You Don't Have a Code of Ethics. Here's Why That's Dangerous.
What Milgram, Luke Skywalker, and Viktor Frankl reveal about the ethics that actually hold
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Do you think you’re a good person? Most people do, and hold to that identity as though it is the same as an ethical position. No offense, but it isn’t. By itself, thinking that you are a good person tells you nothing about what you’ll do when shit….err, stuff gets real; it’s a cognitive bias that helps you feel good without having to work too hard.
In and of itself, that shouldn’t be cause for shame, we all stuggle with this; at the same time, if genuinely living up to your values is something that you care about, those tendencies must be accounted for.
What we need is a bridge from wanting to do good to reliably having integrity, even when it’s costly.
This is worth ten minutes because right now we are living through a period when the institutions we’ve relied on to model ethical behavior — churches, universities, branches of government, even professional licensing boards — have been visibly captured, repurposed, or otherwise hollowed out. The stories our culture tells itself have been revised, the civic education that once taught people how their own system worked has been degraded, and organized religion has been culturally sidelined to the point where it’s hard to even acknowledge the ethical framework it once provided. With these external structures failing to uphold their ethical missions, the only stabilizing force you can rely on is whatever you’ve built inside yourself.
If you haven’t built that internal structure, you’re more likely than you think to follow the orders of some guy in a lab coat. And that’s not speculation.
The Shocking 35% Who Said No
Recently I’ve been reading about Stanley Milgram and his infamous experiments where 65% of people were willing to shock a perfect stranger to death, solely on the request of another stranger in a lab coat.
For obvious reasons, 65% gets most of the attention. What more often gets overlooked is the 35% who refused.
This smaller group didn’t have dramatically stronger moral convictions or significantly different personality profiles, though that line of inquiry would have been worth more follow up studies had the original experiement not been found unethical itself. No. What researchers found among the refusers was a stronger sense of personal moral agency, or an internal sense that they were responsible for the outcomes of their choices.
That gave this group the wearwithall to say things like, “I can’t do that to a man,” and stop flipping the shock switch even when the lab coated authority kept saying, “the experiment requires that you continue.”
A personal code of ethics is something that can create that kind of internal reference point that the cues for authority won’t so easily override.
What Makes The Center Hold
Starting from scratch, most folks, if pressed on what you need to do to consider yourself a good person, would zero in on a few values like honesty, kindness, fairness, or loyalty. It’s a list. And lists are easy. The problem is that abstract values will inevitably conflict when reality steps in. A list of abstract values doesn’t provide a way to resolve collisions.
For a personal code of ethics to be functional, there must be a hierarchy. That means thinking through which principle takes precedence when they clash.
Some elements of an ethical hierarchy are logically obvious. Courage is the foundation of everything, because without it no other value can be enacted under pressure. Someone who values honesty but lacks the courage to be honest when that would be costly isn’t an honest person.
Milgram’s work points to this. The 35% didn’t have superior values; many even apologized for not completing the experiment. What they had was a sense that their choices were their own, and the willingness to act on that even when under pressure from an authority.
With a hierarchy established, you can sharpen your thinking further by asking three questions when facing an ethical dilemma. First, who do I become by making this choice? Do you cheat on your partner when you’re on a work trip? Do you threaten to fire the maid because you had a bad day at work? Do you play tennis instead of cleaning the kitchen and tell your roommates you forgot?
Second, does a principle I hold apply here regardless of how convenient the outcome would be? The U.S. Constitution is built on this model — rights exist whether or not respecting them produces convenient results. Due process isn’t supposed to evaporate because the accused was supposedly caught on video making a real bonsai kitten. Third — and this is the dangerous one — does the result I want justify what I’d have to do to get it?
That third question is the one eating modern institutions alive: the desired social result justifies the methods. Compelled speech, coercion, manipulation. That’s not an ethical stance. That’s “the ends justify the means” thinking. It’s a temptation whenever someone believes they know the real truth.
When Stories Lose Their Ethical Core
This new emphasis on having the “right” outcomes is easy to spot in pop fiction when you know the older backstory. Take Luke Skywalker’s defining ethical act, refusing to kill Darth Vader, holding to the value that redemption is possible. Luke held to this course even when it looked like it would cost him his life.
