It is reassuring, almost quaint, that in the geoscience community a discussion on what consitutes ethical behaviour and practice can be referenced and indeed appears to be gaining increasing traction.
It is reassuring, almost quaint, that in the geoscience community a discussion on what consitutes ethical behaviour and practice can be referenced and indeed appears to be gaining increasing traction.
If only the powers behind the worsening theatres of turmoil in the world could come under such scrutiny. The always quotable polymath Albert Schweitzer wrote, ‘Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.’ The conflicts we are witnessing clearly flout the value of human life, the essence of ethics, and raise many other questions such as the concept of a just war and the value of international conventions. Blended in the background are further disturbing trends such as the rise of authoritarianism, contradications of capitalism and the accumulation of wealth, energy poverty, societal polarisation, etc, etc.
Such disturbing issues present more than a moral maze, rather a moral morass. They are distinctive in being way beyond our power as individuals to affect change, yet are ever present in our daily discourse. It raises the question as to whether a decline in the ethics of ordinary community and business life is an inevitable corollary to the appalling events happening around the world and the motivations that drive them. The answer may not be what we think.
An article in Nature (7 June 2023) by Adam M. Mastroianni (Columbia University) and Daniel T. Gilbert (Harvard University) entitled The illusion of moral decline attracted a great deal of attention when they published their findings that more than 12 million people in at least 60 nations around the world interviewed between 1949 and 2021 believed that morality (as in kindness, honesty, ethical behaviour, civility, and decency) had been going downhill for at least 70 years. Yet they revealed that the reality was strikingly different. ‘People say it just gets worse and worse – that moral decline has been happening their whole lives and it’s still happening today’ is how Mastroianni has described the phenomenon noting that young and old perceived the same rate of decline.
Belief is the operative word here. The authors found that over 100 surveys between 1965 and 2020 asking 400 million Americans about moral behaviour, e.g., volunteerism, levels of cooperation, helping strangers, etc. found no meaningful change over time. In as much as it could be measured, daily morality (involving friends, communities, etc.) was said to be stable, with less than 0.3% variation in responses. These results were reflected in many other countries. The authors also point to the obvious decline over centuries – hopefully not prematurely – in violence such as slavery, murder, rape, and massacres plus in many societies better treatment for those with disabilities and tolerance for different sexual orientations.
By way of explanation the authors show how a simple mechanism is responsible for this strange dichotomy between perception and real life. It is based on two well-established psychological phenomena – biased exposure to negative information and biased memory for information. The negativity stems from the fact that we tend to pay more attention to bad news – ‘if it bleeds it leads’ – and hence gain an impression that the moral state of the world is low.
Mastroianni suggests that ‘If something good and something bad happen to you today, in five years’ time the bad thing will seem less negative and the good thing will not have lost its positive aspect … The first bias makes the present seem like a moral wasteland, the second makes the past seem like a fabulously moral universe.’
Rather scarily these American researchers conclude: ‘If low morality is a cause for concern, then declining morality may be a veritable call to arms, and leaders who promise to halt that illusory slide – to “make America great again”, as it were – may have out-sized appeal. Our studies indicate that the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced. Achieving a better understanding of this phenomenon would seem a timely task.’
If we accept plausibility of the authors’ premise, then lessons to bear in mind would be separating reality from perception and establishing a baseline for judging any improvement (the possibility for which Mastroianni and Gilbert leaves open). Such learnings may be more simply applied to a specific field of activity such as geoscientific endeavour compared with the complications of our everyday lives in general when even the choice of breakfast coffee can have ethical implications.
Historically religions have tended to provide the community with its moral compass, obviously not so universal these days given the need to recognise the authority of a deity of some kind. Many professional geoscience organisations do promote a ‘10 Commandments’ style guidance for their members, for example, the International Association for Promoting Geoethics (IAPG). Endorsed by numerous international societies, IAPG was established in 2012 during the 34th International Geological Congress (IGC) in Brisbane Australia. It aims to provide an important platform for geoscientists to share experiences, ideas, reflections and information on geoethical issues. The rationale is that geoscientists have specific knowledge and skills, which are required to investigate, manage and intervene in various components of the Earth system to support human life and well-being, to defend people against geohazards and to ensure natural resources are managed and used sustainably. It follows they should embrace ethical values in order best to serve the public good, IAPG argues.
