The Guardian on 'Ethics in a time of crisis'

Monday, 22 February 2010 12:50

The Guardian at the weekend published a collection of contributions from leading thinkers on the role and purpose of ethics in economics, politics and society. Learning from the financial crisis and consequent recession, and the lack of ethical conduct uncovered by the MPs expenses scandal, the pamphlet, ‘Citizen Ethics in a Time of Crisis’ is an attempt to revert to the fundamental questions of the role of ethics in shaping the good life and building the good society.

Madeleine Bunting, writing on the pamphlet in The Guardian, notes:

‘A poll for the World Economic Forum last month found in 10 G20 countries that two-thirds of respondents attributed the credit crunch and its ensuing economic recession to a crisis of ethics and values. Sir Thomas Legg declared in his final report on MPs' expenses that there had been a failure of ethics. There's a widespread perception that social norms have subtly and gradually shifted towards the centrality of personal self-interest.

‘Citizen Ethics was a project to ask nearly four dozen prominent thinkers what this was all about. Did ethics really have a role to play, and had it failed? First, despite plenty of disagreements, on one thing there was a clear consensus: ethics are crucial. They are the underpinning to all political debate; they frame the questions we ask of ourselves and of our political economy and therefore do much to shape the answers we end up with.'

‘They are vital to the civic culture in which both politics and economics are ultimately rooted....if we really want to understand how some of the incredible myths perpetrated over the last couple of decades have gone unchallenged, we have to go back to some basic arguments of philosophy. What is justice? Who deserves what? What constitutes human flourishing?

‘Ethics is a word that derives from two Greek words, ethos for habit and ethikos for character, and it better fits what Citizen Ethics proposes rather than "morality", which comes from the Latin word "mores" for social institutions and customs. This is not about reasserting conventions, a preconceived code, but about reinvigorating a habit, a process of reasoning to the perennial question: what is the right thing to do? We wouldn't claim there is a consensus waiting to be found – on the contrary, our aim is to provoke a noisy debate on what kinds of habits and characters we need to run the good society.’

Read the pamphlet in full, including a contribution from Professor Tariq Ramadan, on the Guardian's Comment is Free website here.

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