Passionately Unethical About Safety
‘I’m a Bully for Safety’ the T-shirt read, ‘Get some Thug into Ya, for Safety!’
It seems you can present any nonsense in safety as long as it’s justified by passion. And don’t criticise anything because the person projecting the metaphor or symbol is passionate about it. It seems everything in safety is justified by passion. As long as you are passionate about safety, nothing else matters. As long as you are passionate about safety what is unethical is made moral and what is a vice is made a moral good.
No amount of passion can justify a dehumanising vice. No amount of passion can justify an unethical demonization of personhood justified by counting objects. No language of violence against other people can be justified in the name of safety. No metaphor or symbol of violence and domination can justify any act of safety. Some where along the line words have to have meaning and trajectory and no act of violence in the name of safety can make sense. This is why an Ethic of Safety matters (https://safetyrisk.net/no-moral-compass-in-zero/).
Goebells was passionate about exterminating the Jews, Hitler was passionate about the Aryan master-race. Passion cannot be used as a justification for unethical practice. You can be as passionate about zero as you like, but applying any absolute to fallible people can only result in a dehumanising ethic (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/fallibility-risk-living-uncertainty/).
The idea of focusing on ‘what goes right’ or ‘what goes wrong’ is not a numeric or engineering question but an ethical question. Differentiating and discerning right from wrong is a question about moral action and ethical assumption. An ethic must always be judged by human-person-social outcomes. This is why bullying in the name of safety is morally wrong. The contradiction ought to be clear to any discerning safety person.
Numerics demonstrates nothing about rightness or wrongness. One can be entirely ethical and yet have injuries/harm occur and one can be completely unethical and have no injuries/harm occur. Numerics is like passion, it is not a method for discerning rightness or wrongness.
Applying such measures as numbers or passion to an Ethic of Safety cannot work. An Ethic of Risk ought to invoke moral action that humanises people as persons in community. Unless human well being in an holistic sense is the focus of an ethic, it is not likely that much ‘good’ will come out of it, regardless of the passion or injury rates declared in the process.
Dr Rob Long
Latest posts by Dr Rob Long (see all)
- Culture and Risk Workshop – Feedback - March 24, 2023
- Practical Case Studies in SPoR Presented at Vienna Workshops - March 21, 2023
- Risk iCue Video - March 20, 2023
- Rethinking Leadership in Risk - March 20, 2023
- Gesture and Symbol in Safety, the Force of Culture - March 20, 2023
Bernard Corden says
Reason before passion – Pierre Elliott Trudeau.