Dallas Willard on Ethics

TTF Staff

Senior Fellow Dallas Willard is quoted in an article on ethical lapses among leaders in the Christian Science Monitor.

In an article of 6 July 2005, “It’s All Good, Boss!,” correspondent G. Jeffrey MacDonald (whose article has several good insights and quotes from others as well), sets up his dilemma so:

Though everyone struggles to recognize his or her own ethical lapses, the task of catching one’s own errors in judgment becomes especially challenging for high achievers, whether they run major companies or head up a small household. Reasons are several, but one looms largest: People in authority tend to lack the honest input that everyone needs to maintain a moral life.

Dr. Willard is quoted offering a positive vision of calling and moral accountability as a counterpoint to a more traditional perspective that sees ethical dilemmas as only shades of gray.

Dallas Willard, a Christian philosopher at the University of Southern California, says smart people get blinded to their own immoral actions because “an unsatisfied desire is the time bomb that ticks away in a person.”

Over time, he says, high achievers with considerable autonomy find the forces staving off their desires for money, sex, or power “begin to fall away.”

To keep at bay such festering passions, Willard says, people need firm resolve to pursue “the good that flows from their function” in life, such as providing a worthy service to the public through a business enterprise. Such resolve, he says, depends on a deep certainty about what is right and wrong.

“One of the things that’s come up over and over about George Bush is that he is too certain,” Willard says. “We all know that that’s a possibility, but usually people don’t look at the other side in terms of what uncertainty does. . . . If you can make up stories for The New York Times [as former reporter Jayson Blair did] and get by with it, why not? That sort of behavior is not a reflection of too much moral certainty. That’s the result of something very different.”

It stems instead, Willard suggests, from a worldview that sees no moral absolutes.

In Willard’s view, a single confidant rather than an entire network can be sufficient to keep a successful person morally grounded, especially when coupled with a regular, private journaling habit.

He urges those in authority to write daily on two questions: “When have I served the good of my function [as a family member or professional, for instance]? And when have I served myself?”

Sightings, Character and Ethics, Leadership, Wed 06 Jul 2005