Twenty five years is a long time – in fact, it’s longer than I’ve been on the planet. Age aside, it’s hard to imagine the world twenty five years ago. A world BG (Before Google), a world not yet rocked by September 11, and a world yet to be brought to its economic knees by the Global Financial Crisis. So what will the next twenty five years bring? And, more specifically, what ethical challenges will this period require our next generation of leaders to navigate.
D.H Lawrence once said: ‘Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.’ Respectfully, I disagree; whether for better or for worse, nothing is written in stone and ethics is by no means immune. To go a layer deeper, perhaps Lawrence was speaking to the challenge of maintaining a degree of consistency in our societal ethics and principles of justice during an age of impermanence – typified by the 24 hour news cycle and the increasing digitization and automation of every facet of life.
Ever since the days of Socrates, the central inquiry of ethics has been ‘what ought one to do?’ Contemporary leaders need to apply that line of questioning to a range of issues that are ever-changing and increasingly complex. Some of the larger forces already at play provide an early indication as to where our focus will need to be: globalization, the ageing of the developed world and technological disruption are forces that impact upon our social, economic and political landscapes in both an intra and inter country sense. For the purposes of this short exploratory piece, I’m going to focus on four areas that sit beneath these umbrella terms, and quite often at the nexus of two or more of them: privacy, intellectual property, scientific advancement and navigating the policy challenge of competing economic and political interests.
PRIVACY
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to Instagram it, did it really fall? While I’m being slightly facetious, the fact that that question could well be society’s new philosophical thought experiment speaks volumes about our digital attachment and obsession with capturing and broadcasting our movements, and for that matter the movement of others. Historically, privacy was almost implicit because information was hard to find and gather. But if magazine and newspaper sales, YouTube hit counts and water-cooler conversations are anything to go by, as anecdotal evidence, then it appears that we’re increasingly desensitized to the privacy invasion of others (in fact in some ways we’re complicit) while, paradoxically, becoming more and more passionate about decrying encroachment into our own sphere of private life. Hold this in parallel with the development of drone technology and the intensification of big data profiling (and its commercial exploitation) and you are soon led to ask where, in this new world order, do you draw the line on information others can access and what, if anything, should you have every right to ring fence off?
We routinely sign away our rights via a tick box that states ‘I accept the Terms and Conditions’, which research shows 73% of us admit to not reading.
Currently, we routinely sign away our rights via a tick box that states ‘I accept the Terms and Conditions’, which research shows 73% of us admit to not reading. Cullen Hoback’s documentary, Terms and Conditions May Apply, makes the point that all 425 million Gmail users have signed the term: ‘I consent to the scanning disclosed in these terms’. There’s a need for us to get more explicit on privacy rules; however, does the responsibility rest with us as individuals to take greater control of what we’re handing over or, given our lack of market power, do we need to legislate boundaries for data gathering and commercialisation? The answer to that question becomes increasingly complex when you factor in the government’s growing desire and need to partner with the corporations, who have the stronghold over our data, to monitor and retain information on their citizens in the interests of national security. At a time where it’s foreseeable that people will be able to 3D print guns and bombs within the decade, to what degree is sacrificing our privacy justified?
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Author Jarod Kintz once said: “Don’t steal because it’s immoral, not because you’re afraid you’ll get caught.” For one of those two motivations, or perhaps a fusion of both, the absolute majority of us would never walk in to a store and walk out without paying for something. Yet for three years running, Australia has taken out the gold in the ‘per capita pirating’ ranks… cue the torrented national anthem! The shift from tangible goods to the intangible – from CDs and DVDs to digitally downloadable tracks and files – has seemingly shifted peoples’ perception of entire categories of goods from ‘private’ to ‘public’. Meanwhile, globalisation of the market place is resulting in cheaper imitation products flooding markets and undercutting existing producers. I’d postulate that the next frontier will likely be self manufacturing – if you could 3D print yourself a macbook or copy, paste and print the latest Gucci little black dress, both at a fraction of the price, would you really go to the store and buy it for the full price? Are these developments the next frontier of competition that economic agents need to adjust to or are we cannibalising innovation by permitting the destruction of the economic value of intellectual property?
Yet for three years running, Australia has taken out the gold in the ‘per capita pirating’ ranks…
SCIENTIFIC ADVANCEMENT
In the words of Einstein: ‘relativity applies to physics, not to ethics’ – but what about when science and ethics meet? Having been told the world is overpopulated relative to its available resources, if we can employ artificial means to feed the developing world via improving yield or by lengthening the shelf life of a product, then should we do it? If we can see certain genetic deformities in our unborn child, should we be able to manipulate the genome? While these questions have long been on our ethical radar, the next 25 years will bring them to the floor of our legislative bodies because we’re no longer playing with hypotheticals, we’re dealing with scientifically and technologically attainable realities. These advancements will hold in tension two schools of thought: that we shouldn’t tamper with nature; and that the meaning of life is to evolve and progress by whatever means available. So, is it ethical that the western world could halt developments that could substantially lessen starvation, malnutrition and disease in the developing world? Can we leave the market to its own devices when, based on current global medical expenditure, we spend more R&D dollars on premature ejaculation and male pattern baldness than we do any other ‘ailment’? Or, by enabling these advancements without longitudinal testing, are we putting humans and our planet’s biological diversity at risk from a raft of negative externalities we don’t yet fully comprehend?
NAVIGATING COMPETING INTERESTS
In the words of former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: ‘The challenge is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.’ If you’re a subscriber to that philosophy, then the competing interests poised to collide over the next quarter of a century will be guaranteed to whet your problem-solving appetite. To begin with, never before will we have had a working generation smaller in size than our retired population. With Australia’s ‘over 60s’ population expected to double by 2040, while our working population will remain stagnant, for the first time our economic power base and our political power base won’t be fused. What happens when these two groups of stakeholders have mutually exclusive wants and needs – should politicians pander to the vote base or play to the economic bottom line? And does making that “choice” equate to choosing between the economy and staying in office? Leaders desperate to unlock the next driver of growth and to power-up the engine of job creation, how does the tussle between economic growth and environmental protection play out?
Additionally, at a time of stagnant global growth (against a backdrop of exhausted monetary policy and empty fiscal policy reserves) and with leaders desperate to unlock the next driver of growth and to power-up the engine of job creation, how does the tussle between economic growth and environmental protection play out?We’ve arguably never been as environmentally conscious as we are right now, but does everyone ‘have their price’? Is an injection of investment and jobs combined with the mitigation of environmental degradation a preferable option to environmental preservation sans investment and jobs? We’re going to be forced to confront this question in a myriad of forms in the quarter century ahead, so what is our definition of ‘sustainable economic development’ and are we capable of universal standards?
Churchill put it aptly when he said: ‘It’s useful to look to the future but not further than you can see’.
While the challenge of pinpointing ethical dilemmas against the backdrop of such seismic transformational forces is akin to trying to catch water in a sieve, it is imperative that we try. The complexity of the ethical challenges on our national horizon highlights the criticality of evaluating the interrelationship between our three sectors (corporate, government and non-profit), as well as each of their relationships with the fourth estate. We need to ensure that as a nation we are carving out the time and space for deep thinking and debate “on” our major ethical challenges in order to inform our policies, rules and choices – because, as Yogi Berra remarked, “if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up some place else” – and in this increasingly high-stakes, unforgiving and complex world there’s no such thing as a minor ethical misstep.
This article originally appeared on The Ethics Centre.
