Moral excellence is not a passive, inactive, or static state. It is not a commodity that is on the upper shelf in the kitchen rarely used, like a precious spice.
Challenges such as co-author interactions, book contracts, literary agent relationships will find you as you progress as a novelists. For each of these, it is all too easy to make innocent mistakes with tragic consequences. A finely attuned moral compass to which you are connected will help you determine your involvement and responses in these endeavors.
However, your own incorporation of morality and ethics requires frequent inspection and recalibration. You may be confronted with a circumstance that you haven’t considered before. Test your moral compass by affirmatively using it. Be alert for ethical opportunities, while remaining vigilant for the development of any seeds of unethical conduct developing in your own actions. This requires both time and mental space, and is a perfect topic for your character sabbatical.
Ethical conduct is not the passive passenger sleeping comfortably in the backseat while you drive your novel writing career ─ it is the driver. Make sure that you know where it’s taking you.
You’ll face an ethical dilemma as a novelist. Don’t think that you’re too smart, too clever, too connected, too blessed, or too good looking to have to deal with an ethical threat. Like the next storm, an ethical challenge is coming, and it’s coming for you.
Ethical conduct is the demonstration of your respect for the work, contributions, and sacrifices of others. General discussions and treatises in ethics have been written, but these rulebooks neither identify all good ethical behavior, nor do they delineate the complete universe of ethical misconduct. Rules may describe ethics, but ethical behavior is not a product of rule memorization. Ethics themselves are a way of life, derived from a life style, flowing from an attitude.
It may be more useful for you to think of ethics not as a collection of documents, but instead as a body of “living principles”. These principles, growing and adapting over time, govern your interrelationships with others in science. These interactions are complex and interactive. They consist not just of actions, but of words, and not just of words but of vocalisms and “body language”.
Such complicated dynamics, occurring at many levels, cannot be completely detailed in writing. Codifying ethical behavior is like trying to photograph the wind. You observe its effects, but cannot observe the driving force behind these manifestations. Ethical conduct is not determined by protocol, but is governed and calibrated by an ethical character, itself undergoing continuous renewal.
Ethics is commonly reduced to identifying the right thing to do, and then having the strength and courage to do it. However, it can be hard to know what the right thing to do actually is, particularly if one is not even prepared for the issue. Consider the following[1]
Who do I treat?
Germany was in ruins at the conclusion of World War II. A young American physician who arrived there at the war’s end observed that Germany’s urban foundation had collapsed. With no effective administration, communication, healthcare, or transportation infrastructure, the ability of the German municipal governments to deliver food and medicines to its citizens had vanished. In this vacuum, diseases of poverty and poor sanitation arose to attack the young, the injured, and the infirmed.
Particularly virulent was an outbreak of pneumonia that was especially lethal among German infants. Fortunately, this infection was successfully treated with penicillin. However this antibiotic, then a relatively new drug, was in short supply.
Simultaneously, an outbreak of gonorrhea and syphilis broke out among young American soldiers who were consorting with prostitutes. Untreated gonorrhea produces a life of pain and misery. Untreated, syphilis would lead to insanity and death. The definitive treatment for each of these diseases was penicillin.
But, this young physician did not have enough penicillin to treat both cohorts, and he had to decide to which he would administer the drug. A forceful argument supported treating the German infants who had no responsibility for the fifty million deaths that the war produced, avoiding converting these innocents into the newest, last, and perhaps most tragic victims of the war.
However, the GI’s had not wanted to come to Europe and fight, but were compelled by the actions of a country that had given itself over to a tyrannical despot. Thousands of Americans had died, been maimed, or cruelly treated in prison camps. They gave up lives of leisure by choosing to fight in order to set other people free. And, they were not clerics, but simply young men acting like young men commonly did. Untreated gonorrhea produces lifelong pain. Were they to be punished by withholding treatment?
The physician did not have enough medicine for both. Who should he treat?
Many ethical people believe the German children should be treated without questions. Other ethical audiences insist that the GI’s receive the antibiotic. Other ethical people, recommend splitting the available antibiotic into two proportions, one reserved for the infants, the second for the soldiers. Rulebooks on ethics are of little value in these types of real life situations.[2]
Innate Value
The importance of self-esteem, of prizing your own value despite the nature of external circumstances, is a core principle for the novelist. In a manner of speaking, the recognition that you have great value regardless of how your colleagues or superiors treat you is the ethical treatment of yourself.
The ethical treatment of others is based on the principle that they have innate and special value, irrespective of their external circumstances or reputations. Good ethical behavior flows easily from your decision to accept, with approval, the belief that your colleagues, adversaries, critics, readers each have special and unique significance. Their worth remains unchanged regardless of how they are treated by others, or how they treat you. This is the basis for reacting to them and their work product with deference and dignity.
