Employment and ethics
Recently, I talked to a man whose non-profit employer had
restructured his job, significantly diminishing his title and responsibilities.
The man understood that he was stretched too thin to meet expectations: he had
a full-time job, another part time job, and the part time job at the non-profit
from which the employer took away major responsibilities. However, what hurt
was how the employer handled the change. The employer neither acknowledged the
man’s key role in keeping the organization alive during a difficult transition
nor had a personnel evaluation process to afford the individual time to improve
before the reduction in status.
That conversation pointed my thoughts toward the Hawaii
state emergency agency employee who was fired for initiating last month’s false
alert of an imminent nuclear attack on the island. The employee had a record of
difficulties on the job that culminated in intentionally or unintentionally
triggering the alert.
What does the Bible have to say about employee management?
The short answer is: Very little. The Bible says nothing
explicit about employee supervision and management except that a laborer is
worthy of her/his wages and should not be defrauded (I Timothy 5:17; James
5:4).
The longer, more accurate answer is that the Bible is neither
a rule book nor compilation of God’s dictates on how people are to live. Many
secular ethicists and even some Christian ethicists inaccurately describe
Christian ethics as “divine command ethics,” i.e., Christians find in the Bible
a God-given set of precepts or commandments that govern life. Major problems
with this approach to the Bible include:
1. Deciding which commandments to obey literally and which to
interpret metaphorically or in other, non-literal ways, e.g., the command for
women to stay in separate dwellings during menstruation;
2. Choosing when, if ever, to make an exception to a commandment,
e.g., should one honor a physically abusive parent?
3. Not having rules applicable to many contemporary situations,
e.g., personnel management.
In the 1950s, Episcopal priest and ethicist Joseph Fletcher
developed what he dubbed situational ethics. Christians were to live by two
rules: love God and love one another. The Biblical warrant for highlighting
these two commandments is strong. Jesus identified them as the two great
commandments. Incidentally, the widespread Christian emphasis on the Ten
Commandments lacks a similar warrant. Nowhere in the New Testament do the Ten
Commandments receive a similar endorsement. And in the Jewish tradition, the
ten are simply ten of 613 equal commandments in the Torah.
Ethically, Fletcher’s situational ethics restate utilitarian
ethics, i.e., the right is that which will produce the greatest good (or most
love) for the largest number of people. As with utilitarian ethics, situational
ethics that adopt love as the norm for guiding behavior and choices entail
applying that norm to daily life with its countless situations, contexts, and
decisions, requiring repeated judgments about what appears likely to result in
the most loving outcome(s) without being able to know the actual outcome of
one’s choices. Emotions, knowledge, personal preferences, and many other
factors invariably color those judgments in ways that an individual will rarely
understand. Furthermore, nobody can look into the future. Although many
Christians find Fletcher’s call for love to be the norm for Christian ethics,
in practice the theory has proven highly problematic and led to poor moral
choices. Ethicists find situational ethics only slightly better than the
frequently asked but truly unanswerable question, “What would Jesus do?”
Instead of emphasizing rules or calculations about the most
loving course of action, Christian ethics for most of two millennia have
emphasized virtue ethics. Virtue ethics aims to create a person who embodies
the four cardinal virtues (justice, courage, temperance, and prudence) and
three theological virtues (faith, hope, and love). The Apostle Paul lists the
three theological virtues in the last sentence of his much beloved discourse on
love (I Corinthians 13:1-13). Since Thomas Aquinas, Christian ethicists have
accepted the cardinal virtues as the minimum summary of Christian virtues,
contending that other virtues such as honesty and fidelity are derivable from
the cardinal and theological virtues.
Professional Christian ethicists continue to argue about the
best catalogue or list of virtues. I find those arguments boring.
Rather, I’m primarily interested in helping people so
inculcate the virtues that living virtuously is a function of habit and not of
choice. Rarely does an individual consciously make an ethical choice. Indeed,
neuroscientific research suggests that even when a person thinks s/he has
consciously made a decision, that decision was made subconsciously milliseconds
prior to the moment of conscious choice. Shaping behavior forms habits and over
time shapes character, forming a person in Jesus’ image.
Good personnel policies are valuable in helping to ensure
that employees are treated in a Christlike, healthy, loving way. Yet, as
happened with the disgruntled Hawaii state employee who triggered the false
alert of an impending nuclear attack, good personnel policies are no guarantee
of good outcomes. Ultimately, we depend upon character, not rules or
calculations about the greatest love.
May your habits be Godly!
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