Investing in Your Ethical Infrastructure, with Simon Longstaff

KEVIN MALONEY: Welcome to the latest episode of the Values & Interests podcast. I am particularly excited to share this episode as I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Simon Longstaff. Simon is the executive director of The Ethics Centre, an Australia-based nonprofit that focuses on putting ethics at the center of everyday life. We had a wide-ranging conversation about the power of moral inquiry, how to engage others in truly good faith even when you disagree, and we closed with a discussion on how ethics can help address global challenges such as climate change.

As always, be sure to subscribe to Carnegie Council wherever you get your podcasts, and I hope you enjoy the interview.

Simon, you are the executive director of The Ethics Centre, an Australia-based nonprofit that focuses on putting ethics at the center of everyday life. Before we get into the work, the mission, and how you view applied ethics from an everyday-life spectrum, I would love to hear about your own values formation and what brought you to a point where you wanted to make a career out of ethics.

SIMON LONGSTAFF: I consider myself still to be a work in progress, so it is not as if I have arrived at a terminal position, but the things that have had a big influence in terms of shaping who I am include some particular events, like the death of my mother when I was a seven-year-old child, and that started me thinking about the world and how those things happen, and then there were particular experiences or exposures.

I grew up in Australia, where I was born. I used to spend part of my time in the Outback, that is, rural Australia, on property riding horses, chasing sheep, and things like that, plowing, all the rest of the things. That was very formative.

I left school when I was 16 and had no money, so I had to start work in order to fund my way to do anything else in life, and my first job was as a cleaner and later a safety officer at a manganese mine in a place called Groote Eylandt in the far North of Australia.

There one of the most important things happened; I was adopted into the kinship structure of the Anindilyakwa people, who are First Nations people from Australia living in this very remote part of the world. I have had an ongoing experience with them, and that has been tremendously formative of how I see the world and understanding it from a very different perspective than would typically have been the case had I not had that.

I suppose the other really strong formative experience was through philosophy and just going to the point where I got a sufficient grasp of it, particularly after doing postgraduate studies at Cambridge, and understanding how much I did not understand about that, even after I had gotten quite a high degree. I had to unlearn a lot of it because it tends to give you a false appreciation of what philosophy is about. You think it is all about being smart and clever and winning in an argument and things like that, but as you get older, read it, reread it, and drill into it further you learn a particular kind of humility which is essential to it.

Put all of those things together—rural, remote, the Indigenous effects, and then this kind of level of academic education along with a million other things, family, getting married, all those things—made me the person I am today.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is interesting to hear about your journey from this job in a mine to a moral philosopher now. It showcases that philosophy is a very personal thing. You can be that person working in the mine and struggling with it as much as somebody who is at an elite institution.

SIMON LONGSTAFF: That is very important because one of the things I have always carried with me is that I think some of the most profound conversations I have had were not in Cambridge but with people who never finished any formal education. They were feeders and turners. They were rough diamonds, if you like, and yet they were deeply invested in serious conversations about life and their place in it. You never want to lose sight of just how important ideas can be in wrestling with those questions for people across the socioeconomic spectrum.

KEVIN MALONEY: I am going to write down that quote and have it framed somewhere here in terms of understanding what you don’t understand. One of the best parts about my job at the Council is that I get to be a fly on the wall in so many of these conversations. I try to take this sponge approach to it, and I feel very lucky to be at the Council in that regard.

Turning to the work of The Ethics Centre specifically, I think when people see Carnegie Council’s name and ethics or literally The Ethics Centre and think about the times we are living in it can feel like the center itself or the institution itself is disjoined from the reality of the moment, but I think these institutions are more important than ever. I would love to hear about the work of The Ethics Centre and then frame it within the moment that we are living in right now.

SIMON LONGSTAFF: The first thing I suppose is what we are not. We are not a moral policeman. It is not as if The Ethics Centre has set itself up as some kind of judge and jury around what is good or bad in terms of the decisions people make. Rather it is there to deal with the questions people have in genuinely complex times and provide frameworks and opportunities for thinking through to come to an answer which every individual organization can live with because ultimately they have to make the choice.

The Ethics Centre, which was established as a charitable endeavor in Sydney, unfortunately was set up without any endowment or anything, so the only way it survived was by constantly proving itself to be relevant to the community. That has had a particular dynamic, which has led The Ethics Centre to be unique.

Its uniqueness lies in two things: Firstly, it deals with everything including preparing soldiers to go to war. When our Australian forces were deployed alongside people, say, from the United States to places like Iraq and Afghanistan, we made a point with our regular forces at least of making sure that every solder who was deployed had “thickened up,” if you like, their ethical skin so they could be ready for the abrasive effects of combat when it is asymmetric and has a whole series of different dimensions.

