When someone disagrees with us, are they unethical?
Over the past 27 years, I’ve addressed all sorts of ethical issues in The Right Thing column. Mostly, I try to look at how people make ethical choices when faced with multiple options.
It’s important to remember that there is no one right thing to do when faced with a day-to-day decision or a particularly thorny conundrum. In his book “Defining Moments: When Managers Must Choose Between Right and Right," Joseph L. Badaracco, the John Shad Professor of Business Ethics at Harvard Business School, points out that when we are faced with multiple right choices, our goal is to make the best right choice that most aligns with our values. I’ve long found Badaracco, who teaches a course on ethics where he uses examples from literature to guide students through making ethical choices, to be a wise man.
Making a choice can be simple. But making a thoughtful choice where we take the time to examine the implication of our decisions and what affect they might have on others can be hard.
When we make such decisions between right choices, we also would be wise to do so recognizing that someone else when faced with the same choices might end up making a different decision. That doesn’t make us or our choice superior to someone else. We should be able to disagree with someone without unleashing our wrath on someone else simply because they think differently.
It is timely to bring this up again now. Threatening judges because they don’t rule the way we’d like them to is wrong. Defacing or burning automobiles because we disagree with the company owner’s political views is wrong. Harassing someone online because they don’t agree that dating us would the best decision of their life is wrong. Bullying someone to get them to think like we do is never good.
Don’t get me wrong. Disagreeing vociferously and strongly with those whose views we find morally questionable is not only acceptable, it is essential if we want to find a way to live in the world together. It’s good to let others know that their decisions are not made in a vacuum devoid of consequences. When someone makes choices that conflict with our own values or that are likely to have a dire outcome on others, the right thing is to challenge these choices.
Not everything, however, rises to the level of catastrophe. What someone wears to a Cabinet meeting may annoy us, but that alone doesn’t make the person reprehensible. A mayor telling congresspeople to do their job rather than try to run a city may irk a congressperson, but it doesn’t indicate the mayor isn’t following federal, state and local laws.
In her essay, “The Insidious Ethic of Conscience,” the writer Joan Didion wrote that “when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something” but that it is a “moral imperative that we have it,” that is when “we join the fashionable madmen,” and that “is when we are in bad trouble.”
She wrote that in 1965. Sixty years later, the right thing remains to avoid joining the fashionable madmen and to work hard to identify decisions others make that are worth fighting over vs. those that simply differ from our own.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.
Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.
(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
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