Ethics in Society
I have struggled to write this post now for months. It started first as an exploration of ethical values. Except, that alone didn’t work. The practice of ethics provides an abstraction: a naming of values, an understanding of what values are in play, and a way to “logic” decisions. Applied ethics – used by doctors, lawyers, and interpreters – focuses on building tools to use ethics to make decisions for others.
There’s a reason The Good Place lands with those who study ethics. Chidi Anagonye (played brilliantly by William Jackson Harper) ends up twisted in knots over the most mundane of decisions. His character shows how you can understand ethics, but fail rolling them out in daily practice.
Most applied ethics training centers on tools, so we don’t end up like Chidi: tortured by our choices or lack thereof.
Here’s the rub: we make a ton of decisions daily, some more impactful that others. One challenge in the modern world has been sense-making in the era of Covid-19. Do we go out? 1 mask or 2? What about dining out? Or school?
The proliferation of charts hasn’t helped. Users struggle to interpret the complexities that aren’t well disclosed or, worse, are made to intentionally confuse the issue. Today, in the US, we marked over 500,000 dead. These losses are threads cut too early, holes that will progressively reveal themselves as generations age with lost linkages to the past.
Many early trackers are winding down. The COVID Tracking Project will make its last posting on March 7. Here’s one point they mentioned that sits with me: “We began the work out of necessity and planned to do it for a couple of weeks at most, always in the expectation that the federal public health establishment would make our work obsolete. Every few months through the course of the project, we asked ourselves whether it was possible to wind down. ” Others are also planning to follow suit.
The Tense Balancing Act between Ethics and Society
Society informs ethics, but ethics also slowly move societal values and dimensions. Too often, ethics are framed as either a product of society or the feedback loop gets simplified, like this:
The relationship between society and ethics is far more complex. Tension plays a key role in creating cultural shifts. Right now, we’re in a pandemic and many of us feel tension in some way or another. We’re schooling kids at home, facing natural disasters with far less supports than before, and trying to keep working amidst it all. The tea pot keeps whistling, but doesn’t get poured. When the water runs out, these things explode or melt to your stove.
If we weren’t tense enough, sociology often explores these relationships around tension. Émile Durkheim finds it between the individual and their cultures (I use plural because we’re often interacting and identifying with multiple cultural groups). As individuals, we may struggle against cultural labels or norms. We may feel apart from certain values or question their validity. For Durkheim, society was like a body: interrelated, purposeful, and with specific functions. It doesn’t mean everything plays well together.
American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois explored racism through this vehicle. He discussed the double consciousness faced by Black people that also plays out with other marginalized groups. In addition to the physical color lines created by society, these dynamics play out internally as well. As Du Bois pointed out, the color line surpasses race, but includes any defined difference that is used to marginalize. We have external tension, but internal as well.
Beyond groups and ourselves, Charlotte Baker-Shenk and Dennis Cokely provide a cultural model for Deafness that explores the role of attitude around factors. Language, sociopolitical identification, and physical features (in their model, auditory deafness) help define members. This are usually shown as a Venn diagram with attitude being the defining feature around cultural identification. This model, too, creates tension – we might feel we’re not “enough” of something to truly fit into a cultural group.
Illustrated, these relationships might look like this:
We can can how our worldview is affected by culture, individual identity, and attitude. The tension between these facets in part get explored by ethics and are shaped by linguistic, sociopolitical and physical aspects that inform our attitude. Call this a snapshot of society that shows us how it informs ethics, but also how other factors outside ethics play a role.
Let’s change this snapshot to video.
How Ethics Feed Back into Society
Ethics collide headfirst into these parts of society as part of how we make and explain decisions. Typically, classic ethics are taught away from society, such as the Trolley problem. The Good Place explicitly calls this out:
A part of the trolley problem focuses on decision-making when all options are terrible (like in a pandemic). It also assumes that only the driver or switch operator can make the decision. A number of decision tools work to spread out or share the decision-making as much as possible. In a pandemic, this means broader decisions above us like laws and policies make it easier for us to make individual decisions.