At the other end of the life-and-death spectrum is that we work on end-of-life decisions in hospitals. You might be a family member of someone who is reaching the end of their life and is unable to speak for themselves, and there is a critical distinction you may not be aware of between on the one hand using technology to prolong life, which of course is a noble aspiration, but you can use exactly the same technology to make someone die very slowly. I have never met anyone who said, “Oh, I want my loved one to die as slowly as possible,” yet often when you have this kind of heroic syndrome within aspects of the medical fraternity they won’t tell you that there is that difference, and you can inadvertently become complicit in something you would never choose and that your loved one would never choose.

In between those two extremes of life and death we with deal with sport, government, and commerce both at the organizational and institutional levels and also very much at the personal level, and that is the second unique component in that we operate what is still the world’s only free national helpline for people who have ethical issues, so we have everyone from cabinet ministers in our federal government to farmers and policemen who, if they are just uncertain and caught in the moment, can come somewhere to be helped.

The last thing I will say is that we also have a very strong program of public engagement through things like the Festival of Dangerous Ideas and our publications, again designed to push the boundaries to some degree so that you can maintain as large as possible a middle space where reasonable people can come to debate issues but not necessarily to agree, and instead of shutting everything down we want to create a place where it is safe tochallenge ideas, not to be safe fromideas.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is so interesting to hear you making the case for the efficacy of ethics and the intervention points you highlighted specifically around combat and end-of-life situations because these reframe your value system. These are things you thought you would not have to deal with, and now it is looking at you straight in the face in terms of these difficult moral choices.

We think about this a lot at Carnegie Council more from a geopolitical perspective, but the values-and-interests calculus is always there in terms of being shaped by the environment you are in. It is very interesting backing up and thinking about that from a more universal perspective and having your helpline almost being that point of universalism where the teacher and police officer are dealing at the most basic level with the same things even thought they might manifest in a different way.

I am interested in going back to ethics at a higher level and your approach to ethics from either a universal perspective or a pluralistic perspective. What is the organizing principle there for how you think about applied ethics?

SIMON LONGSTAFF: Ethics is clearly a branch of philosophy, and philosophy for thousands of years and across multiple cultures has been wrestling with the very deep questions that humans confront, everything from the nature of truth, beauty, existence, and things through to what ethics focuses on, which is really the structure of human choice and how it shapes the world because when you look around your world everything could be other than what it is but for the fact that someone made a choice to create this particular way, whether it’s an institution, a piece of technology, or even the way we dress, everything like that.

Over the millennia in ethics what we have been able to do is invent if you like the equivalent of the Swiss Army knife, which can be used for all sorts of different purposes, but always both to understand the deepest structure of human choice and then, having that understanding in hand, to be able to assist people and reflect on the choices they have before them and have a range of tools for assessing them in a way that supports a life which isn’t just conventionally lived, by which I mean it is not just a life in which you do things because everyone does it that way or you have always done it, which can be a moral life in a sense because you can be habitually committed to all sorts of values and principles; the ethical life is distinguished from that by being an examined life in the sense that Socrates talked about.

This is what that branch of philosophy is doing. It is very much about practicalities because the decisions you confront can’t be avoided. You can’t just sit there refusing—I supposed you could, but that is a choice in itself—and it is about providing structured means so that people can particularly be assisted to avoid some of the pitfalls of making a choice in a blind sense and not seeing things as they really are. That is what has been unfolding over the thousands of years we have been working on those questions.

KEVIN MALONEY: You bring up some very interesting points in terms of what ethics actually is in terms of it being a tool to live a better and more reflective life, but from a public understanding perspective there are two camps. You have the “Well, that is too ivory tower and that is moral philosophy, and I didn’t go to university and get my Ph.D. so I am not going to touch that.” On the other side it is a conflation with minimal standards or something punitive—somebody acted some way and violated ethics. You are thinking through it in what I would say is a more personal and dynamic way. I would love to hear your thoughts on the challenges of messaging ethics to the general population right now and how you think about that at The Ethics Centre.

SIMON LONGSTAFF: I think you are absolutely right in characterizing those two views, which are strongly expressed and have been for a long time.

The first thing is about everyday life. Ethical questions are sometimes put in this box, say, a discussion about whether or not to support voluntary assisted dying, and they will say, “Oh, that’s an ethical question.”

