DEI and Character

Thoughts on the Intersection of DEI and Character

Tony Klemmer

How might the current push for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training (DEI) dovetail with a parallel push for character formation? Both these areas of personal and social development address the individual and her/his roles and behaviors as an individual person and as an individual person in community.

The purpose of this memo is to sketch out some thoughts on these important matters.


Our Capacity for Understanding Across Difference

Our country’s long history of inequity need not be recapitulated here, and that history coupled with recent current events has brought the need for better understanding and cooperation across difference to the fore again throughout the country and across sectors. Within the field of education, this renewed push began long before the events of last summer (2020) catalyzed a “movement.” Few of us would argue that this heightened attention is unnecessary, rather it is long overdue. Countless examples exist in which gender, race, ethnicity, age and other social identifiers diminish levels of acceptance and opportunities available to persons identified with such groups.

None of this is new. “Justice too long delayed is justice denied,” as Martin Luther King, Jr. reminds us. Overlayed on the specific challenges of race, gender and ethnicity, are the yawning political divisions in our country that prevent us from engaging in the kind of civil discourse that most of us feel represents a cornerstone of a flourishing democracy. These are separate but related problems that, when combined, have frozen our leaders and institutions into inaction and delayed reaction.

A strong wave of training sessions (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion [DEI]) has emerged as one remedy to better understand the dynamics of difference and some of the underlying psychological and social theories that underpin these dynamics. Social identity, implicit bias, stereotype threat and other related concepts help us understand how we engage with others as human persons in community. Organizational training efforts to sensitize individuals, particularly those in positions of power who hire, manage, set policy and otherwise control resources and decision making, to become more inclusive and to treat others with the same dignity, with which they would expect to be treated, constitutes the crux of much of the DEI work that is underway. An entire industry has emerged to guide individuals and organizations toward these more equitable aspirations. Achieving success in this area beyond its core benefit of strengthening our common humanity has the added organizational benefits that come from building diverse, equitable teams (e.g., improved outcomes, better solutions to problems, increased creativity and more).

Many DEI initiatives are designed as stand-alone activities. There may be an opportunity for deeper learning and higher transfer if such initiatives were integrated into a broader range of learning activities for individuals and organizations. The starting point for much of the DEI work underway, almost by definition, centers on social identity and the theories that drive that field of research and behavior. The groupings referenced earlier (e.g., race, gender, age), are all aspects of our sense of ourselves in society – our social identities – with associated “in groups” and “out groups” and our behavior in and toward both, explicitly and sub-consciously. One question to be raised is the potential for a more foundational starting point, perhaps that of personal identity.

Personal identity theory and social identity theory are two separate, related strands of psychology and are essential to our full understanding of ourselves and others. A focus on personal identity leads to an understanding of the construction of my essential sense of self, in time and space. Leading with this kind of work, even prior to exploring the dynamics of my social identity, might strengthen and contextualize explorations into the dynamics of my role(s) in social and organizational settings.


The Foundational Role of Personal Formation

In recent character formation work, this distinction between the individual self and the social self is shown to be vitally important. While these two dimensions of the self are wholly symbiotic in practice, their development may be best sequenced by starting with the individual self and the intrinsic traits, values, beliefs, attitudes and perceptions of that self as a self, first. Then we can move toward the broader exploration of that self in community. When we use a virtues framework to develop (form) adults, in fact, the moral virtues separate into two useful groupings that mirror these parallel dimensions of identity. See diagram below.

 

 

Ironically, an adult’s personal formation journey (i.e., her/his efforts to live a virtuous life of good character) requires deep self-reflection and at the same time a community of others. We are only fully human in community and we live our lives in community, so that dimension is essential to our individual growth in this domain of personal formation. At the same time personal formation is a deeply personal journey requiring solitude, self-reflection, metacognitive effort and selfdevelopment. As stated above, these are separate but tightly coupled aspects of moral development (i.e., the self and the self in community).

