28.5167 Latitude By 33.95 Longitude
By Chaplain Norbert Karava
July 9, 2010

It is not a coincidence that we find an ever-increasing emphasis placed on numerous ethical trainings in various formats and perspectives: Professional Ethics, Character Counts and Ethical Advisement to mention a few.

It seems that there has been a growing realization that an amoral focus on either performance or production is self-destructive in at least two dimensions:

First, it dehumanizes the hapless carbon-based life forms that are tasked with performance and production, and second, ultimately undermines and compromises both performance and production (amoral, carbon-based, slave life forms are just so unreliable) to such a degree that even cynics and moral relativists must at least pretend to care about morality in the interest of maintaining profitable levels of performance and production.

Not to worry, we have PowerPoint to clothe the shabby and embarrassing truth with the garments of professionalism and decency! We witness a gradual evolution from an intuitive, pre-rational sense of fair play on the playground to an increasingly formalized and articulated ethos to rules of conduct to, finally, ethical standards.

The problem, old as man, concerns the ultimate authority at the heart of morality, if there really is such a thing: If it is a violation of ethical standards to help oneself to the paper clips and stationery at the office, does this have something to do with a moral precept akin to “Thou Shalt not Steal,” appealing to a “Transcendent Authority,” or is it simply a violation of agreed-upon rules of conduct and behavior?

I opine that that the multi-tasking, bleary-eyed, carbon-based, cubicle-dwelling life form will ask himself such questions, one way or another: “Why is my conscience obliged by the mere collective opinion of an ethics committee?” Or, “Am I really an evil man because I violated the latest draft of ethical standards, hot off the email distribution list?” And looking at the BMWs in the privileged parking spaces of the company archons, he will be hard pressed to worry much about paper clips, or even, ye gods of corporate leadership forbid, the sacred stationery.

Try as we might to leave the “Transcendent Authority” out of the moral precept upon we build our ethical standards, call it perhaps the quirkiness of the human mind, we quickly succumb to the temptation of rewriting our morality in the ethical standards that we individually or collectively draft for ourselves and our institutions in answer to the pressing and practical needs of the hour.

To this purpose we employ both humor and even our language against our native moral frankness. We are tempted to take the moral precept “Thou Shalt not Steal” and blunt its unsettling edginess with the quasi-humorous “Gear Adrift, Gear a Gift” or the euphemistically technical sounding “Tactical Acquisition.”

Mount Sinai arises not only at certain geographical coordinates of our planet’s surface, but from out of the depths of the human heart entertaining a presence that knows neither latitude nor longitude.