Both Burnside’s TEDx talk and the Oxfam case study focus on the notions of justice and humiliation, particularly as they pertain to people without institutional power. In each case, members of not-for-profit organizations tasked with helping foreigners in need perpetrated abuse against some of the individuals they were helping. The abuses only became known because people were willing to speak out about them, risking their reputations, careers, and friendships. As such, it is critical for the achievement of a just world that people who see such miscarriages of justice make them known despite the risks.
The author has known people who worked in public positions and privately spoke about misconduct within their agencies. One such person decided to report the wrongdoing, which resulted in the launch of an investigation and several people’s firing. The person was reassigned because their coworkers were unhappy about the damage to the agency’s reputation, but they do not regret their decision. The situation was a classic case of a conflict of interest, where the person’s ethics were contrary to their and the agency’s immediate benefit.
The example serves to demonstrate why people, especially those in positions of power (such as public policy administrators), need to regularly and thoroughly evaluate their ethics. As Cooper (2012) notes, ethical concepts such as justice are mutable, and an ethical decision-maker has to have established principles to form the basis for their choices. It is easy to choose to warp one’s principles to preserve the organization as well as oneself. However, many different people’s compounded actions to that effect lead to corruption and ultimately create harmful and unethical systems. The only way to prevent this degradation is not to tolerate such lapses, identifying them and addressing them appropriately.
References
Cooper, T. L. (2012). The responsible administrator: An approach to ethics for the administrative role (6th ed.). Jossey-Bass.