 

 

There seems to be a parallel in the realm of unpacking our social identities for the purpose of building better understandings and actions across difference (DEI), in order to achieve a more accepting and equitable citizenry and set of institutions in society. Starting with the individual self in that exploration may have similar benefits. We might consider this combination – personal identity work (the self) and social identity work (the self in community) – as an essential and integrative foundational step, in order to broaden and deepen the impact of this work.


How Might DEI and Character Work Intersect?

Beyond these hypotheses about the impact of actively incorporating personal identity work with the existing social identity focus of current efforts in DEI, the question remains: how do these important developmental objectives (DEI and Character) intersect?

If we envision personal formation as an exercise or journey for the whole human self in pursuit of a life of goodness, flourishing and meaning, it is foundational to much of the other kinds of learning and development we can experience. Our approach to the moral life should permeate all the aspects of our lives (e.g., social, familial, personal, interpersonal, professional, faith). There should be a coherence to our approach to living virtuously across these many segments of modern life. It could be argued that even in our pluralistic world, it would be very hard to make claims about living virtuously, if we did not believe in and actively live the ideal of “the dignity and worth of every human person.” Being good selectively, does not constitute a fully formed life of goodness. In principle, we must strive to be good to and with all human persons in all situations.

In order for this to take hold as an intrinsic aspect of our whole moral selves, the use of a moral virtue framework tethered to the sacred writings of the world’s wisdom traditions has been proposed (see separate writings). With this as a scaffold, building a personal formation learning program that allows participants a balance of self-reflection and development in a community of others with the goal of shifting participants’ moral mental schemas (mindsets, mental models) can address these dual dimensions of personal development.

By taking a new approach to the representation of the wisdom traditions, we can begin to bridge the worlds of equity and character. We incorporate a broad range of traditions including eastern (i.e., Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism), indigenous traditions (i.e., Africa and N. America), and monotheistic traditions (i.e., Judaism, Islam, and Christianity). Beyond this we capture the voices and lenses through which different groups hear and see their wisdom sources, given their lived experience and histories. The rationale for this approach parallels the beliefs of DEI proponents who remind us that different lived experiences and personal histories lead to different worldviews and approaches to life and such differences require understanding. This is true, we argue, in the moral realm as well. As scholars have corroborated, for example, individuals with a lived experience of oppression and a 400 year history of struggle gravitate toward different passages, readings and interpretations of wisdom sources then would those with a different history (i.e., European). These differences in sources, interpretation and prioritization among the moral virtues lead to varied insights and individualized paths to goodness. By incorporating the specific voices of Latinx, Feminine, and African American wisdom writings alongside the other more traditional wisdom sources, we are able to see these differences clearly, and discuss them deeply within the adult learning programs for which they are designed.

 

 

The benefits of this design are twofold. First, this approach exposes us to the plurality of valid ways toward goodness in our world. Second, it begins to sensitize us to some of the fundamental moral differences that exist within a diverse community. As we operate in our social, familial and professional worlds among a diverse range of other persons, these understandings, rooted in the sacred sources of our world’s wisdom traditions and framed by the moral virtues, cannot help but open our eyes to the similarities and differences among us.

We speculate that by incorporating this nuanced and expanded presentation of wisdom sources into a program designed to help adults answer the central questions of living virtuously through moral goodness, toward lives of flourishing and meaning, we make a contribution toward the objective of fostering understanding across difference and giving us reason to act with goodness across those differences in the name of our own moral development and that of others with whom we live, work and serve.

Thoughts on Professional Ethics

Thoughts on Professional Ethics: Why Professional Schools Fail, and the Searching for Moral Goodness

I was in the Sistine Chapel with my family a few summers ago breathing in the majestic beauty and history of the place. The guards repeatedly said in loud voices and many languages: “No Photographs!! No Photographs!!!” So, I left my camera slung over my shoulder in that 500-year-old holy shrine. Next to me in the crowd was an American father and son. The son appeared to be about 17 years old, about the same age as our sons. I watched the father enlist his son to block for him in the crowded room, so that he could point his camera to the ceiling and take pictures, even as the guard repeated persistently: “No Photographs!!!” What struck me as shocking, was not so much the arrogance and selfishness of the father, rather the complicity he was drawing from his son and what he was teaching his son by asking him to help and by ignoring the very clear rules of that setting. Message of father to son: It’s okay to cheat, try not to get caught. I then wondered how that father behaved in other facets of his life.

