
breakfast with Rush Kidder, at a small coffee shop overlooking the harbor where
we traded stories of our workshop experiences, dilemmas raised by our
audiences, helpful resources, and new ideas on ethics training. Sadly, there
will be no such rejuvenating conversation this summer as Rush passed away suddenly in March at age
67. I was stunned at the news of his death but today I feel the loss even more
viscerally. I have lost a fellow traveler in the quest for moral courage and
the world has lost a champion for ethics. Rush Kidder made ethics relevant,
important, and palatable, at a time when the prevailing attitude was that
ethics were passé and indigestible.
I had known of Rush’s work founding the Institute for Global Ethics long before we
actually met. His book How Good People Make Tough Choices was a
compelling read, beautifully written, and solidly grounded in the literature on
ethical decision making. The paradigm the book sets forth, that all ethical
dilemmas can be classified in at least one of four categories (truth vs.
loyalty, short-term vs. long term, justice vs. mercy, individual vs. other), is
so intuitive and elegant that I used it as an organizing principle in my book
on The Ethics of Practice with Minors. Rush managed to balance the complexities
of ethical decision making – the ways that various perspectives (rules-based,
care-based, ends-based) can shape the ultimate decision on what is ethical—yet
he never fell into the trap of relativism. In person and in writing, he
approached dilemmas with curiosity and gentleness. In fact, the description of
Rush that most comes to my mind is delight.
Rush was delighted to talk about dilemmas, to see people working their ways
through difficult situations, to uncover new avenues for enhancing ethical
fitnessTM. His spirit and approach moved ethics from a topic of
condemnation to one of conversation. In his view, ethics are not stark determinations
of right and wrong, but instead a careful dialogue to choose well when right and
right conflict. Ethics are not only the province of long-dead philosophers–
dilemmas confront us every day and each of us must possess the skills to
determine what is right and the courage to act on that determination.
Perhaps the greatest gift I received
from Rush was an introduction to the concept of moral courage. I had recently
done a workshop where I thoroughly failed to connect with the audience. Only
afterward did I realize that the challenge for the participants wasn’t in
knowing the right thing to do, but in doing what they knew was right amid the
fear of social and occupational reprisals. Shortly thereafter, I heard Rush
speak on moral courage and at last I had a term to describe what I and those
workshop participants needed! With that term in hand, I can investigate the
personal and organizational barriers to action, the precursors to acts of
courage, and the people who demonstrate both moral courage and moral cowardice.
