Simon Longstaff, executive director of St James Ethics Centre

Richard Aedy: Hello, welcome to Sunday Profile. I’m Richard Aedy and I have a question: What’s an ethical life?

The man you’re about to meet has done more than anyone else in Australia to encourage all of us to have a go at answering it.

Simon Longstaff is executive director of the St James Ethics Centre. He’s the only boss the centre has ever had, and he’s been doing it for more than twenty years.

The centre is a non-profit that seeks to encourage both individuals and organisations to include an ethical dimension in their lives.

To do this it gets out there with advocacy and publication. It hosts the Intelligence Squared debates; you might have heard one of those actually. It offers counselling and training. It runs leadership development programs. And it consults to the corporate world.

Simon Longstaff is at the heart of all of this. He’s a philosopher, and his great philosophical hero is Socrates, another man who believed in getting up and about.

And while Dr Longstaff wouldn’t compare himself to one of the founders of western philosophy, he does share that determination to make ethics something practical - a suite of tools you can use every day – all of which, along with the St James Ethics Centre’s open door policy, means that people come to him with ethical dilemmas.

So which has been the hardest to resolve?

Simon Longstaff:  It’s probably been in the area of personal relationships, where an individual has changed in who they are in the course of their life, and somebody else close to them hasn’t, and they’re trying to work out what are the implications of that.

I find those things the most difficult. The ones to do with politics or the law or medicine and other structures which are often thought to be the really hard ones …

Richard Aedy:  Yes?

Simon Longstaff:  I actually don’t think that they’re nearly as difficult as the ones which come down to the intimate decisions that people make on a daily basis.

Richard Aedy:  So it’s the kind of ethical dilemma that really any of us could find ourselves in.

Simon Longstaff:  Absolutely. And I think it’s the ordinariness, if you like, of these things which brings their challenge, because you can immediately see the impact of a decision, not being spread out if you like and diffused throughout society, but rather the needle of it touching on the lives of particular people.

Richard Aedy:  There is a difference, isn’t there, the difference between being in a corporate position and knowing what the right thing is to do, and perhaps the more profitable thing, and having a very tricky personal decision that is going to affect your life and perhaps the lives of the people who you love?

Simon Longstaff:  The relatively easy decisions that you get faced with in life are where it’s good or bad, right or wrong, where you’re pretty sure about the territory. It’s those moments when it’s good versus good or right versus right. And you’re caught.

That’s why the notion of the dilemma is so interesting, that notion of the horns of a dilemma where you’re caught right in the middle between these equidistant pressures that are pulling or pushing you, whichever way you want to think about it. And I think they can arise in any of those different fields. In the corporate setting it’s just as likely as in the personal level. But at the personal level, you see the implications of it.

Richard Aedy:  And do you get many individuals coming to you? Because the centre, well, you obviously talk a lot to corporates and you talk to professional groups and you talk to educators and you’re involved in ethics in schools and things like that. But do people actually just pick up the phone and say, look, I’ve got this issue?

Simon Longstaff:  Yeah, they do. And we’ve got a particular service, the only one of its kind in the world, which they can use. So it’s not an accident that they call.

We have all sorts of people who phone in because they’re looking for someone independent, a place where it’s safe to talk about the issues they confront. So it can be farmers, policemen, company directors, politicians even, you know, who find themselves with this situation and they don’t want to go to somebody who can act as a regulator or who might have some kind of direct say over them.

We’re not government, we’re not a university. We’re just this small organisation that has no power, that cannot do anything to anybody, and therefore it’s safe. It’s safe to talk to us. And that’s been part of, I think, the magic of the mixture that, you know, you’d love to have a more stable position, but to the extent that you get any of those elements of authority or power, you stop doing the work that you need to do.

Richard Aedy:  Yes. What sort of situations do people need most help with? I’m wondering if ... you mentioned, you know, personal circumstances change. But is it because people haven’t thought about things enough?