Equally if you go to the supermarket and are looking at what eggs to buy, if you have a choice are you going to buy the eggs that come from birds which have free range and live a reasonable life, or are you going to buy those that live in cages? You are doing ethics. If you stop for a moment and ask which ones should I buy—and you have to balance things like price and availability—but at that moment you are doing ethics. It touches this very day-to-day kind of consideration unless you want to simply resign yourself to saying, “Oh, I’m never going to think about the world I live in.” It is not that you won’t be driven by a set of values and principles; it is just that you will be driven by ones over which you have no control at all. You are like an automaton that is wandering around. That is one end.

The other end, and this is one that I think can be particularly strong in certain cultural environments, is a reduction of ethics to a set of rules or codes. Then, of course, the moment you stop and ask, “Well, where did those rules come from and how should they be applied and what are the exceptions and what do we do when they require different things pulling us sometimes in opposite directions,” then you understand that it can’t be just that.

What I constantly do—and I think what any of us who are interested in ethics can do—is just present it to people and say: “Look, let’s start off with something that is really obvious that we can all agree on, which is that we have choices, that these choices matter, and if you are interested in knowing how to make better choices and not have someone tell you what to do but equip you with the capacity to make better choices, then we are here to do that, to assist you.” We make a bet that on average better choices will make for a better world.

KEVIN MALONEY: Ownership over your personal and then how we would say at the Council your “political” reality requires reflection. We think about ethics again through the lens of geopolitics but through three dimensions, so it is reckoning with the ends and means but also the consequences. I think that goes to your everyday life example. Even if you have what you might think of as an individual as the clearest moral crystal ball, you do not understand all the consequences of your choice. You can to an extent, but there is a consequence to be reckoned with.

We very much think about the ends-and-means equation, but every decision is going to lead to another decision, is going to lead to another decision, and I think a lot of times people especially in the geopolitical space reduce it to: “I made an initial decision, and at least I did it responsibly so now I can wash my hands of it.” I think that is a big tension point right now in both politics and geopolitics for us.

SIMON LONGSTAFF: We also dabble in the geopolitical side as well, particularly in issues involving the military and other services. You get people from a range of different cultures, so we would bring people together from, say, Pakistan in the West through to China in the East and the Pacific and all the rest and start to have these conversations, and firstly you start to see that particularly when you are dealing with people from the profession of arms that they are right at the pointy end of some of these decisions, some of which they don’t actually control themselves because they are made by the political class. They understand not just the effects they are going to create but also the unintended consequences that they might have to live with because they are putting people in harm’s way and they understand all the implications in a very gritty way for what is done.

It is not as if the world stops for this process of endless deliberation. That is not how the world operates, but what you can do is make yourself better prepared to deal with these challenges in the way that you described, and that can be incredibly useful both for the individual, who is protected then from some of the effects of bad decisions such as the moral injury that people can suffer, but it also makes it better for even your adversaries to understand that there is some kind of framework which is in application at the time which people are thinking, and that makes it slightly more predictable in even the most chaotic environments, such as war.

KEVIN MALONEY: We have a long tradition of looking at those questions in terms of norms being developed around what more just action in war might look like and really reckoning with those questions, but even from a diplomacy perspective being transparent about your moral framework for your adversary allows for better conditions to engage with that person, and naturally doing that in a good-faith effort that is not purely politically, economically, or power-driven.

That leads to my next question, and we have talked about this for the past few days as you have visited us at the Council, the concept of good faith and that being a critical piece of the equation, not only in coming to ethical reflection as an individual in good faith but finding other people to engage with. I would love to hear how you think about good faith and how this interacts with the process of applied ethics.

SIMON LONGSTAFF: I did mention one of the things in my own formation that I eventually had to learn—took me a while—and that was the importance of humility and the curiosity about the world that comes with that. You can think that you are coming to a discussion with good faith but be so locked into your own worldview and position that you are impervious to the influence of any other person, and in fact you are not engaging with them really; all you are trying to do is prove your point, to win your part of the argument. I don’t consider that to be practically effective, and it certainly does not meet my test of what is good faith.

If you approach some other person with good faith what you are able to do is listen to them with a degree of intent and sincerity such that when you replay to them what you have heard them say, they say, “Yes, you’ve got it,” which means that you have to be open to their ideas in some sense and also to the possibility that you might adjust your position in the light of something they are going to say.

Likewise, if a person on the other side of the conversation has a similar disposition, then in almost anything you can think of you are likely to have a more productive conversation because people are then open at least to making some kind of adjustment to their position which is not just brought about by the application of blunt force but by reason, consideration, and by the creative possibility that something between those different positions may have been better than either of them by themselves.