Both ethics and attitudinal values flow into artifacts commonly seen in society:
- laws and other codified rules
- perceptions or interpretations of what rights mean
- expectations around life, achievement, and how society operates
- expression, including language, practice of religion, clothes, and forms
- mythology that represents the memories and values we want to keep
- goals stemming from the above
These facets are affected by both our ethical decisions and the factors that influence our attitude. Here’s where Du Bois returns to the discussion. A scholar hoping to use his craft to create justice, he found intentional tension (political agitation such as protests) as the only way to truly make permanent societal change. He used data expertly to show the scale of the problem.
Tension, however, creates passion. We see this in letters and speeches from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr: that the only way to get people to pause and listen is through purposeful agitation. Tension is resistance to power structures in place. Michel Foucault explored power as existing in every relationship, not merely a thing that exists at the top levels, but a dynamic echoed everywhere.
If we expand our chart, it now looks like this:
Tension matters when it comes to social change. It forces discomfort and an investigation of our values. Things like a pandemic, or an infodemic, force us to explore our our ethical values and ask what type of society we want to make.
Visualizing a Pandemic: A Year Later
I’ve already discussed the ethics of visualizing during a pandemic and also did a 6-month retrospective some of my concerns about visualizing during the pandemic. As mentioned above, this is the part I wrote first. I’m hoping this post represents a denouement in the series. That may be a bit optimistic on my part, as we are still very early in the vaccination game. During the midst of the pandemic, we discussed how certain “baseline values” had to shift either upwards or downwards, such as autonomy going down to support other values shown below.
As noted above, justice ends up being the value with the most variance. Pandemics expose injustices and sociologists like Du Bois highlight how social agitation is needed to make change. Pandemics can serve as agitation in some societies, but initiate the calls for further agitation in others.
So what does this mean for our values?
In an ideal setting (heavy stress here), values start to shift towards towards their normal values with wider bands. Pandemics are full of ebb and tide, with the need to intermittently return closer to early pandemic values. There is, however, one notable exception to resetting: justice.
Pandemics expose cracks in any society – where people have been marginalized or where society has changed, but supports haven’t kept pace. This is that tension piece. One (of many) groups affected is parents. I expect post-pandemic some places will roll out more long-term supports for parents. The tension of parenting, schooling, and entertaining all in one place has been enough to move the culture in some areas.
Values may not settle fully back to their prior state. They may get closer, but large-scale traumatic events such as pandemics force a review of values by creating tension. By re-examining justice, other values too must shift.
This typically happens when a society rallies around eradicating the pandemic and the tension is enough for most people to agree on a shared direction. The curve in places like this will be generally flat with spikes when new variants occur or relaxing social distancing reaches a tipping point.
This is far from the norm, though. In reality, the pandemic hit when many countries are facing greater inequality and decreasing commitments to democracy. In the US, a highly individualistic country, our trajectory looks more like this:
The wide variances tie back to the schism that has sat in US culture for centuries, in addition to growing inequality and reduced interest in democracy. The wide banding highlights the breadth of attitudinal values, easily seen in state regulations around COVID-19, as well as increased calls for racial justice. Without consistency, these values will volley back and forth, eventually settling into a fuzzy band somewhere or coming to a head when the next trauma forces a value readjustment.
Sociologically, justice plays a key role here. If we, as members of a society fail to see our society as just, we lose trust, we focus smaller where we can control, and may see new extremes beyond where the original landed. We may find polarization, groups centering on opposed norms. This creates more tension until it’s enough to make societal change.
Ken Flerlage has done an amazing analysis on this. Go look and click through.
Epilogue
In 1918, the US faced a flu epidemic like it had not experienced before. As the illness spread, the first World War neared its end. Like COVID-19, the government response varied, various locations encouraging masks and other mitigations. As the epidemic closed, we rolled into the roaring 1920’s, fatigued by both a long war and an epidemic. Americans focused on smaller and immediate needs. Inequality widened. By the 1930’s, the system started to implode. Worldwide, democracies dissipated to autocracies, the start of the next world war fully brewing.
You see, ethics don’t occur within isolation of society. They quietly wrap in our values and carry who we will be forward. Who we choose to be today affects tomorrow. As we make visualizations, we’re crafting the stories that later generations will find. They will see our lives during this time, abstracted and noted in charts, the tracking of when and how much, and they will know who we are by how we presented the data.
The flow charts are inspired from an example in Introduction to Sociology: The Social World with credits to various theories in-diagram.