Simon Longstaff:  Most of what happens in the world which troubles people is not the product of people deliberately waking up in the morning and deciding to do terrible things. A far more common phenomenon is that people do really bad things without even thinking about it.

And if you go back and ask them ‘do you think that was appropriate’ they say, oh no, no, no, I can’t believe I did it. How come you did it, then? ‘Well, everybody did it like that. That’s just the way we did things around there’.

Richard Aedy:  That is not thinking about things.

Simon Longstaff:  It’s not thinking, that’s right.

Richard Aedy:  That’s the unexamined life, isn’t it?

Simon Longstaff:  That’s the unexamined life. But that’s not what gets people in trouble, in the case that I think you were asking about where people come to you and they say, is it that they haven’t thought about it. No they actually have thought about it if they’ve got to the point where they’re coming to us.

But they’ve encountered a situation which is a mysterious part of the human condition in which you might be inclined to live an examined life, you might actually be fully committed to doing that and you might be doing it in practice in relation to your own circumstances. And yet you reach a point where the matter is undecidable.

So to take a common example, you might be in a situation where you know something that needs to be said or done, something to do with the truth which you feel compelled to disclose. So you’ve got this strong orientation to truth telling.

On the other hand, you might also know that you’re committed not to causing harm to people where that can be avoided.

So one horn of the dilemma is a commitment to truth telling. The other is not to cause harm to other people where that can be prevented. And yet you know that in this particular situation if you tell somebody the truth, you’re going to hurt them. You know, truth/compassion. And there’s no amount of thinking that necessarily resolves that for you.

Richard Aedy:  But it’s hard, it occurs to me, Simon, to deal with these things because ethics are not a set of guidelines or rules by which we operate. It’s more a way of thinking about the world and you in it.

Simon Longstaff:  Yeah. It overlaps with morality which does provide a pre-defined set of values and principles.

If you think of the great conversations in the world that have emerged from that core question in ethics which is, what is what ought one to do, you’ll hear over a long, extended conversation various voices that crystallise.

So there’s the Christian voice, the Jewish voice, the Islamic voice, the Buddhists – all the religions.

Then you’ve got philosophical frameworks coming from people like utilitarians and deontologists and all the rest.

What they all have in common, though, is that they produce a kind of package – a little box, if you like, with a ribbon on it – and if you open it up and you say, well, if we’re asking the question ‘what ought one to do’, inside that box there are values and principles, revealed truths, exemplary lives. But there’s a package already in place. And you can take that package, a morality, which is effectively what it is, and you can apply that in an uncritical fashion, just because that’s the way you were taught to behave or because you’re under some instruction, whatever. And that’s living a moral life in that sense which can be purely conventional.

The key to an ethical life is that you don’t simply do that, but you actually add the additional ingredient which is that you think about it, that you wrestle with the issues, that you live this examined life. Without that ethical component, that reflective component, I think, is of a lesser order of life.

Richard Aedy:  A lot of parents in New South Wales and Queensland will be listening carefully to this because primary school students in those states now have the opportunity to study ethics. And I understand Victoria is also considering introduction of ethics.

Can we go back – how did your centre become involved in ethics in schools?

Simon Longstaff:  It was because of parents. In New South Wales, at the time of settlement when Europeans got off their boats, along with them came the sectarian divisions that existed between Protestants and Catholics.

And for a long time the provision of school education to students in the colony was done by the churches where they competed, in part, for the souls of those within their territory. So the Catholics would open up a school and the Protestants would want one next to it.

And it meant that there is a patchwork of educational opportunity around the state which left some people well-served and others totally ill-served by the access to education.

So people like Wentworth and later, Henry Parkes, said this is not good enough, education is critical to every child in this colony, we will make sure that it is provided by the state, which meant that the state took over the provision of education.

The end result of a negotiation with the churches as they let loose their hold of education was that there was a period of time, an hour - up to an hour a week - reserved for the provision of what was called ‘special religious education’ or what lots of people call ‘scripture’. 

But there were some parents, quite a lot of parents as it turned out, who did not want to send their children to scripture in the school.

