BBC Radio 4 2016-03-11

BBC Radio 4 2016-03-11

Good morning. A few years ago one of my grandsons, who was a keen tennis player, was thrilled to meet Maria Sharapova. He, like millions of other tennis fans round the world will now be very disappointed by the allegation against her and hoping for the best both for her and the sport. Leaving aside her case, what has happened has also highlighted a wider issue. Across many sports there are people taking legal drugs because of their performance enhancing qualities rather than for a medical condition. In short there is an ethical grey area. And ethical grey areas are not of course confined to sport. They exist in every department of human life politics, business and personal relationships.

A dramatic example occurred a few years ago with the MP’s expenses scandal. Only a tiny fraction of the behaviour was illegal, but too much of it, though perfectly within the rules at the time, struck outsiders as dishonourable, just not right. The fact is that laws, though essential for curbing the worst excesses of human behaviour can only do so much. A great deal is inevitably left to individual judgment-to our conscience if you like. And the problem with a law based, rule dominated society is that it can set up a mentality of what we can get away with rather than doing the right thing for its own sake. Rules have to be interpreted and they often can be stretched very far indeed in the direction of furthering our own or corporate interests as we see in the area of tax avoidance.

Young people who join a good business or a sound profession soon find that not only are there certain rules to obey, but there is a certain ethos in which some things are just not done. There is a kind of moral milieu, or value soaked environment which they breathe in as part of their working life and which shapes their outlook. This accords with a trend in moral philosophy in recent years where there has been something of a swing against morality seen in term of rules, to one that arises out of the kind of person we are, and is reflected in certain virtues. Certainly my mother would have approved, for her criteria about people was always whether or not they had what she called a nice character. This means examining how an action might look to our deepest self, knowing how prone we are to self-deception and how easy it is to fool ourselves. We could also ask how it might look to the people we most respect. And for a religious believer this all part of laying ourselves open, in the words of the old Prayer Book, to the one “to whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid.”