Ethics Priorities for 2017: Banish the Binary
January 10th, 2017
Ethics and Leadership, Ethics in the News, Governance, Accountability and Transparency, New Ethics for New Issues
2016 was a year of landmark ethics challenges. The year closed with an unprecedented Presidential-scale conflicts of interest quagmire and alleged cyber interference with the US election. Along the way, landmark “in or out” binary decisions such as Brexit left divisiveness, uncertainty, and waste in their wake. Looking forward to in 2017, we should focus on one element of ethical decision-making: banishing the binary. The persistent interpretation of ethical dilemmas as black and white does not generate ethical solutions to today’s technologically and politically complex problems. We should reframe “either or” and “yes or no” and “in or out” decisions to...