Some of those didn’t want to because their religion wasn’t offered. There are others who did have it being offered but said this is not something for strangers to do, we wish to do it within our own church or home or whatever, so again, religious people. And there was a third group who were not at all religious.

But what that group of parents all shared in common was a simple desire that for the period in which their children were at school when others were going to scripture, that they be allowed to do something meaningful, because under the regulations that in force up until the end of 2010, there had been a deal struck between the state and the churches that nothing meaningful …

Richard Aedy:  That’s right, it’s watching DVDs and things.

Simon Longstaff:  Oh look, again, this is 150 years going back. I mean, I had people who ... really well known members of the community, just contacting me out of the blue telling me about how they’d had to pick up papers during that period or play in the weather shed or sit outside the principal’s office.

So what they said was, look, all we want to know is, could we have our children given access to some kind of ethical framework, of thinking about the world, without the theology?

And we thought it would be really easy to do that (laughter), but as it was it turned out to be an eight year fight – and it was a fight – led by the parents, with us supporting them.

But I have to say that whether it was intended or not, the greatest compliment I think I’ve ever been paid in my life was dished out unintentionally during the course of that, because when it got really heated I was accused of effectively corrupting the youth and impiety, which of course were both of the offences for which Socrates was charged in the Athenian democracy. So, as a philosopher, you can’t do much better than that.

Richard Aedy:  No, that’s right, it is a badge of honour.

So what kind of feedback have you had on the ethics classes in schools?

Simon Longstaff:  Well, they’re still being developed and rolled out. I think there’s about 5,000 children currently able to attend.

There are 100,000 kids still ... well, there’s 95,000 left, if you like, who are not being catered for, but we’ll eventually provide something for all of those if their parents want to take that up. And the feedback so far has been really positive.

Richard Aedy:  From the kids or from the parents?

Simon Longstaff:  Oh, it’s been a mixture. And I can only say this as anecdotal. We haven’t got comprehensive evaluation yet. And it may be there’s a little bit of self-selection bias here, that people are only telling us the good news. But, you know, because even when we did the trial, children were excited by that. You know, they’d come up and say, wow, that was really interesting to be able to do the sorts of things they were doing. 

But parents most importantly said, look, our children are coming home from school and they’re sitting down and they’re wanting to talk to us about the sorts of issues that they have been dealing with in the course of those ethics classes. And there’s not too much where they come home that excited and engaged and wanting to deal with it.

Richard Aedy:  And are you involved with the plan to go forward with this in Victoria?

Simon Longstaff:  Not at the moment. I mean, I think in Victoria, as I understand it, there’s a case currently being heard in the courts which is challenging the kind of arrangement that’s been in place, such as existed in New South Wales until the parliament here amended the Education Act at the end of 2010. If it is the case that any state or territory comes to the view that it also wants to be able to offer something similar, then, of course, we’d be open to those discussions.

Richard Aedy:  Hello, this is Sunday Profile. I’m Richard Aedy, and we’re joined today by Dr Simon Longstaff who heads the St James Ethics Centre.

Now you’ve also worked with business and you’re on a number of boards. And in '97 you wrote a book about ethical decision-making in business. Is business, do you think, over those what – nearly a decade and a half since – more ethical since then?

Simon Longstaff:  The answer in short is no, but not because people are worse behaving than they were. I think what has happened is that businesses have become more compliant rather than more ethical.So the level of regulation and surveillance that’s applied not just to business from outside, but which they choose to apply from the board down inside the corporation, has just absolutely multiplied.

Now company directors will tell you that they don’t have much choice in this, that they feel compelled to do this by the regulatory environment, by the effect of various cases at law.

I don’t entirely buy that. I think there’s more flexibility for them to think about these issues and to do differently to what they do do. But the reality is that they spend a huge amount of time and money, energy and resources on compliance and there’s a hell of a lot of that going on inside the corporate world.

Now my concern about it is that although that might give the illusion that there’s a greater capacity to measure and manage risk, in fact, if anything, what’s happening is that the systemic risk within Australian business is increasing.

