A message to virtuous people and professionals
Dear good people,
We write to you in order to form an international community. As you well know, good people must organize to save the planet from continuing destruction, environmental degradation and acts that bring the world closer to obliteration from weapons of war.
We need virtuous, educated professionals willing to dedicate some of their valuable time for the purpose of international collaborations. We need you, and we encourage you to inform other professionals. We encourage you to do this with us. Please contact us at publications@ethicalconflictconsulting.com
In the later part of the early 21st century, we know that worthwhile publications ethically require BRUTAL HONESTY about systems, institutions, social groups and certain individuals as the powerful elites. There can be no rational hope without organizing and strategizing an effective resistance. We plead to you to help us make calls for action and to strategize and implement solutions to the troubles we face from the corporate, political, military and media monoliths during the search for a return to indigenous ways while maintaining technologically advanced societies.
We ask you to help us communicate the idea that the excessive use of resources (i.e., from resource hogs) is killing the living part of the planet and causing massive amounts of extinctions of important species. These important species are not only necessary for the continuation of the human species, but they are important for the continuation of the living earth.
We ask you to help us communicate that the excessive use of resources causes excessive competitiveness, which includes unprofessionalism, such as violence with ill wills and other misbehavior that cause the levels and amounts of safety, efficiency and fairness to fall at workplaces.
Only true professionals can save the planet, and these are ones who are dedicated to improving the standards and actions for safety, efficiency and fairness through professional communications, which requires ethics.
We strongly believe that every individual is both unique and valuable, and we demand that each person be given a fair set of opportunities in life to live in meaningful ways. This entails having respect for people’s labor, time and energies.
Professional Ethics
Fairness and safety are the most important characteristics of professional ethics.¹ At workplaces, there is an ethical need for the tendency of improving both fairness and safety as well as efficiency. If YOU are interested in contributing, consider the following systems of ethical thought, and write to us so that we can help you publish your ideas, especially those involving the identifications of unprofessional behavior and practices at workplaces as well as solutions to our main global problem,² namely, providing a continued increase of levels of safety, efficiency and fairness at workplaces.
Presumably, if we can form a sufficiently effective international community that uses professional communication for calls to action, and these calls provide enough encouragement, then we will succeed in raising the levels of safety, efficiency and fairness at workplaces. The continual rise of safety, efficiency and fairness is good enough to save the planet. For this kind of a rise, we need your assistance as a professional or coming professional.
Does anyone know of a university with an ethics program for graduate students that offers moral guidance for free via their website? They generally tend to just provide people with a LIST of things to be taught, such as bioethics, neuroethics, duty ethics, ethics of mass media etc. In doing so, are these universities with ETHICS PROGRAMS not tacitly supporting the military industrial complex, the medical industrial complex and other industries and organizations that NEED to be called out as mainly consisting of ethically questionable and morally deplorable people, power elites and major profiteers that are causing massive social problems in societies and are destroying the LIVING PORTIONS OF THE PLANET?
Moral directions: What can be accomplished by universities?
There are many different moral directions that each of us can take in life. One important moral direction involves giving moral instructions and guidance for what we should do and should not do as morally good people.
Some universities are the advertisers of what the moral directions are, and they teach people how to pursue their own personal moral directions in life sometimes. However, what fails to be seen from universities, especially their academic departments of ethics, is moral guidance from their websites, including their websites of ethics and philosophy departments. The universities are not holding people, institutions and systems responsible for excessive waste, excessive war and excessive competitiveness and neither are they providing us with the means to organize and strategize and implement practical actions to increase professionalism with ethics.
As of late, universities and schools have such thick levels of bureaucracy with vast amounts of administrative workers and paperwork that did not exist during former times. Moreover, corporate cronies have invaded universities, and they are not at all interested in teaching sustainable practices or encouraging the use of natural materials.
In fact, universities are all too often physically supporting and encouraging excessive consumerism. Universities have become like big bad corporations insofar as they are profit-seeking and are selling many products that are unnecessary and also contribute to waste and destruction of the planet.
Consider the ideal university. Such a university would teach people how to use technology and methods for increasing your chances of survival in meaningful ways that are not wasteful, but rather are sustainable.
Consider the ideal university that uses natural lighting almost entirely instead of artificial lights that require more energy via coal, nuclear, wind or solar power plants. The ideal university uses absolutely no air conditioning and no heating system because it is constructed from natural materials that have good enough geothermal properties to keep the rooms cooler in the summers and warmer during winters. This university would sell products that it creates, such as nutritious foods and beverages that are CULTIVATED by and for the students, faculty and staff members in order to mutually benefit their own people.