When you do that—as I say, it is partly a disposition of genuineness to engage, but maybe there is some skill in it too in terms of learning to listen and all the rest—what you are doing is forging new possibilities, or at least you are allowing for these possibilities to emerge in a way that doesn’t happen otherwise. I cannot think of a thorny issue in individual personal life, geopolitics, or anything else where that isn’t better than the alternative.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is interesting to hear you say that. In my work here at the Council I keep coming back to either the search for good-faith actors or thinking about forums to optimize a good-faith environment. That seems to be one of the essential things in the work of the Council, especially when you are working on very thorny political issues and across different cultures and value sets, these things that require international cooperation and governance. You are never going to go ten for ten in bringing the good-faith individuals into the room, but I have found in my years here that it is a good North Star at least.

SIMON LONGSTAFF: Sometimes you can help create the conditions. You might have two parties who seem to be hostile to each other’s point of view, they’re dug in and defensive. It’s like they come in with their arms crossed, not willing to listen to anything. I think you can characterize a lot of politics like that and geopolitics the same.

When you have a disinterested third party who is not concerned about winning the argument for one side or the other, like Carnegie Council, that is a very powerful thing. In some sense your own vulnerability, the fact that you are not a powerful government or something, can be a source of strength because you threaten no one. It is not as if you can impose a solution; it is not as if you have any power to constrain or maintain. You are just there, disinterested and relatively weak except for the influence you might bear in terms of creating the conditions where the other parties can unfold their arms a little, maybe listen, and even be helped in some sense to hear what the other party is saying in a way that isn’t fielded by assumptions that are already built into their position.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think that is important. Ironically we are in a political situation globally where we see the safe civic spaces shrinking when supply and demand requires more of them at this time.

SIMON LONGSTAFF: That is why you have to be brave. I mentioned this thing we created years ago called the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. It does push genuinely dangerous ideas. When people come they get outraged across the political spectrum, but it is done for a serious moral purpose and that is to counteract that tendency you just described, which is about a shrinking of that space where reasonable people can come. They might be engaged in principled disagreement, but at least they are listening. The more within the world we try to preserve those places the better chance there is that things don’t collapse into a very dangerous state where people are just armed and hostile in opposition rather than listening.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think about that a lot from a personal perspective and through osmosis in working here. I want to be “comfortably uncomfortable,” that is, balancing—you want to be a good father and husband, you want to provide and have a safe home, but you also want to push yourself especially in this moment politically. The Council and I am sure The Ethics Centre provides a lot of people with the environment to do that, to feel uncomfortable and be exposed to other ideas and do it hopefully in a safe civic space.

SIMON LONGSTAFF: This is the distinction I alluded to earlier. A lot of people, particularly in the last 30 years, have tried to create spaces where they are safe from the world, at least the part of the world they don’t agree with, whereas I think what we are both involved in is trying to create spaces where it is safe to engage in these issues and do so knowing that, yes, it may be a little bit uncomfortable, but it is not going to be something that breaks you. It is more likely to be something that is going to allow you to flourish a little more for having been engaged.

KEVIN MALONEY: I always think about this example: It is not fun to go to the gym, but you feel better in a month’s time, better in two months’ time, and so on. I always tell myself that when I am reading a piece of literature or philosophy that it takes me ten times to grasp, but it is good to do a mental workout.

We have talked a lot about applied ethics from a larger political perspective and also an individual perspective. One of the issues across the spectrum right now for all of us is climate change, so I want to pivot a bit to that and go into the “Swiss Army knife” that you talked about before. What tools do you think can be leveraged right now to think about unlocking greater progress around this issue of climate, both from an individual perspective but also more globally?

SIMON LONGSTAFF: I think we have touched on some of the key elements around climate change. One is that you have people who see a dangerous situation becoming more dangerous more quickly, and there is an urgency in their concerns. Equally there are people who have vested interests and feel threatened by this. I am not talking here about big companies in the fossil fuel industry but ordinary people who feel like their own lives are going to be turned upside down.

We are starting with a situation where it is a global problem so we have all of the issues of multicultural approaches to those things. It is an urgent issue, at least for some, and that tends to put people into very hardened positions in which they are driven, impelled by their sense of concern, to lecture to others if you like about how the world must be different, to take action, to protest, and all the rest.