Recognizing the innate value of others reinforces your drive and desire to respect them, their efforts, their time, their work, and their opinions. This is a very high standard, and one that requires consistent effort and character development from you to achieve. However, this core principle of the innate value of yourself and of others provides clear direction for you as your gauge your relationships and interactions with them. It is just one more force that drives you as a novelist to them.
Undertows
It is unlikely that the reader will dispute the importance of moral rectitude and good ethical conduct. It is also reasonable to assume that your peers and colleagues shun unethical behavior as well. At no time does a fellow writer say that they want to author garbage and sell millions of copies. Yet unethical conduct seeps in.
Examined from another perspective, the great novelists who are engaged in unethical conduct started their career, in all likelihood, with the attitude that you have as a beginning writer. They did, as you do, cling to a firm belief in proper professional conduct. Yet, they too have gone astray. A relevant question for you is, “What is it about me that will make me different from professionals who have come before me and who have lost their ethical way?”
Why do some beginning writers with the best and most wholesome of intentions ultimately engage in disturbing conduct? Part of the reason is that these inexperienced authors are not looking in the direction of the ethical attack. As a beginning writer, you can’t help but be attuned to sensational issues in ethics that may be in the news (e.g., contract disputes between publishers and writers that wind up in court and in the media).
However, large ethical difficulties in oneself do not spring up de novo; they inexorably develop from character and personality flaws that the writer allows to go uncorrected. These defects, either hidden from view (or hiding in plain view), work like an undertow to exert their influence during a time of duress, anguish, frustration, or fear. Thus, the novelist must consciously develop a talent of self-discernment in order to recognize their own small vulnerabilities. Recognition of these flaws is the first step toward their removal, or, more accurately, replacing these weaknesses with new found strength.
The ethical nature of your character requires constant attention and must be guarded. However, recognize that as a novelist rarely will your personal ethics be overcome in one hurried assault. Your literary agent won’t demand on a zoom call to “Violate your publisher contract, and make more money”. Instead, your ethics will be overcome slowly over time. This corruption, like the slow stream of poison sliding into a clear mountain lake, is a process that occurs over years, and produces a predictably destructive and barren result.
Tidal drift
The temptations and opportunities for unethical behavior surround us. Including a favorable but inaccurate summary of a preliminary experiment in a grant application to strengthen the argument appears at the time to be the smallest of violations. The incorrect attribution of the ideas of a student is easy to get away with. The promises of money, prestige, promotion, and grant awards can get closer to reality if the investigator is willing to engage in a little unethical behavior.
We, as investigators, are surrounded by these temptations every day; like a strong undertow, these forces pull us away from our ethical base. If we are passive, this unethical undertow will sweep us downstream. Your vigilance is required to detect these circumstances, and your affirmative energy is necessary to resist the temptations that they offer.
Damage to your ethics through enticements or distractions can occur in any career field. In some environments, the distraction is money. Of course, everyone is concerned about money, and commonly money is a good reward for good work. However, in some environments, workers fixate on money. Although the ongoing central activity is supposed to support good writing, much of the conversation that take place is about money. Discussions of stock prices, estimations of the sizes of year-end bonuses, computations of the impact of a new book of yours on your earnings, conversations comparing the money generating book activities of different people can be ubiquitous and appear to swirl around you.
Even the most charitable and least material people can be carried off by this monetary maelstrom. Dissenting voices are drowned out. Everyone agrees that ethics are important; however, if an outsider were to judge the group’s preeminent principle by the prevalent topics of conversation, the most important concept would be seen to be not ethics, but financial wealth. The atmosphere isn’t seasoned with money, it’s poisoned by it.
In other fields, the focus is not on money directly, but on publications. In a field where publications are intended to serve as simply a method of communicated scientific information, they can unfortunately become an end unto themselves. Colleagues discuss and compare the number of publications that they have. Researchers consider the advisability of working on projects based on the work’s “publication potential”. Of course, publishing is important to the scientist, but the love of publishing (i.e., the idea that publishing has great value regardless of its content) blights the ethics environment.
Working and hoping to become successful in these environments can first disorient, and then overcome your sense of ethics. As an author, you may not recognize the harm that will befall you. However the combination of pressure and acceptance (“everyone is doing it”) can overcome the better nature of your ethics.
[1] This scenario was provided during a lecture while I was a medical student at Cornell University Medical College in the Spring of 1996. I have long since forgotten the identity of the lecturer and so am unable to give him an appropriate attribution. However, perhaps it is credit enough that fifty years later, I still remember.
[2] The physician chose to use the penicillin to treat the GI’s. He said “Every morning, outside my office, the young German mothers would line up, clutching their coughing and dying babies to their chest, and spit on me as I walked by”.