Yet by 2015, the character of Luke was rewritten. In The Force Awakens, Luke is characterized as nearly murdering his nephew in his sleep based on a premonition. That’s not character development; that’s a rewriting of the character’s ethical core. For the audience, especially those who are young or not inclined to nitpick, this subtly teaches that there is no stability in moral conviction. Values are provisional to circumstance.
Many will absorb this model without interrogation.
Humility and Self-deception, Confronting Our Bias
Among the biggest challenges to maintaining a personal ethical code is the all-too-human capacity to deceive ourselves. The easiest way to be a good guy is to rewrite history or change the definition of good to include whatever vice you can’t bear to give up. These are exactly the kind of responses that an ends-justify-the-means frame invites.
This is also why, in additon to courage by necessity forming the base of choice in the face of adversity, humility must also rank near the top of the value hierachy, because without it, every other ethical commitment becomes self-serving performance. A code of ethics won’t function if you have no desire or means to catch yourself in the midst of your own folly. To arrive at ethical behavior, you need people who will tell you what you don’t want to hear, and the willingness to hear listen. These are the tools of accountability.
If you can’t name one person who would call you on your nonsense to your face, you don’t have accountability. You have an audience.
Discernment, the ability to perceive what a situation actually requires, is the skill that ties it all together. Knowing how to choose the right principle to apply in the moment isn’t something that can be reduced to a simple rule. This can only be learned through expeerience. And it is the wisdom earned through experience, honesty, and the willingness to acknowledge mistakes that creates the discernment to make better choices in the future.
With many external models not operational, this cannot be prescribed from the outside. But the right questions can force the right kind of thinking.
Writing and Keeping Your Own Code
A complete personal code of ethics can’t be handed to you by someone else. The work is inherently personal. But there are certain structural questions that force the kind of thinking that produces a code you can act on even under pressure. And that’s useful, as opposed to a list of nice-sounding words that collapse on contact with reality.
As with many worthy adventures, getting started is the hardest part. So here are five questions to begin building your code of ethics.
What principles am I unwilling to violate even when it costs me?
What order do those principles fall in when they conflict with each other?
What do I do when I discover I’ve violated my own code?
Who in my life will tell me the truth when I’m deceiving myself?
What stories, models, and institutions do I allow to shape my ethics with, and are they worthy of that influence?
This is the beginning. The work of building a code of ethics and living up to it is ongoing and never finished. But just beginning, however imperfectly, gives you an anchor against mindless drifting and being vulnerable to influence that could convince you to shock a person to death at a moment’s notice.
The 65% in Milgram’s experiment didn’t decide to adminster lethal shocks; they just never decided not to. They didn’t have an internal reference point that tied their own actions to a sense of personal accountability strongly enough to override an external authority telling them to continue.
A personal code of ethics is an intentional practice to create that kind of reference point. Viktor Frankl, in discussing attitudes, sums up the value of this best.
”Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
A personal code of ethics is how you make that choice before the moment arrives.
Housekeeping
As might be obvious, the last two months haven’t gone to plan. I’ve had some agonizing family difficulties, and those played a part in worsening other challenging situations. I can’t go into specifics but I’m grateful for your patience in bearing with me.
While things do seem to be simmering down, over the remainder of the summer I’m going work on doing some updating around here, and trying to find a rhythm that works for the new normal. I have quite a lot that I’d like to write, if I can find a way to juggle that around other competing duties.
Substack has also released many new tools some of which may help streamline my creation process once I can figure them out.
For the moment, if you have preferences for what sort of posts I write, please, voice those in the comments.
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About
Diogenes in Exile began after I returned to grad school to pursue a master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at the University of Tennessee. What I found instead was a program saturated in Critical Theories ideology—where my Buddhist practice was treated as invalidating and where dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy was met with hostility. After witnessing how this ideology undermined both ethics and the foundations of good clinical practice, I made the difficult decision to walk away.
Since then, I’ve dedicated myself to exposing the ideological capture of psychology, higher education, and related institutions. My investigative writing has appeared in The Federalist, Real Clear Education, Heterodox STEM, Minding the Campus, The College Fix, and has been republished by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. I also speak and consult on policy reform to help rebuild public trust in once-respected professions.
Occasionally, I’m accused of being funny.
When I’m not writing or digging into documents, you’ll find me in the garden, making art, walking my dog,
I think those experiments have been pulled apart and found to have major issues. Like most of the participants sensing it wasn't real etc so the results are exaggerated.