We learn how to act from those moments when certain behaviors are expected of us and it is often someone more senior than us, who guides and shapes that behavior. It can be a parent, teacher, elder, or peer who influences how we decide what to do. Not every such moment is a life altering moral dilemma like those described by philosophers through the ages: Five people on one train track versus one person on the other – who do you save? It is in the smaller moments when the stakes are low, and perhaps no one is looking, that we develop the habits and dispositions which then become vital as the stakes rise.


Moral Coherence in Modern Life

The genesis of my doctoral thesis years ago came from a graduate ethics course in which we studied a range of topics entitled: Business Ethics, Medical Ethics, Educational Ethics, Legal Ethics. We reviewed the great philosophers and the handful of time-tested schemas used in the field of applied ethics. Kant on duty, Aristotle on goals, Mill on utility, Gilligan on care. The class was centered on what the right thing to do was in various sticky moral situations, and which moral philosophy to apply. What struck me was the sort of moral “code switching” that was implied by the whole exercise. In one field we should calculate this way, in another field and setting that way. You apply Kant here, and then apply Gilligan there perhaps.

Where is the coherence in that? We live one life and we live it in community, even as our communities shift from work to family to social settings. Is there not a simple, somewhat universal code of behavior that most if not all of our fellow travelers could agree to? Or at least a reasonably accepted process by which most all of us should/could handle moral moments, whether at work or at home? This is by no means a new question. Some would say it is THE question for human persons across time. I was convinced that moral coherence should be an aspiration across the many different situations and environments we find ourselves in throughout our lifetimes, not one set of rules and patterns of behavior for business, one for home, one for church, another for the field of medicine and a separate one for social life


What are we aiming for in professional ethics (i.e., medical, business, legal, military, educational ethics?

If we hope for ethical behavior, and that means ethical action, in a group of professionals, then the ultimate goal should be to instill in them the practical wisdom (phronesis) to see and act consistently in all their work related moral deliberations and decision making. This requires a level of awareness about what constitutes a moral moment, sound judgment and consistency in applying one’s moral code. To ultimately be effective, it must lead to good, moral action.

As a short aside, it is not at all clear to me that we can assume that all educated professionals in our world today, even have a basic understanding of what a moral moment/moral dilemma is or looks like. If there is no consensus on that, it is doubtful that a professional code of conduct is going to have much effect.


Why teaching professional ethics is not in and of itself enough

Challenges with teaching professional ethics:

