President Jacob Zuma has called for a national debate about morality and asked Pastor Ray McCauley to convene it. But our biggest need isn’t yet more talk about morality. It is effective moral action.
Here are some ideas about fostering the necessary moral action, involving seven principles and a number of practical steps.
First, the process must be fully inclusive. It must reflect, respect and include all our value systems, secularist as well as religious. Especially important are the value systems and practices of our traditional African cultures. Although our religions must be part of the process, they have no monopoly over morality. None of us has that.
Another mistake to avoid is to think that Western moral philosophy is all you need if you want ethics to be a more effective force for real good. What about African, Hindu, Islamic, Buddhist and Chinese philosophy?
Second, the country already has a set of basic ethical values in the form of the Charter of Moral Values developed a few years ago by the Moral Regeneration Movement. So we don’t need to reinvent the moral wheel by going over that terrain again.
Third, nothing big happens these days without dedicated, specific and independent organisational power, which applied ethics lacks. Think of what Fifa does for football worldwide and you get the point. For morality to be sustainably effective, it needs its own dedicated support structure. There is an opportunity here for South Africa to pioneer a global first by blueprinting and setting up just such an ethics support structure. The proposed structure must be independent.
Conscience — our moral sense and the actions it inspires — welcomes partnerships from all agencies and individuals that share its vision but it loses effect when it is subordinated to other agendas, especially political ones.
This leads to the fourth principle. Conscience needs money if it is to be a force for sustainable, effective change, but it must not be beholden for its budget to individuals or institutions with other priorities, such as government, business or even religion. How to obtain the necessary funding is something I return to below.
The fifth principle is that conscience is a generic human reality. Therefore, although we must certainly get our own house in order here in South Africa, the wider regional and international contexts must also be kept clearly in mind.
Next, although any act of kindness, integrity and moral courage is immediately valuable and can trigger great and even global changes – as Gandhi’s life shows — there is no quick fix for national moral transformation.
The last principle is that moral transformation needs the resources of the knowledge explosion of the past century. Expert ethical knowledge based on thorough research is essential if we are to make real moral progress.
So much for the principles. Here are some steps that can be taken to implement them:
- All people must understand the importance of setting the best moral example, above all those in positions of power, right up to the president. They need to run an honest audit of their behaviour, face up to and change what is weak, consolidate what is good and make a life-long commitment to being the most honourable people they can be.
- We need a respected leader, such as a university vice-chancellor of known moral character, courage and independence, or a small group of them, to offer to convene the next step towards moral change.
- This person or group must convene an inclusive working group of people, both experts in applied ethics and committed laypeople, to guide a national conversation about measures that are known to help build moral fibre, on a voluntary, self-funding basis.
- It is especially important that this group has appropriate, multidisciplinary expertise, as well as people who can speak with authority from within our various value systems. A key consideration here is the ability to promote moral motivation — to explain just why ethical living and working are essential.
- A narrow view of morality, limited to personal virtues and vices, must be avoided. Just as important is to approach morality at the macro levels of the organisation, the workplace, government, nation and region.
- The group’s initial tasks would be, first, to issue a nationwide call for people to contribute details of whatever measures they know to be effective in fostering morality at home, in the workplace, on the sports field and anywhere else; second, to launch the designing of a structure to support ethical living and working; and third, to set up channels of transparent, accountable fundraising from all who wish to contribute to the cause of goodness.
The daily evidence of violence, corruption and other evils is a grim and deadly reality. But let it not blind us to an even more important one: the vast majority of decent people whose goodness, integrity and generosity are our greatest asset — provided we find effective ways to mobilise it.
Martin Prozesky is an independent ethics consultant, an emeritus professor of the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the founding director of its Unilever Ethics Centre. His most recent book is Conscience: Ethical Intelligence for Global Well-Being, published by the UKZN press