- We're going to be talking about ethics and morals.
And I have a very special guest today,
Dr. Ryan Bisel.
He's gonna help us out,
so let's get into it.
(rock music)
Hey there, Alex Lyon here,
welcome back.
And today we have a very special guest,
we have Dr. Ryan Bisel,
from the University of Oklahoma.
And he is a professor there in Communication.
He's also an expert, or authority,
in the area of organizational communication.
He has a special focus on leadership, morals and ethics.
In fact he wrote a book on this,
it's a fantastic book.
I will put a link to his book,
"Organizational Moral Learning,"
in the description below,
you can find it on Amazon.
And today, because he's studying organizations
and communication in the workplace,
we're not going to take
a deep philosophical and historic look
at ethics and morals,
we're gonna look at what this looks like in your daily life,
how you encounter it today.
So we're taking a practical look
and so that's why Ryan is the perfect person
to come and talk to us about this.
So welcome Ryan,
welcome to the channel, good to see ya.
- Hey, Alex, thanks.
I really appreciate being here.
- It's great to finally have you on.
By the way, we're doing a two-part series.
This is the first video in a two-part series
and the next video is on Organizational Ethics
and that's going to get more into the practical
what do you do,
how do you confront ethically questionable behavior
when you see it in and around the workplace.
So that's,
when that video is done and edited I will post it
and link to it in the description below this video.
Before we get into the nitty gritty,
Ryan, how did you first become interested
in studying communication,
leadership and morals in the organization?
- Oh, yeah. I appreciate the question.
I come from a family where we put a high premium
on telling big stories and being funny at the dinner table
and I think probably my love of communication started there,
and I think it just grew.
And once I realized in college
that this is something that I could study
and make a career out of, I was hooked.
And then once I really got into those studies,
I found organizational communication,
leadership communication,
and that was it for me.
I just kept going ever since
and it's been a great ride, yeah.
- Awesome, thank you for that background.
Let's talk about these two concepts,
two related concepts.
What are the similarities and differences
between ethics and morals?
- Well yeah, I think that's a great question.
Ethics and morals in some ways are the same
and depending on how you're thinking about it
you might say they're use of those terms
are slightly different.
Ethics and morals both really just refer
to widely shared standards of right conduct,
and that's really what we're talking about here.
Widely shared standards of right conduct.
And so in the research in social science,
you'll see we use ethics and morals interchangeably.
My understanding is that the same is true
in contemporary philosophy as well,
with some small exceptions.
The most part, experts in these areas,
they use these terms as synonyms.
And for the most part,
I think that makes really good sense.
For example, in organizational ethics,
studies of organizational ethics,
we have terms like: moral identity
and moral imagination,
and moral mum effect.
Well all of those are in the study of organizational ethics
and it just works pretty seamlessly that way.
- Okay, so they're two sides of the same coin.
People who study this use those words
depending upon the sentence structure,
depending upon the thing they're looking at.
But yet we do have different terms for these,
so what are some of the differences?
- Yeah, and I think that's right.
And so from a communication perspective,
even though maybe we're really talking about the same thing,
I think you see a pattern of when the vocabulary's come up.
So from my perspective I think you see people use the term,
Ethics, in more formal,
maybe more professional and corporate settings,
the word Ethics is probably much more common.
For example, therapists have a professional ethics
of not having a romantic relationship
with a client of course,
and that makes really good sense.
It's an important professional ethic of being a therapist.
Now on the other hand,
I think you tend to see the term Morals,
being used more often in maybe informal settings.
Maybe religious communities,
maybe even just among friendship groups,
that kind of thing.
So example, if you know somebody who you think of
as very honest,
if you think of somebody who is very,
you can trust them with handling money,
we might say,
"So and so has great morals,"
"I appreciate their morals,"
that kind of thing.
And again, we're really talking
about widely shared standards
of right conduct in both cases.
But I do think it's safe to say
there's a pattern when we tend
to select some vocabulary over others,
just in every day talk, yeah.