Thoughtful work would be rewarded and life skills would be taught and learnt and implemented so that the megastores that sell plastic-wrapped foods and beverages and unnecessary goods shipped from different regions of the planet would be unnecessary and unwanted and unused. The food would be grown by the university, which means that the students, faculty and staff would be doing that largely for themselves and the community. The food would not be shipped to a factory, be placed in the wrapping made by fossils fuels and then be distributed at a great distance to the consumers.
The university would act in ways that are becoming known as obviously moral, safer, more efficient and fairer than the current status of the universities, which promote consumerism and materialism via their actions. Instead, the ideal university would both employ and teach and thrive from its population via creating productivity for itself. It would promote biodiversity, sustainable practices, conservation and maintenance while promoting collaboration with the community, which includes all of the neighbors. The ideal university would have a major impact on the city and surrounding cities with its produce, educated minds working with the land and natural materials in order to form an oasis of moral goodness and beautiful minds.
With these ideas in mind, let us consider a few more that are important for us and our societies.
Duty Ethics: Do things in such a way that you are not interfering with the abilities of others to make decisions in life. This way of behaving gives others the respect that they deserve as moral beings. It involves not using people like tools as the means to your own ends. When people use others like tools, they are disrespecting them and treating them unfairly, like objects for their own use, which can be associated with personality and other psychological disorders, such as narcissism, sociopathy, Machiavellianism and psychoticism. Treat people as if they are worthwhile decision-makers.
Virtue Ethics: Cultivate virtues in your life. Consider the superhero. The superhero is punctual and charitable with his or her time and energy. He or she is polite, sympathetic etc. For example, Superman does not show up late to offer his time and effort and virtue of helpfulness. These virtues are worth practicing so that you begin forming them as good habits and they become part of your person. That is, you become a virtuous person. Of course, being excessive in these behaviors is not morally good, such as being overly punctual and overly polite. So, there is a balancing act that requires practicing these behaviors to form habits that are neither excessive nor deficient of the virtues. It requires being thoughtful.
Social Ethics of Justice as Fairness: Make decisions behind the “veil of ignorance”. Imagine that you do not know who you are or what you are going to be in life. That is, you could be a minority, a handicapped person, old and poor or a baby, for example, but you are ignorant of who you are and what you will become, in this thought experiment. What sort of laws and cultural norms would you then choose to provide yourself and the whole society with justice and fairness to the greatest extent? Behind the veil of ignorance, you make decisions that are fairer for those who have the most disadvantages in life and give yourself every advantage if you are confronted with tragedies in your life at some point.
Professional Ethics for Workplaces: For workplaces, increasing the amount of safety, efficiency and fairness is key. This often involves improving professional communications with co-workers, owners, clients etc. Safety, efficiency and fairness are measurable factors since safety can be measured over the years and decades of an organization.
For the sake of safety, the goal is to decrease the number of destructive, self-destructive and violent behaviors at work as well as to improve the safety standards for working conditions. Since most large organizations have suicides, obesity, alcoholism, self-mutilations, violent attacks at some points during their histories, it helps to investigate and make changes that reduce these sorts of behaviors for the purpose of safety (Read Conflict on the main menu of ECC to understand conflict management).
Efficiency refers to reducing waste, which is also measurable. An organization should focus on using as much of their own waste materials as possible, like the scraps from the tables of farmers are used for their chickens, for example.
Fairness can also be measured by large organizations in terms of the increasing or decreasing numbers of termination agreements, lawsuits and whistleblowing that exceeds the attention of the organization and becomes broadcast by the press, for example. If these sorts of occurrences are increasing, changes ought to be made as soon as possible.
Professional ethics offers methods for deriving conclusions about what is right and wrong about practices and circumstances at workplaces. See the methods that are implemented for whistleblowing ethically and the methods for managing conflict on our site under Conflict and Whistleblowing Ethically under Ethics on our menu at our homepage.
Contact us at Ethical Conflict Consulting to contribute to our ethical analyses with clear, practical and transparent methods to educate others about improving professionalism at different types of workplaces.
publications@ethicalconflictconsulting.com
Thank you for your time, effort and consideration.
Sincerely,
Our team at ECC
Footnotes: ¹ For education, no discipline or field of study is more important than ethics. Ethics is the rational study of what is right and wrong. It is the practice and command to perform good and fair deeds. Ethics is necessary for every workplace since excessive unethical business practices lead to the downfalls of societies. Ethics education is necessary for all of the major social institutions in society, such as the school and university, the church, synagogue and mosque or religious center, the law, the medical community, the scientific community and many more that shape public opinion.
² This is one of many ways of phrasing the main global problem. Another way of phrasing it is a comparison of waste-values (i.e., all of the waste as solids, liquids and gases that come from business activity) with their costs as destruction in environments, the use-values (i.e., to society, communities, families and individuals) and the exchange-values. The latter way allows for us to observe the different types of businesses that are having the worst impacts on our planet (i.e., with high waste-values and low use-values).