In 2016, the Association published its Capetown Statement on Geothics available in 38 languages, the product of an international effort to focus the attention of geoscientists on the ‘development of shared policies, guidelines, strategies and tools, with the long-range goal of fostering the adoption of ethical practices in the geoscience community’.
The Hippocratic-like nine vows (the Geoethical Promise) for adoption by early career geoscientists proposed by IAGC to promote respect for geoethics values in geoscience research and practice may be asking too much, but it does demonstrate a seriousness of purpose. With the same motivation of promoting awareness among engineering students, Prof Raffaella Ocone, current president of the UK Institute of Chemical Engineering (recently featured in our First Break Personal Record series), has been advocating the need for increased teaching of ethics in the academic engineering curriculum to supplement the profession’s established code of practice.
Putting aside our biased beliefs and assessing the reality, we may ask whether setting ethical standards for the profession has any measurable effect? Anecdotally we may feel that progress is being made regarding workplace issues such as racial discrimination and gender bias. On the latter, more women seem to be coming into the geoscience profession but, as EAGE’s Women in Geoscience Special Interest Group regularly attests, there are plenty of gender-related challenges and certainly a lack of women in senior management and leadership roles, pace Irene Basili and Sophie Zurquiyah, CEOs of Shearwater Geoservices and Viridien respectively.
A position statement by the Geological Society of America paints the actual picture in the US reporting a trend not that different from Western Europe. ‘Between 2010 and 2019, women accounted for 50% of the United States workforce, but only one third of geoscientists and environmental scientists (AGI, 2019). While there have been steady gains in the number of women earning PhDs in the geosciences, reaching 45%, women are still only 27% of geoscience faculty. The percentage of women in faculty positions decreases with rank, and there is a higher rate of attrition for women than men from geoscience faculty positions (Ranganathan et al., 2021).
Unsurprisingly most literature on issues of race in the geosciences is based on the US experience. An indictment tempered with some positive solutions can be found in an Americal Geophysical Union article Combating Racism in the Geosciences: Reflections from a Black Professor in which Prof Vernon R. Morris, a professor of chemistry and environmental sciences at Arizona University and self-styled ‘advocate for STEM equality’, decries institutional racism based on his career experience and calls for geosciences to be diverse, equitable, and inclusive.
In an unusually candid posting, the US Geological Survey (USGS) last year posted an article on its participation in a virtual 16-week virtual programme initiative Unlearning Racism in the Geosciences (URGE) programme, established in 2021 by a group of young professionals to counteract racism supported by the National Science Foundation, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. USGS was prompted by its struggle to diversify the geoscience workforce.
What such initiatives do not address is the disconnnect between such community action and everyday geoscience life and the global ethical issues in the resources field of oil and gas and mining for which geoscientists can be held accountable but can do little to influence. This is where we came in. The common strategy advice to cope with the kind of overwhelming news we are currently experiencing is to limit news consumption, practice self-care, and focus on what we can control, also perhaps acknowledge our feelings, seek support from loved ones, and engage in activities that bring us joy.
Such counsel may be a little touchy-feely not to mention impractical for geoscientists in a corporate environment. Many are engaged (without meaningful control) in energy industries widely held to be unethical in both their disregard of climate change and some of their industrial practices, yet oil and gas exploitation can legitimately be interpreted as providing the ‘greatest good for the greatest number’, the creed of Utilitarianism (Bentham). If philosophy is to help provide peace of mind, then we should sample the smorgasbord of ethical approaches making sure to include essentials such as deontology (Kant), virtue ethics (Aristotle) and natural law (Aquinas). Unfortunately every ethic is open to critique, so developing your own personal philosophy is really the only answer, the cue for a multitude of self-help books.
There’s a strange dichotomy between perception and real life
Disconnnect between everyday geoscience life and the global ethical issues in the resources field
