By FASPE Chair David Goldman

Complicity: per one definition, “association or participation…in a wrongful act.” Another, “the state of being involved with others in…wrongdoing.”

Association? Participation? Involved with? Wrongdoing? What do any of these mean?

In a world in which many of us see rampant, contagious and dangerous wrongdoing, we must ask about our own complicity in what we see. These questions demand answers today!

Much has been written about complicity. I want here to touch on complicity from the point of view of the professional. This is the continuation of a conversation, not the beginning or the end, one based on an important starting point, a FASPE theme: the ethical professional must always engage in self-examination, including the question of one’s complicity.

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What is wrongdoing?

1. Isn’t wrongdoing anything that the person asking the question about complicity thinks is wrong? Or put differently, if one is concerned about whether he or she might be complicit in something, it would suggest that the decision about whether that something is wrongdoing has already been asked and answered, at least for that individual.
2. But, of course, that is not enough; it covers only limited situations. The ethical professional must be self-aware and interrogate the thing. Is it wrong? Constant self-examination is vital.

Part of FASPE’s approach is to utilize a history in which there can be no doubt about the thing; no one will argue that the policies of National Socialism were anything but wrong, undebatable wrongdoing. So, we can avoid the question in order to examine the why, i.e., why we become complicit. But, the real world is more complicated. The real world is gray.

3. For these purposes, I propose that we not seek to create a blanket definition of what is a wrong; that would not be possible. Instead:

• the ethical professional must constantly ask: is the thing that I am doing, the thing that I am engaged with, the thing I might participate in, a wrong, and

• the ethical professionals must accept that their particular expertise, as a doctor or lawyer or other professional, means that they have the unique capability to define a wrong within their area of expertise.

The wrong may take many forms—including, acts against the profession as a whole, acts against the people whom the profession is intended to serve, attempts to create unfair advantage for some within the profession, etc. The wrongs need not be unlawful in order to be wrong within the construct of the ethical professional!

A lawyer in a law firm can best answer whether an executive order that bans a law firm from the right to practice in federal agencies is wrong.

A doctor can best answer whether disseminating misinformation about medical treatments is wrong.

A journalist can best address whether denying journalistic access to government leaders as a result of perceived unfavorable coverage is wrong.

Clergy may be well positioned to consider whether the use of starvation as a tool of war is morally wrong.

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The more complicated question is what constitutes participating in wrongdoing?

1. I propose that the answer should take into account where one stands on the continuum of expertise in respect of the particular wrongdoing. Because we are dealing with professionals, we start with expertise!
2. The first question: is doing nothing an option? The answer is clear: if the professional has particular knowledge, experience, and/or expertise in relation to wrongdoing, doing nothing is complicity.
3. Accepting that doing nothing constitutes complicity, what must I do (or not do) in order to avoid being complicit?

• How much potential power do I have with respect to the wrongdoing? What I must do (or not do) in relation to the wrongdoing must be proportionate to the potential influence I have. Obviously, the more potential, the greater the responsibility, the greater the risk of complicity.

• Possible actions can take all forms—from seeking collective action among professionals and professional organizations to individual advocacy, from public defiance to speaking or writing in one’s smaller community, from publicly quitting one’s job to quietly seeking to make change from within, from interceding with one’s patients, clients, and customers to seeking harm mitigation where possible.

The ethical professional must, in any case, self-examine. What is possible? How and where can I have the most impact? Accepting that doing nothing is not an option, what is possible, what is the most effective? Noting that the goal is not martyrdom or self-sacrifice; the goal is realistic, effective action in the real world. Doing nothing is not an ethical action.

The questions of complicity and degree of complexity must be examined. They must be examined in light of expertise, proximity and the potential for impact—not as an excuse to do nothing, but in terms of what I must do (or not do).

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We must remember: complicity is not a political question.

This is not partisan politics. There is nothing inherently incongruous between partisan politics and professional ethics. Partisanship should allow for disagreement without assuming ethical implications. On the other hand, if the professional sees wrongdoing in a partisan position, he or she becomes complicit in that wrongdoing by not acting. And, if these partisan politics constitute an attack on the profession itself, or on professionals by virtue of their profession, the line of wrongdoing has been passed.

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It is not enough to engage in handwringing. Where we have the capacity to influence, it is morally unacceptable and professionally unethical to engage in self-satisfactory victimhood, merely regretting our plight.

Professionals, you are not the victims; you are the elite; you have power; you are complicit if you do not recognize and acknowledge your responsibility and capacity for influence. In small ways and large. Creatively, actively, and purposefully. If you are one who judges yourself by what your mother or priest may think, or by what the wrongdoing could look like tomorrow or in five years in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, then think about your mother or your priest or that newspaper article when you fear or ignore, when you want to remain silent or not act when your voice or your action could have even a small impact. Let the symbolic knowledge of their judgment spur you to do what is ethical.

Wrongdoing comes in all stripes and packages. As does complicity. Mirrors are not just for the vain; they are also for ethical self-examination.