What I think the Swiss Army knife of ethics can do is show that actually whichever side of these questions you are on there are better ways to engage. For example, ethics can help you to understand the structure of the choices that people are making and to come to grips with why they might hold the views that they do. It can help you deploy a series of lenses for both understanding those perspectives but also communicating, which will be far more effective because they take into account the diverse ways we think about the world and what we consider to be legitimate, and allow you to explain yourself in ways that will actually be heard, not just because you are shouting louder but because, “Ah, yes, I can recognize myself in that.” It can allow you to position yourself so that you have more people who are in a sense compelled to take seriously what you say because you take them seriously in the way we were just talking about.

At a very, very practical level, if you learn the skills of this, whichever side you start on, you are likely to find yourself better able to make sense of the situation you confront but also to communicate with others about what you are trying to do. All of that means that many of the points of resistance for change can actually start to melt away.

I will give you just one very simple but potent example, which has emerged from our conversations. I think one of the biggest blockages to any kind of progress on a topic like climate change—and many others, for that matter—is the very significant collapse in trust in government, politics, and in institutions, whether they are private or public, and that collapse in trust has been precipitous because it has happened where a whole lot of institutions have more or less fallen over like dominos pretty much within a very short period of time.

It means that you might be a person who agrees that a certain course of action, say around climate change, might be desirable. It could have to do with the rollout of renewables or something like that. You may even think that this would be good for you, but you just don’t trust the world to ensure that both the burdens and benefits of change will be equitably distributed. You say: “Oh, I know what’ll happen. Once again I will be left having to carry the costs while someone else enjoys all the benefits.” So you say, “Don’t do it; I’m not going to take that risk,” even though you are compelled by reason or experience to think it would be a good idea.

Ethics is absolutely at the core of rebuilding trust, and I would argue that in this question and in others we need to be investing as a society not just in our technical and physical infrastructures but equally in the repair or strengthening of our ethical infrastructure, because without that being healthy all of the other things produce suboptimal outcomes.

KEVIN MALONEY: There is a strong tension right now especially for those aligned more politically with the left on how to save or reinforce institutions, and there is a great debate over whether this is a grassroots moment or a top-down leadership moment. You have offered a third lane here, that we need the ethics ecosystem to be equally strong, the third pillar of the stool. I could not agree more. There are arguments on both ends of the spectrum, but ethics seems to be in the middle there, a more moderate reflection of society.

SIMON LONGSTAFF: Strangely enough, the most conservative people should be the ones who care most about the strength of institutions because they are all about seeing evolution rather than revolution, and people from the left should be concerned too that they have a kind of infrastructure that allows a just and orderly kind of transition if that is to come or a more equitable society, however one thinks about that.

What ethics does is that it positions us, as you have suggested, in another space where it is not about holding fast to a political position or whatever, but you look at it and take a much more serious-minded but also open-minded approach. I think people who at the moment object to the way society has gone in every case could find a serious point to be grasped. This is the thing so often when you look at the great currents in politics, whether geopolitics or within national environments, the voices you hear are often extreme and polarized, but there is a germ of truth that they are holding which has been lost, buried under all the rhetoric and rage at not having been heard.

If you take people seriously and find what that grain of truth is and let it be expressed, then people let go. They are open then.

KEVIN MALONEY: They feel seen.

SIMON LONGSTAFF: You have a much more productive conversation and opportunity for moving forward than you would otherwise have achieved.

KEVIN MALONEY: I want us to close focused on climate but in terms of how you see the space right now. Do you feel hopeful? Are you on the opposite end of the spectrum? If you had a blank check to infuse ethics into a certain point to address this issue of climate, where should that energy be? Maybe people who are listening and working in the social good space can take that and run with it.

SIMON LONGSTAFF: I tend to be an optimist. I think the best description I would have for myself is a “pragmatic idealist.” I have a sense of what things could be, but I am also very much focused on what works.

The biggest gap I think for those who are working—we will take climate as the focus—is not to do with dispositions or outlooks. I think it is a lack of skill. I would say that what ethics is is not just about a feeling about things nor is it a purely intellectual engagement. There are skills to be learned, and I would say that those people who care about climate or any other topic for that matter, “If you were to devote some time and energy to developing hard, practical skills that ethics has to offer”—and let’s assume that they are available and there are people who might be doing that—“I think you are far more likely to achieve your ends by skillful means than just by any means at all.”

KEVIN MALONEY: That is a great point to end on. It is a personal experience I have had since working at the Council, where I feel like I have the Swiss Army knife in my pocket and am walking around with it as a dad, professional, and husband. You can see the knock-on effect even when you are not at your desk.

This has been great, Simon. Thank you so much for joining us on Values & Interests.

SIMON LONGSTAFF: It has been a pleasure. Thank you.