Why? Because if you create a situation in which no-one can choose to do anything wrong because your compliance system is so comprehensive, then inadvertently you create a system in which no-one can choose to do anything right. You don’t choose, you just comply; you tick the box.

Richard Aedy:  The other thing, of course, is that surely it fosters, I suppose, a drive to inventiveness where in which (laughter), if I can put it that way, in which you are complying but you are still able to gain some kind of edge.

Simon Longstaff:  Well, the best story I’ve ever heard about this came from Enron, that now failed, infamously failed company. They actually had pretty good compliance systems including policies which were specifically designed to prevent them from doing the sorts of things which ultimately brought so much ruin to that company and to those stakeholders who depended upon it.

That’s what you get, of course, when it’s all about just the rules and not the underlying values and principles. But you also get this weakening of the sinews of an organisation, the ethical sinews – an absence, a loss of resilience – because you don’t practise this difficult stuff that we were talking about before, of making choices. You don’t actually practise doing it.

Richard Aedy:  But how do you change that? Because some sectors, in particular those connected with healthcare and food production and transport, anywhere where safety is a real issue, they obviously need to be carefully regulated.

Simon Longstaff:  Obviously. And we need a prudent amount of regulation and surveillance, but enough room still maintained within a corporate setting so that people are not merely permitted but actually required to take responsibility for the decisions that they make.

Now in the business world this is a bit tough. I mean, talking to Peter Costello when he was treasurer, he made a really illuminating observation.

He said look, Simon, I’ll tell you something. This is what I have happen to me sitting in the treasurer’s chair. He said business leaders come to me and they say two things in the same breath. They say: Treasurer, there’s too much regulation and we need to know exactly where the line is drawn. (Laughter) So he said, how am I supposed to respond to that?

Richard Aedy:  Well, I’m wondering how you respond to people in corporate culture for whom the company making money for its shareholders is the paramount responsibility, and whether to behave ethically becomes a version of the prisoner’s dilemma? You see if everyone is doing the compliance and you add ethics on top of that, there’s an opportunity cost.

Simon Longstaff:  Well, the job of directors is not to increase shareholder wealth in the sense in which you suggested. The duty of directors is to act in the interests of the company as a whole. Companies exist and shareholders enjoy the privilege of limited liability, which is an extraordinary privilege, because this whole system within the context of a market economy ultimately leads to an increase in the stock of common good.

And that needs to be looked at in a much broader sense than just the financial performance for a particular group of people, which is why things like integrated reporting, which are on the rise now, are saying it’s not just financial capital but it’s social capital, natural capital, human capital – all these other things that need to be guarded and transformed in the corporate context.

Richard Aedy:  And is this an increasingly persuasive argument to make?

Simon Longstaff:  I think it is. I mean if you talk to people in the investment markets they’re saying, look it’s crazy, we need to be able to properly price for risk and opportunity. And the way we price for risk and opportunity is not just by looking backwards into a set of accounts that tell us what the financial performance was. We need also to be able to see whether or not there’s things like environmental controls that are going to affect the performance of this company, or it could be the social licence to operate.

But there’s absolutely compelling evidence that companies that get the ethics right, that is, that think about what they do and have a strong set of values and principles that they consistently apply, they actually perform better.

Richard Aedy:  I want to ask about you now because you dedicated your book, Hard Case, Tough Choices, to your father. And you wrote, “For my father, Robert, who has faced more hard cases and tough choices than anyone deserves and who has come through with his honour and integrity intact.”

Can I ask, what were those hard cases and choices?

Simon Longstaff:  Well, it’s around his part in the decision-making in events that led to my mother’s death when I was seven. She was fine with me being born. Then there’d been some illnesses associated with brothers and sisters and it got to the point where the doctors told her that if she was to have a fourth child, she would die.

She fell pregnant and she went to the doctor and the doctor confirmed the diagnosis that to proceed with the pregnancy would certainly lead to her death and probably to the death of the child.