"Considering Professional Ethics" is a monthly essay shared in the FASPE e-newsletter.

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By FASPE Chair David Goldman

The Trump Administration announced that reporters from the Wall Street Journal would not be part of the White House press pool accompanying the President on foreign travel this week, i.e., they were affirmatively banned from the press pool. Ignoring that the travel was in large part a US taxpayer funded boondoggle for the president to visit and promote his family’s golf courses in Scotland. This is, of course, not the first time that the White House has wielded the power of access; for example, the Associated Press has lost favor—meaning access—because it refers to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of Mexico.

One of the fundamental propositions of ethical journalism, the role of ethical journalism, is the responsibility to hold power accountable. Or, put differently, the responsibility to report both the news and what lies behind the news, what exists behind the curtains of power and privilege. The White House’s efforts to control access to the President of the United States is a flagrant violation of ethical journalism, let alone a possible breach of basic constitutional protections.

The above is not a revelation. That this White House and this president seek to interfere with ethical journalism (including by seeking control over content) is hardly news. We have seen this picture for years: the use of lawsuits, inflammatory descriptives, spinning anything critical as fake news, reducing or eliminating government funding, making threats to terminate regulatory licenses, etc.

Two thoughts:

(1). Normalization. We, the public, and they, the media, have normalized this behavior. Decrying responsible journalism as fake news, sowing distrust in journalists, denying access as a means of punishment—all this and more must not be normalized. It must not be ignored as a passing phase, as if this behavior is the equivalent of a child’s terrible twos.

We the consumers of news must not look the other way. We must not ignore it as fleeting but ultimately harmless behavior.

Moreover, and more importantly, the media itself must not stand idly by wringing their collective hands. Journalists, it is your ethical responsibility to remain assiduously and aggressively ethical; it is your ethical responsibility not to decamp into the left and right, the pro and con, and thereby feed the beast.

And, journalists, it is your ethical responsibility to stand together. Do you really believe that you will benefit from the Wall Street Journal’s absence from the plane or the Associated Press’s absence from the Pentagon or CBS’s payment of blood money to settle what by all accounts was a groundless lawsuit? Why are you, journalists, too often silent in the face of the attacks on particular news media; why are you silent when you see this or that media company responding on bended knee to the White House’s threats? Have some of you learned nothing from the ethical courage displayed by those law firms that stood up to the White House’s unconstitutional attacks on the fundamentals of legal ethics?

Journalists, it is your responsibility to lead in opposition to attacks on constitutional protections and on ethical journalism.

(2). Local Journalism. Here is a novel thought, even as economic and technological realities have decimated local journalism, as the local news outlets fly under the radar of the cynical anti-free press crowd, we can look to the local news to shine a light on important stories, look to them to hold power accountable. What is local is not merely small, what is local is not merely minor, what is local is not merely limited. What is local is both representative of the national and international. It is also, by its very nature, directly national and international.

We need local journalism, not just to report on the local but also to tell us what is happening on the ground, to report the truth about the real impact of what is being dictated from Washington and beyond.

There are important funding initiatives in support of local journalism–noting, for example, work of the MacArthur Foundation and The Knight Foundation. But, that is not enough.

Local journalists: now is your time. Even as you are economically at risk, even as your numbers dwindle, we need you even more. We need you to fill the ethical gaps created by your less willing, though seemingly more powerful, colleagues. Speak truth to power!

Consumers of journalism: look to local journalism for truly ethical reporting! Read and subscribe. Support your local journalist!

"Considering Professional Ethics" is a monthly essay shared in the FASPE e-newsletter.

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By FASPE Chair David Goldman

There is an entire cottage industry philosophizing about whether there is such a thing as bystanding, as a bystander. Is apathy or complacency just a form of complicity, i.e., passive complicity through inaction? On the other hand, does condemning the bystander ignore the circumstances, the risks, the potential dangers? Is there a difference between intentional bystanding and passive, thoughtless bystanding? A debate.

Today, we are facing a more insidious form of bystanding: passive acceptance. Or, put differently, conscious (or subconscious) normalization.

As FASPE studies the insidious normalization process of the 1930s in Germany, we cannot help but notice that we are now living with (learning to live with?) behavior that is truly extraordinary and not normal, behavior that if viewed from afar (in time or space) would be shocking. Worse, it is behavior that we can be certain, when viewed retrospectively, as historians with the benefit of knowing the ultimate outcomes, will be viewed as aberrant.

One of FASPE’s partners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum muses about the present and the future–in the certainty that there will be people in the future, like us today, who will look back at our behavior and ask “how did they let that happen?”

How? By accepting, through a gradual process of normalization, actions or behaviors that are not really normal. By allowing such not normal behavior, over time we let it take on an air of normalcy, in part because of: how it is sold. How often it occurs, how seemingly benign it begins, how normal the advocates of the abnormal appear, how willing those whom we respect are to normalize out of political expediency, how unwilling we are to consider possible adverse consequences, how comfortable we are with the present! On and on.