- Right, so I really...
That resonates with me.
I see it starting like a diamond
where at the top we're starting with the same thing,
and then there are some people
who talk about it a little differently here and there,
but really at the end of the day,
as the expression goes,
we come back to the same place.
And in most cases we can use these concepts interchangeably.
So where do our ethics and morals come from?
- Well that's a, (chuckles)
yes, that's a big question for sure
and I think that we're still working through that question,
it's an important one.
But I think the contemporary thinking is that
our morals and our ethics,
they really come from both biology and culture.
You gotta say both.
It's a matter of both nature and nurture
and there's a lot of really good evidence
to suggest that there's a neurobiological foundation
of moral decision-making.
And there's some fascinating,
clever experiments out there these days,
for example with children,
even pre-verbal infants,
that demonstrates kids are,
that they're able to make
some moralistic evaluations pretty reliably.
And that's a really profound insight on one level
to realize this kind of thing.
And of course we cannot understate the value
and importance of culture.
And sources of culture would be of course our family culture
and our friendship network,
our communities, including our religious communities,
and our nations,
our professions and our organizations.
All of these create important cultural influences
on our ethical and moral decision-making.
- Yeah, I think it's fascinating
that no matter where you come from in the world,
no matter who you are as an individual,
there is a place,
even though our ethics and morals might differ slightly
in some ways,
we all have that sense of right and wrong
in our conscientious; woven into us.
And we also have that sense of right and wrong
coming from our cultures, our communities.
Those are two huge sources.
Why are they important today,
to societies and to us as individuals?
Why are morals and ethics still relevant now?
- Oh yeah, I mean of course they are.
It's powerful.
Maybe the easiest way to answer that question is to say,
we all hate being the victim of unethical behavior.
Nobody likes to be lied to, or cheated.
Nobody likes to be gossiped about,
and that list goes on of course.
And so we know that people's behaviors can hurt
and so (clears throat)
just even in small ways.
But of course they can hurt
in really profound ways as well.
Ruining of people's finances,
or of the environment,
and that list,
the exploitation and injustice that can happen,
and we continue to see
all of which point to the fact that of course,
ethics and morals,
they matter and they're key.
Because people are key.
People are worthy of our ethical care
and treatment of them.
- That's wonderful.
Yeah, without that sense of right and wrong
and nurturing that in ourselves and in societies,
we'd be in deep trouble.
Even deeper trouble then we're in now.
We need those guideposts to keep ourselves
and our societies moving in the right direction.
And one of those key directions of course
is life in the workplace.
We spend more time in the workplace,
eight hours a day,
five days a week.
Many of us more than that.
And so it's a real hot topic
in terms of organizational ethics,
so I think this is a good stopping place
to say the next video in this two-part series
looks specifically at organizational ethics
and Ryan is going to be my guest as well on that video.
So when that's done and posted
I will put a link to that in the description below the video
and I would just like to one more time
remind you that Ryan does have a book
on "Organizational Moral Learning."
And I believe, Ryan,
there's also a case study book that goes along with this,
is that right?
- Yes, so we have
a "Organizational Communication," textbook
and a "Organizational Communication," case study book.
Yeah, thanks!
- And morals and ethics are a theme
in almost all your research and publications
so I really appreciate that you're working so hard on that.
Well Ryan, thanks for being on the channel today.
I appreciate your time. - Thank you!
Yeah, I enjoyed my time.
Yeah, thanks.
- Good to have you.
All right, well thanks.
God bless!
And I'll see you all next time.
(beep)
Julien Mirivel, you know him right,
or know of him? - Yes.
- He was saying one time
that a client wanted him to come in to talk
for 10 minutes or something and he was like,
"10 minutes?"
He said, "Look, the shortest I can talk is 50 minutes."
(laughs)
"I can't say anything in less than 50 minutes."
- Yes.
- On a Monday, Wednesday and Friday.