  • Unless we start at the level of the human person and the human life and we talk about deep principles and the language of virtues, not just individually shaped values, we are aiming too low and unlikely to succeed in making much of this stick for young adults. Some argue, I do not, that young adulthood is too late.
  • A typical approach to applied ethics is to start by studying what the great philosophers told us. The philosophers alone may not provide sufficient scaffolding as a precursor to then apply ethical approaches to real world challenges in a consistent way, for a variety of reasons.
  • If we are trying to prepare individuals for an ethical life, within which they are disposed to ethical business decisions, some broad connections to moral guidance through moral sources are needed. I do believe this is the right first step – a precursor to the narrower field of applied ethics.
  • It is not about how to behave as an entrepreneur, it is about how to behave as a human person. The narrowing to a given setting (medical ethics, business ethics, military ethics), endemic to professional schools, has the unintended consequence of striking a level too low to really root itself. There is nothing wrong with having guidelines or understandings among professionals about how one should conduct oneself within a profession, but in order to be an ethical person, that set of competencies and patterns of behavior really needs to exist at the level of a life, not just an organizational life. Put another way, as a precursor to any exploration of applied ethics, there needs to be the broader exercise of what I call “personal formation:” a person’s stance with respect to moral goodness, a life of meaning/purpose, living virtuously. Unless young adults have explored and unpacked this, I don’t think applied ethics, untethered from a deeper set of moral roots, has much of a prayer of working consistently.
  • I think that the best way to provide the foundational ideas and antecedents to good ethical action is to expose individuals to deep, rich sources that connect them to people and ideas well beyond themselves. The logical approach is to share not just the philosophers’ calculus, but also the world’s wisdom traditions. An examination of such texts and ideas can provide individuals with a deeper sense of things and connect them to time tested principles that they should at least understand and perhaps adopt. Without them, individuals are lost to make meaning at just those moments when
    meaning can be the catalyst for good action. There are clear ways to do this without the implications of religious instruction or proselytizing. And it need not be a long drawn out experience, although the more time spent on such matters the better, from my perspective
  • Another unintended byproduct of the whole professional development arena is the centrality of “leadership” in the objectives, titles and promotional materials of degree and certificate programs. Virtually every program is understandably billed as and commits to developing leaders, e.g., virtuous, adaptable, servant, transformational, and authentic leaders. The instant we shift into our role as leaders, we move into our organizational contexts. We are no longer exploring our selves as individual “whole human” selves, rather we are shifting into our organizational roles. Our mindsets are zeroed in on our stance and approach to our work within our professional roles. As stated above, I believe this starts the exercise of personal formation at a level too low to take deep root.
  • A related question when we do enter the field of ethics for a given profession is: How do we punish offenders in our community? If they get a slap on the wrist, that says something. If, as in the current revision of accepted norms around sexual harassment and inappropriate relations, violators are removed from the community actually and symbolically, that creates a higher price to pay. While it is a last resort and after the fact, it may serve as a warning to others and embolden those around such others to serve as a collective conscience of sorts. If there is little or no risk of this, then the incentive to conform is radically reduced.

To make claims about developing an ethical orientation among entrepreneurs, or MBA’s or any group of adults:

  • The exploration should start at the level of the whole human person, the whole human life
  • It has to be rooted in something bigger than business decisions, or professional codes, beyond
    leadership
  • There likely need to be connections made to deeper sources, guideposts, influences (i.e., the world’s
    wisdom traditions)
  • It has to focus ultimately on action, not just awareness or judgment alone
  • It is about having the proper mental schemas/mindsets that lead to “good” behavior and the goal
    should be coherence across all aspects of one’s life
  • The consequences of failure (the risk of being ostracized by the community) should be dire

Other topics to be reckoned with:

  • Good action vs. right action
  • Broadly accepted virtues vs. individually constructed values

 

This is exactly what I designed an experience for educators and other adults seeking to answer these deep important questions (the work applies to all professionals and ordinary seekers). A direct result of their individual journeys should be human persons with more deeply rooted convictions who are then able to live by professional codes as they apply their broader “whole-life moral beliefs and understandings” to those moments of truth. Over the course of years, the dispositions become habits and habits become character and that should be the ultimate goal, forming professionals of good will who are inclined toward the good in their thoughts and actions across the various settings in their lives. Those will be the carriers and guardians of ethical behavior in their respective worlds. My sense is that most adults are craving this kind of self and communal examination and awakening.

If the approach to professional ethics concentrates on right vs. wrong exclusively within the context of the professional setting and professional decision making, it will come up short. If the approach allows for time to cultivate one’s stance toward goodness, flourishing and meaning as a whole human being first and that person is allowed to shift the way they see the world through a moral lens, that is keenly interesting and vitally important work, that I believe will result in developing moral/ethical adults.


Further Thoughts on Ethical Development for Professionals

Literature, music, theatre and art have long been used in graduate schools and executive education programs to broaden the content and learning modalities available to course designers and instructors. Theory of Reasoned Action vs. Theory of Deliberate Practice; Shift into right brain (whole brain) must
be considered.

 








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