myAIPMA New Model for Ethical Leadership
Max H. Bazerman | Harvard Business Review
"Autonomous vehicles will soon take over the road. This new technology will save lives by reducing driver error, yet accidents will still happen. The cars’ computers will have to make difficult decisions: When a crash is unavoidable, should the car save its single occupant or five pedestrians? Should the car prioritize saving older people or younger people? What about a pregnant woman—should she count as two people? Automobile manufacturers need to reckon with such difficult questions in advance and program their cars to respond accordingly.
In my view, leaders answering ethical questions like these should be guided by the goal of creating the most value for society. Moving beyond a set of simple ethical rules (“Don’t lie,” “Don’t cheat”), this perspective—rooted in the work of the philosophers Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Peter Singer—provides the clarity needed to make a wide variety of important managerial decisions.
For centuries philosophers have argued over what constitutes moral action, theorizing about what people should do. More recently behavioral ethicists in the social sciences have offered research-based accounts of what people actually do when confronted with ethical dilemmas. These scientists have shown that environment and psychological processes can lead us to engage in ethically questionable behavior even if it violates our own values. If we behave unethically out of self-interest, we’re often unaware that we’re doing so—a phenomenon known as motivated blindness. For instance, we may claim that we contribute more to group tasks than we actually do. And my colleagues and I have shown that executives will unconsciously overlook serious wrongdoing in their company if it benefits them or the organization."
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A New Model for Ethical Leadership, Max H. Bazerman, Harvard Business Review, 2020
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