Topics Ethics

Question I work for a voluntary organisation with a great premise that I am wholeheartedly committed to. However, there are some senior staff who, athough they are themselves committed also, are ineffectual and have over the years damaged the organisation albeit inadvertently. In order to save the organisation from ending, these people need to be removed or brought to a realisation that would probably end in them removing themselves. To do this the board of trustees needs 'evidence' or a paper trail of the ineffectualness. Should I contribute to this evidence in order to help save the organisation or should I refuse to contribute because the people concerned are very good people and only inadvertantly damaging the organisation? To me, both courses of action are wrong in some philosophical sense. And in the end both courses of action leave me damaged in my perssonal sense of what is right or wrong. But should my own concerns be put aside for the greater good of an organisation which genuinely seeks to, and works to, better the lot of society and individuals within it.

Accepted:
September 17, 2006

Comments

You write asking for advice about a real life moral dilemma that you face. We often ask others for moral advice, but we are rightly suspicious of those who are too quick to offer it! You need a trustworthy adviser, but to be that, for you, in this context, any advisor would have to know a lot about the details of the relationships in question, about you and about your values, so that they could advise from a perspective that your best self could come to see is warranted. Knowing only as much as can be known from this posting, I think you should distrust anyone who is willing to say to you categorically, "do this" or "do that," so I'm not going to do that.

Instead, let's back up and consider whether you have got the best framing of the choice you face. Is there some way of defusing the dilemma? Is it a fully-fledged dilemma or a hard choice? An agent faces a fully-fledged moral dilemma when she is required to do A and she is required to do B and she cannot to both. Whatever she does, she will fail to do something that she ought to do. An agent faces a hard choice when there are considerations that count in favor of one course of action and considerations that count in favor of another and she cannot perform both. I think that your choice has the second structure and that there may be ways of making it less hard. Being good willed is not grounds enough for keeping a job at which you have been performing poorly. This means you may not face an obligation to protect those who have been performing poorly just because they are good people who are not trying to damage the organization. If this is right, then you do not have conflicting obligations. Instead, you are sensitive to two important considerations that seem to pull you in opposite directions: the survival of a good organization; and the possibility that good-hearted people will be hurt. You can think of your task as deliberator as being about working out which of these considerations is, in the circumstances, the most “weighty”: the organization or the good people who will be hurt (and your own anguish at contributing to this hurt)? Or you can think about it another way: here are two important considerations; is there an action that I haven’t thought of yet that would give due recognition to both of them? Is there some way to bring the people involved to see that the organization that they are themselves committed to needs something different from them, perhaps even their own resignation? Only someone very closely involved with the situation (and possessing insight, imagination, and virtue!) will be able to work out whether there is a missed option that respects all the moral considerations that are present, but this might be a helpful way of thinking about your decision.