Ethical flexibility is everything for a successful leader

The pandemic crisis poses important moral dilemmas to political leaders. To maintain the trust of their citizens, leaders must show flexibility with respect to personal ethical principles, a new study shows.

Should younger individuals be prioritized to receive intensive medical care over older individuals when medical resources such as ventilators are scarce? Well, lucky enough most of us will never confront with such a moral dilemma. But political leaders do. And their choice have a strong impact on people compliance with public policies, especially during crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic.

There are two major lines of reasoning that leaders can use to solve moral dilemmas. Because younger, healthier people are more likely to recover and have longer lives ahead of them, leaders can argue that they should be prioritized for care. This is the utilitarian line of reasoning, which aimed at maximizing the benefits for the society at the expense of groups of individuals considered less productive. On the opposite front, non-utilitarian leaders can argue that everyone who is eligible (for example, by being a citizen and/or contributing through taxes or private health insurance) has an equal right to receive medical care, and therefore it is wrong to prioritize some individuals over others.

A recent study published in Nature has studied individuals’ reported trust on political leaders who endorsed utilitarian and non-utilitarian decisions when confronted with realistic pandemic dilemmas. The dilemmas involved sacrificing some people to save many others (‘instrumental harm’), or maximizing the welfare of everyone equally (‘impartial beneficence’). Participants read about leaders who endorsed either utilitarian or non-utilitarian solutions to the dilemmas and subsequently completed behavioural and self-report measures of trust in the respective leaders

You can try firsthand to answer some of the moral dilemmas used in this research through this app that I’ve programmed in shinyR. Required time 30 seconds, no data will be saved.

Results show that endorsing utilitarian approach can both erode and enhance trust in leaders depending on situations: participants reported lower trust in utilitarian leaders who endorsed instrumental sacrifices for the greater good and higher trust in utilitarian leaders who advocated for impartially maximizing the welfare of everyone equally. “These results show how support for different ethical principles can impact trust in leaders, and inform effective public communication during times of global crisis” the authors conclude. Hence, whether you are an utilitarian or non-utilitarian leader, ethical flexibility will increase your trustworthy.

In my opinion, this study emphasize two other important aspects:

1. Ordinary people don’t explicitly think about moral issues in terms of “specific ethical theories” like utilitarian and non-utilitarian views. Otherwise, they would be more consistent in deciding who to put their trust in;
2. In uncertain situations, supporting the ‘instrumental harm’ is always a bad idea. One day, this decision may backfire. ‘Impartial beneficence’ is always the safest option.