The Human Givens Institute
| Ethics and professional conduct policy | ||
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<< Section 1 page 1 Section 1, Page 3 >> those around us, it is difficult for us to cooperate, and our interactions at all levels are necessarily more crude. Then it becomes harder to ensure our real needs are met and selfish behaviour becomes more likely. Ethical decision-making within a society is only possible if its members share the majority of their perceptions. Perception is the act of understanding the world by whatever means. Our senses are the channels for information about the world and perception is what our brains do with the information. But first the information is filtered and selected. The selection process involves matching up the sensory information to what we already know by passing it through the embedded patterns of innate and learned knowledge held mainly in the limbic system and the left and right neocortex.4,5 The brain in effect compares all new information with its instinctive templates and learned memories of past experiences, and asks, 'Is this important survival information — do I need to react? Or is it just interesting, or can I ignore it?' As the brain discriminates — excluding or accepting information through this filtering process — it is forever building and enriching its internal model of reality. But, inevitably, this model is based on heavily censored input because the discrimination process is influenced by emotion, appetites and conditioning. For instance, a young man walking down the street on a warm July day is more likely to be aware of the attractive young women in their summer clothes than of the unevenness of the cobblestones which preoccupy the unsteady old gentleman behind him. Or, when we applaud the words of a pundit or philosopher and proceed to repeat them to others, it may not be because of the clarity of the case presented but because we happen to agree! All living creatures, even single-celled ones, that respond to sensations such as heat and cold, light and dark, hard and soft — moving forwards or away — are in effect practising discrimination: we require ‘sensitivity' in order to discriminate. The same, in a wider sense, can be said of groups or cultures. Civilisation can only exist when enough people share similar perceptions about the nature of the world and their place within it. The more refined, or subtle, the level of generally shared perceptions within a particular culture, the more highly civilised it is. In other words, a society in which there is a high level of dissent about what constitutes acceptable behaviour in people's dealings with one another, or where there is an unwillingness to establish and abide by laws, operates at a cruder level than one where there is accord about such matters. Thus civilised (moral) behaviour can never be a static achievement; it is a process involving the refinement of shared perceptions, the discrimination of countless shades of grey. We can see that whenever this process is halted or reversed, the organisation or culture concerned 'freezes' and becomes intolerant. It then degenerates and eventually collapses, as happened in many ancient empires and more recently, in spectacular fashion, in the Soviet Union. To increase our understanding of the friction between cultures today, and the predicaments of being human in a crowded world, we need to work at refining our perceptions as far as we possibly can. That means enlarging our perspective with the aid of the knowledge available to us from history, anthropology and psychology, to enable us better to see the bigger picture — the view beyond our own individual outlook or take on events — and know how to discriminate between the abstract and the concrete. Needs and wants Looking at life from different perspectives inevitably brings about a greater understanding of others' needs and wants and how they may conflict with our own. Ethical dilemmas mainly arise when circumstances are preventing someone's physical or emotional needs from being fairly met, perhaps because they are in apparent conflict with those of another individual or organisation. The woman in her sixties who wants to bear a child, because technology now makes it possible for her to be helped to do so, may want a child because she has been unable to conceive before, or because she has lost a child, or because her children are grown up and she feels her life lacks purpose without a caretaking role. Perhaps, however, it might be considered that her need to be needed could be better met in a different way. The medical authorities may feel that she has as much right as anyone else to an assisted pregnancy; or that her needs are secondary to those of younger women; or that the pregnancy would be dangerous; or that it is inappropriate for a post-menopausal woman to bear a child when that is plainly against Nature's intent. Others might argue that the menopause, which used to signal the decline of a woman's life, now commonly occurs less than two thirds of the way through it, when women are still very healthy and active. Yet others may be concerned that the unborn child's needs conflict with those of the mother, if it is in the best interests of a child to have a parent who is able to take an active role in their life throughout childhood or who has the ability to work to support them. Or might it be taken into account that a particular financially secure, physically and emotionally healthy 60-year-old woman, who has a younger husband and the support of her family, could be a more competent parent than a younger woman who is alone, mentally unstable, earns no income and often uses what money she has to buy drugs? Taking the wider view, and establishing the different competing needs and interests involved, leads us to strive to understand each situation in which we find ourselves, rather than relying on belief systems for resolving them. Operating out of a belief system means blindly applying rules without questioning their applicability. Although beliefs 'live on', from generation to generation, they are, in themselves, dead things, preventing the pushing outwards of mental boundaries. Circumstances can alter cases. Emotional arousal Issues such as the 'right' to have a child or the 'right' to a homeland generate an enormous amount of emotion. But taking the wider perspective requires objectivity — detachment. This is impossible when we are in a state of high emotional arousal. As is now well understood, the more emotional we are, the more the rational part of the brain is overwhelmed and we are forced back onto the binary responses of the emotional brain — fight or flight. Emotional arousal locks us into one-track responses, which although they have survival value in certain circumstances, in our complex world today, are rarely helpful for dealing with difficult interpersonal problems. When emotional, we think in black-and-white, all-or-nothing, terms. Misunderstandings occur. Feelings of being out of control develop. We tend to misuse our imagination, becoming so anxious about change or so fearful of the unknown that we cannot meet challenges or take risks. We may worry constantly about loss of power or status; develop a morbid fear of failing, illness or death; begin to doubt our abilities and competence; become anxious and depressed. Because emotional arousal makes us inflexible, we suffer disappointment when things do not work out as we expect or as we feel they should. In effect, being governed by emotion means being driven by the instinct to get our own needs met. In such a state, we cannot solve ethical dilemmas. Nor, when our emotions are strongly bound up in an ethical problem, are we capable of recognising that someone who does not share our view is not necessarily the 'enemy' or the 'opposition'; and that if, in fact, they are standing back and taking an objective view, they are better equipped than we are to come up with a fair solution. For instance, some pressure groups might clamour for an individual's right to die when suffering from a debilitating incurable illness, and refuse to hear any dissenting voice. Yet, someone with knowledge who is unemotionally involved might usefully point out that many incurably ill people are depressed and that, if they were helped out of their depressed mood, they might no longer wish to die. Solving difficult dilemmas that have moral or ethical aspects takes time. We have to be calm enough to allow answers to arise in us. As neuroscientist John Ratey says in his book A User's Guide to the Brain, 'If one acts before |
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