And she was a very devout Catholic and wrestled with this issue. And, in fact, I found years and years later, after I was doing this job, a letter she’d written to her sister in which she described this terrible dilemma with a husband, three children she loved and having to make this decision, and then describes me standing next to her, you know, while she writes this letter, which is kind of curious in terms of what I ended up doing. But Dad’s part …

Richard Aedy:  And heartbreaking to read, Simon.

Simon Longstaff:  Yes, but then I’ve always thought in terms of my own life that I’m happy with where I am in my life, and I can’t pick and choose the bits that have made me who I am or given me the opportunities that I’ve enjoyed. So I take my life as a whole, good and bad. And so ... but that’s to distract from Dad.

Dad was not a Catholic. He’s an Anglican. I don’t think he personally would have felt constrained in the same way as she did around the choice.

But what he did do – and this was the, I think, the extraordinary thing – he said to my mother Margaret that he would support her in any decision that she as a matter of conscience chose to pursue, and that he would do that knowing that he would then, if she chose to proceed with the pregnancy, have to contend with her death and being by her while she died, and then being left with three - or if the child had lived (and he did, my brother) - four children, which he would have to care for, including a newborn baby, and that he would support that.

And I thought that in a life which, of course, has its imperfections, where decisions are made which may not have been ones that always should have been made, that was such a big one. And so much flowed from it and was acted out in other parts of his life that I wanted to dedicate the book to him in those terms.

Richard Aedy:  How did he cope with what happened?

Simon Longstaff:  Well, he was devastated. He couldn’t, I remember we didn’t see our mother before she died. I don’t know exactly why. But apparently she had lost all colour. So she was ... her hair was white, she was white. I don’t even know if this is true but this is what I was told. She had this kind of slightly other-worldly look as she approached death.

Dad came home on the day that she died and I still remember sitting on his knee at the end of the bed. And we have the bed now, Suzie and I, and so I can still see myself there on the actual object. And I asked him. I said, “How is Mummy?” He said, “Oh, she was asleep.” I think he told me that as he got out of the car. And then I think later on he sat me on his knee and he told me the truth about what had happened. And I’m not sure that I fully understood what it meant to be dead at that time.

Richard Aedy:  Not at seven.

Simon Longstaff:  No. Anyway he had and a terrible time from then. Obviously there’s been great joy in his life since that time, but so many things flow out of those sorts of events in families – incalculable consequences, I suppose, in terms of what happens. And I think probably of all the people in the family, I was the least scathed by it.

Richard Aedy:  If somebody came to you with that dilemma now, how would you address them?

Simon Longstaff:  I would respect, if you like, the decision my father made. And it’s been an essential part of, if you like, the way the Ethics Centre works more generally, is that I would not seek in any way to deprive that person of the opportunity that comes for them to make a responsible decision of their own. Ultimately it would be a matter of conscience.

I would do everything in my power to help them to make an informed decision so that they fully explored the facts, they looked at the kind of values and principles that were at stake, the nature of people whose interests were going to be weighed in the balance, that they would consider a range of options beyond perhaps the obvious things that might be done, including the steps beyond the decision itself.

But ultimately I would not want to put myself in any position where I became a substitute for them making the judgement. I’d be there more as a ... to assist them towards their end.

Now with that having been said, I think that if the conversation was tending in either direction, for a woman in circumstances such as my mother found herself, I would be wanting to provide that degree of support. In other words, if a woman was deciding that she wanted to continue with the pregnancy knowing all of the things that would flow from that, that would be a choice for her and for those around her to decide; as would be a woman who decided in those circumstances that she didn’t want to proceed with the pregnancy.

Richard Aedy:  Simon Longstaff, thanks for joining me on Sunday Profile.

Simon Longstaff:  Pleasure.

Richard Aedy:  Dr Simon Longstaff is the executive director of the St James Ethics Centre.

Sunday Profile is produced by Belinda Sommer. I’m Richard Aedy. Join me again next week.