Consider some pictures today:

• Marines on the streets of America.
• Precision bombs being dropped as part of “modern warfare,” knowing with certainty that there will be significant civilian deaths.
• Immigration agents of the United States government entering sacred places (churches and hospitals for example) seeking to arrest non-dangerous individuals whose identities and locations are not secret.
• Denying election results in democratic countries as a political strategy.
• Disrupting and destroying necessary infrastructure and using starvation and soul-breaking, à la the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s, as a means of modern warfare.
• Physical and emotional violence condoned, even encouraged, in America as a political tool, as political sport.
• Consorting with despots and autocrats while denying basic respect to democratically elected allies.
• Military parades in Washington à la Moscow and Pyongyang.
• Encouraging, even trading in, misinformation and blood threats to a free press.
• Denial of medical science in favor of baseless, even bonkers, conspiracy theories.
• Personal attacks on judges, law firms, and the system of justice as “legal strategies.”
• Denial of climate science in the face of the realities of unprecedented weather events, famine, and death.
• Exclusionary, bigoted, and dangerous White Christian Nationalism expressed in the name of religion and faith.

Yes, the above is the work of our professionals. Lawyers, doctors, business people, clergy and others–all normalized as simple pendulum swings and political phases, as temporary blips and exaggerations. But, they are not normal.

Perhaps all will pass gently into history with little irrevocable damage (other than to those who are the intentional or innocent victims). But that is not a strategy. It is passivity. Like those living through the 1930s in Germany who did not anticipate the destination of Auschwitz (speaking metaphorically), what future are we blinding our eyes to? I do not intend to analogize to 1935 Germany with a threat of impending genocide–that would be preposterous, demagogically unproductive. But, we do learn from history.

We must call on those in our communities with the potential for impact, our professionals, to take action, to assert ethical leadership. Not to accept the hypnosis of normalization, not to seek to minimize the impact of normalization through negotiating strategies that themselves accept the normalcy, not to limit their professional activities to the present with a blind eye to the future–but to lead ethically.

FASPE asks more of our professionals; day-to-day ethical behavior, ethical leadership in our day-to-day work demands more.

Professionals, don’t just question your ethics but act on your ethics. In your day-to-day work. We cannot allow the normalization of fundamentally unethical behavior.

"Considering Professional Ethics" is a monthly essay shared in the FASPE e-newsletter.

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By FASPE Chair David Goldman

We are inundated with attacks on universities, access to books and the arts; attacks on immigrants, the availability of habeas corpus and fundamental rights to due process; attacks on funding international programs, including everything from USAID to Voice of America; attacks on science, scientific research, and on science-based medicine, itself; attacks on law firms, judges and the entire proposition of three coequal branches of government; attacks on non-profit organizations and philanthropy; attacks on the European Union, Canada and Ukraine. The zone is flooded.

Is flooding the zone a tactic, diverting our attention from any one particular attack? Or is it a strategy, expressing a hope that, for example, the Supreme Court will not rule against all the attacks such that even a low success rate will produce lasting change?

What we know is that all these attacks are causing stress—stress on the judicial system, stress on the legislative branch, stress on all of us and on our ability to take it all in.

And, it is causing stress on the ethical underpinnings of our professions. What do I as a doctor or pastor do when immigration officials enter sanctified places of prayer or medical treatment? What do I as a doctor do when science-based medical treatments are challenged? What do I as an educator or librarian do when I am told that certain books are offensive and must be metaphorically burned because they teach a particular history—not because that history is inaccurate but because it is uncomfortable to particular readers? What do I as a business executive (or any employer) do when I am told that hiring policies that I believe are fair and desirable will jeopardize my company’s government contracts? What do I as a journalist do when I fear that there will be retribution for covering certain stories or angles? What do I as a civil servant do when I am told that my carrying out my duties is partisan and threatens the loss of my job?

Part of the problem with this stress on the professions and the professionals is that there is no playbook; there are not necessarily responses to be found in some hypothetical section 3.48(b) of some “rules of professional ethics.”

I offer three thoughts:

• Now is the time for individual ethical leadership based on individual north stars. Those with the capacity to have impact, including our professionals, must harken to their ethical grounding and act accordingly, even at hypothetical risk.
• There is power in collective ethical behavior. We have seen the result when law firms decided to go it alone or when universities felt they had no choice but to go forward without assistance. There is power if wielded collectively through professional organizations, by the leaders of institutions, by professionals speaking with one voice and not seeking to gain some kind of favor by cutting the best available deal.
• We all learn through joint conversation—through identifying best practices, by brainstorming effective responses, by testing work-arounds, by establishing priorities. And even through commiseration and storytelling.

None of the above is a discussion of politics or partisanship. Instead, I talk about responses to threats to our professions and to the right to practice ethically within them. Ethical leadership is required by acknowledging the ethical stress, yet acting through individual ethical commitments and relying on the comfort and effectiveness of collective action.

"Considering Professional Ethics" is a monthly essay shared in the FASPE e-newsletter.

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